Thursday, April 22, 2010

Sony HX5V camera

I have been trying to buy a HX5V for the last 2 weeks. None of the main retailers have it in stock and at this rate I might just order one from Tesco (they have one of the cheapest UK prices at a bit under £300) and pick it up when it comes in stock again.

The reason I think this camera is worth it are the basic features of:
* GPS coordinates and compass direction added to photos (in the EXIF data)
* 10x optical zoom
* 200g and pocket-camera sized

It has an interesting variety of other features but GPS is a deal breaker and very few current cameras include it. When I think about our last trip to Southern Greece, it would be handy to have the photos automatically placed on a map as it is easy to forget the name of which village, ruin or beach each photo was taken at. On my T100 we have had some success at taking video so the ability to record in high resolution (AVCHD / 1080i) would be interesting to play around with.

A break with the philosophy of "product-lock-in" by Sony has been to allow the use of SD/SDHC memory cards as well as the Sony PRO-duo. I note there is no upper limit on card memory in the specification, though they do sell 32GB cards to go with the camera which is as large as I could imagine using in the next five years (the largest I own currently is an 8GB card).

Friday, April 2, 2010

KeePassX

My use of rather feeble passwords has been on my mind of late. Following a recommendation I have tested out the free and open-source KeePassX application. This runs on multiple platforms including OSX, mobile phones or a portable application from a USB stick. It's rather neat to be able to update passwords on my Macmini and then copy the same encrypted password file to my trusty Sony Ericsson K750i for use on the go.

It works as a pretty standard encrypted password wallet but the feature I've enjoyed most is the automatic password generation. This means I can generate random passwords with various options as to whether to include uppercase, lowercase, numbers and odd characters. For most online applications where I might login from someone else's PC I have switched over to using a 16 character random mix of uppercase and numbers on the basis that I might have to type it in by hand. For my various other sites, particularly those that remember my credit card details, I have used 25 character or more random mixes of uppercase, lowercase and numbers. Due to a vague concern about personal data, I have whacked on a human unfriendly 50 character password to my Facebook and Evernote accounts. Okay, in the latter case I could type in the 50 character password by reading it off my mobile phone but I really cannot imagine having to log in to a strange or temporary computer to access these applications.

It seems odd that some websites that store your credit card limit passwords to a crackable 12 characters. I have one such site but I'm using a fully random password with special characters.

As it feels a lot easier not to have to remember passwords in my head, I am now far more likely to change passwords after, say, logging into my Amazon account while on holiday from an internet cafe.

Sites:
http://www.keypass.info
http://www.keypassmobile.com