After doing a poll on both twitter and friendfeed in which I asked what brand of point-and-shoot digital camera people would buy at around the $200 price point, I learned that a profound number of people use/love/recommend Canon products. I went ahead and picked up the 10MP Canon PowerShot SD790 IS for a mere $179. Add a couple 4GB SDHC cards, an extra battery, an extended warranty and I was off and running!

This Camera is hands down one of the most impressive and surprising devices I have picked up in a long time. The form factor is great and with the 3″ PureColor LCD screen reviewing photos and video is a snap. The SD790 has a very intuitive interface and a great deal of very hand menu options. I could go on and on about this little device but I will let the PowerShot speak for itself. Below is both a photo gallery I put together on Flickr as well as a video I shot and uploaded to Youtube. (Note: The video is also available in high-res on Flickr, just click any of the thumbnails below to view the entire set)

According to the manual the battery should take slightly over 2 hours to charge completely. I clocked it at 1hour, 48minutes. At the time of writing this review I have shot roughly 150 photos and recorded almost 10 minutes of audio/video (850MB) and much to my surprise the battery is still 2/3 full. I have not charged it since I opened the box, needless to say the extra battery was probably overkill.

Syncing on the Mac is as simple as plugging the PowerShot in and iPhoto takes care of all the rest. With my Windows box the sync process was also seamless. Windows XP knew exactly what it was and what it needed to do. **NOTE: I did NOT install ANY of the software prior to sync’ing the camera, not even a driver. XP had it all natively. Pops right up in explorer and I can manage easily from there.

All-in-all I really couldn’t have asked for a better camera for the money. With 10MP, built-in image stabilization and audio/video capture quality like this I am highly recommending this camera to anyone who is looking for an affordable point-and-shoot.

— Nicholas

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I picked up some flameless (LED), battery (CR2032) powered tea light candles today and I have to say I am pretty impressed!  I took some pictures of the whole ordeal, check em out below.

Flameless candles in the package.

Tea light holder.

Flameless tea lights in action!

All-in-all I definitely like the effect these create, they are supposed to last 60 hours per battery and there is absolutely 0% chance of burning your house down. Hands down these are a win-win.

- Nicholas

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I attended a private conference recently led by Larry Smarr who is the director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (CalIT2). The underlying theme of his presentation was that data communication is moving closer and closer towards a utility service, much like electricity. By creating a worldwide infrastructure of supercomputers (high-performance linux clusters running rocks) with dedicated fiber pipes (moving towards 1TB/sec) and massive amounts of redundant, reliable storage we can essentially eliminate distance.

Another major topic that he covered involved the concept of the visual interface being the largest bottleneck in computing. In the last 10 years our computing/network power has increased exponentially, by the thousands, however the number pixels we have has remained essentially the same. The majority of users are still using the same size monitor today that they used 10 years ago. 15″-17″, 10 years ago it was a CRT, today its an LCD, either way you still have the same number of pixels to work with. His point was that while we can process and store incredible amounts of data, we can’t possibly display it effectively using a single display. He showed pictures of his office and of others in which has implemented his design and to give you some idea what we are talking about here his office featured 20 Dual CPU nodes (roughly 1/4teraflop) with 20×24″ lcd’s which spanned one of his entire walls. Using this type of configuration you can process, store and display incredibly detailed and complex data effectively.

In summary, he said that it wasn’t until 1950 that the last few big companies in America stopped trying to produce their own power and linked up to the power grid. He believes that the same thing needs to and is going to happen for data communication and we will be moving closer and closer towards that initiative.

Stay Tuned.

- Nicholas

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For the Love of Geeks welcomes aboard our latest contributing geek, Nicholas Kreidberg.

A self-proclaimed geek, he has been involved with computers and technology for over 20 years.  Currently employed as an application developer and database administrator, Nick spends countless hours writing both web based and server based applications in addition to building databases to support the back end.

Apart from being an expert in PHP, PostgreSQL, and several other web technologies; Music, Photography, and fatherhood take up Nick’s time, and whatever is left is spent entertaining the world on social networks like twitter, plurk, and friendfeed.

For the Love of Geeks looks forward to insightful, and educational posts from Nick about PHP, Databasing concepts, and other web tech training.  Nick will also be co-producing a new podcast that will be released through For the Love of Geeks, centrally focused on PHP.

We hope you will enjoy the new flavor that he will bring to the site, and give him a good welcome.

If you wish to get a hold of Nick you can email him here niczak@gmail.com or for other ways to find him online view his profile page.

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