Nothin special…just playing with a 10-20mm F4-5.6 EX DC Sigma lens. I’m heading to Las Vegas this weekend and wanted a lens that would give some good wide shots. We plan on heading to the Grand Canyon and thought this lens would come in handy around that area. I’m digging it so far. Check back next week for some shots from Vegas. My hope is to find some really cool stuff around that area.
I’ve been working on cleaning up my music directories, by fixing the tags and adding album art and such. In doing this I’ve been using Windows Media Player 11 which I’m actually liking a lot. Partly this is because I use Windows XP Media Center edition on my home computers and when I play music in my living room it’s normally through Media Center which uses Media Player at it’s core. So, Windows Media Player generally does a good job with getting album art and renaming the files with album and artist name etc. Everynow and then it doesn’t get the album art because maybe it’s some obscure CD or something.
So, I normally goto Google and search for the album or artist name and find the album art on some website. I also tend to use Amazon.com to find them as well. I found a program called, oddly enough, “Album Cover Art Download.” It works great and I’ve been able to use it to find a lot of album art. I haven’t played with it extensively, but you can have it automatically scan your music folder and download album art as well.
Cleaning up your music after collecting it for several years can be a huge chore and it’s a slow process, but it’s worth it to be able to browse your music collection and see all the album art along with it. I despise CD’s anymore and I now purchase almost all of my music exclusively through online sites such as iTunes, but a lot of my older music was collected before there was much support for album art etc. Add to this the fact that much of my music isn’t really mainstream stuff and it makes keeping it organized difficult.
I’ve longed for a way to read books on an electronic device for along time. I’ve tried reading on Tablet PC’s, Pocket PC’s, Palm Pilots, Notebooks and standard PC’s and have never been able to read a book for an extended period of time. The Sony Reader has changed this. I’ve been able to sit and read a couple of different books for several hours at a time and could read longer if I could just stay awake!
The screen looks great and the brighter the room light the better the screen looks. The lack of back light is a downfall in low light situations, but leaving out the back light is one of the reasons the battery lasts as long as it does and this I’m sure helps keep the cost down as well. At 6 inches the size of the screen seems perfect to me. The interface is a bit slow, but then again, the prime use of the device is to read books so the speed isn’t a concern to me. It has somewhere around 92mb of built in memory. This doesn’t sound like a lot, but it actually turns out to be plenty. I’ve added a 2gb SD card as well, so I have more books on the thing, than I could read in a year and much space left over. Most of the books are going to be 2mb or less, mostly less. I’ve subscribed to some RSS feeds using the Sony software and many of those are 5mb or less.
The software for getting books on the device leaves a bit to be desired in my opinion. It’s not that straight forward and could use some improvements.
Sony’s website says the battery will last for 7500 page reads on one charge. I’ve read close to 200 pages of one book and 50 or so of another on one charge and the battery indicator hasn’t budged from showing full, so it looks like battery life will be a non issue. I don’t see myself sitting through 7500 pages in one sitting in this lifetime.
I haven’t tried the built in MP3 player, but I would think that would drop the battery life some at least. With my added 2 gig memory card, I have plenty of room to throw some good reading music on it. You can also put pictures on the device that look surprisingly good for being black and white or more like shades of grey.
One thing that Sony did do to offset the somewhat pricey device, was to give you a $50 credit to it’s online book store. With this $50 I bought three books and still have $15 left. The books I purchased are new books as well, so this was a nice addition. Buying books from within the software was a piece of cake as well. The price is a bit high at $349, but it does what it’s supposed to and does it well in my opinion.
I actually picked up my camera and took some shots this weekend…it felt good.
Function Rpad(ByVal MyValue$, ByVal MyPadCharacter$, ByVal MyPaddedLength%)
Dim x As Integer
Dim PadLength As Integer
Padlength = MyPaddedLength – Len(MyValue)
Dim PadString As String
For x = 1 To Padlength
PadString = MyPadCharacter & PadString
Next
Rpad = MyValue + PadString
End Function
Function lpad(ByVal MyValue$, ByVal MyPadCharacter$, ByVal MyPaddedLength%)
Dim x As Integer
Dim PadLength As Integer
PadLength = MyPaddedLength – Len(MyValue)
Dim PadString As String
For x = 1 To PadLength
PadString = PadString & MyPadCharacter
Next
lpad = MyValue + PadString
End Function
