Geekinator.com

This isn’t a technical review of this particular camcorder, because that’s not what I do. There’s plenty of review sites out there that provide great, in depth, technical reviews of the Kodak Zi8. I’m just going to explain my experience with this camcorder, and how it’s helped me.

My dad and I have been thinking about creating some informational videos for the visitors to some of our websites, for quite some time. What neither of us had was experience, knowledge, or the equipment to make a good video.

So, I did a little research online, asked some friends, and tried to figure out what we were going to do. I realize that our industry, RVs, isn’t the most popular online (meaning I’m not expecting to get millions of views for a RV financing information video) but we get quite a bit of traffic, so decided to give it a try.

I personally own an Aiptek A-HD+ 1080p Pocket Camcorder already, so I tried filming some segments with it. The problem I had was, even in a “quiet” small room with the computers off, I was getting tons of static noise in the video. I realized that I needed a camcorder with an external mic jack that worked well.

I didn’t want to spend a fortune, since I have know idea how to produce a video, so this would be a trial run. So, after a couple of hours searching various forums and shops online, I found that most people preferred the Kodak Zi8 1080p Pocket Camcorder, because it produces excellent quality 1080p video (h.264 with a mov wrapper) AND has a built in external mic jack. The mic jack is only mono, but for the videos we’re planning, that’s fine. What’s even better is it’s under $200 (at least when I bought it, it was)…great! Oh…there’s even an HDMI jack on the camera, AND an HDMI cable is included in the box!

I ordered one from Amazon, and was able to find a remote (yes, it even supports a wireless remote control!) on the Kodak site (sort of weird that was the ONLY place I could buy one online…at least that I could find), and an Audio-Technica ATR-35S Lavalier Mic on Amazon.

I played with the camcorder after charging it for a couple of hours and I have to say, the video looks incredible on our Sony Bravia 46″ LCD HDTV. I shot at all the resolutions (1080p 30fps, 720p 60fps, 720 30fps, and WVGA 848×480 30fps) and I think I like the 1080p quality the best.

The only downside to shooting in HD, I think, is my computer isn’t quite powerful enough to preview the playback at full speed while editing. Good thing is, I can still listen to the audio in real time, so cuts aren’t that hard to make. I have decided, after posting several HD videos on YouTube, to post dvd quality (720×480 or so) videos to youtube, because they load much faster than HD.

Here’s an example of one of the videos I shot with this camera, for RVfinancing.com. We’ve received about 900 views since posting it January 14th, so it’s not doing too bad. I’d like to thank my buddy Mike for handling the lighting for the video.

Last weekend, I started to notice that Madden 10 on Xbox 360 would freeze at random on the loading screen, following a game in NFL Superstar mode. I looked all over the net to see if there was a fix for this problem, and it turns out that I’m not the only one having this issue. Not only is this happening in the Xbox 360 version of the game, but also in the Playstation 3 version.

I was able to find a single post, after a few hours of searching, that mentioned a way to at least prevent the freezing from occuring. Only problem is, you have to do it after every game you play. It’s a little annoying that EA hasn’t had this problem patched yet, but this is better than nothing.

All you have to do to prevent the freeze, is after every game you play, save your superstar, then exit career mode. Then, if you want to play another game, resume your career. It’s worked for me every time and it really doesn’t take that long to do.

I’m not sure, but this problem might also occur in Franchise mode or other modes in the game. If so, try saving your game, exiting the mode, and then load your save, after each game.

I can’t believe I haven’t learned about this little trick until recently, but I’m sure glad I learned it. A lot of you may already know this, but there’s a simple little tag you can add to the top of your PHP pages that will speed up the transfer of your site significantly, and on the fly. Don’t ask me how it works exactly, but I can tell you that it uses gzip compression (from what I have read) to automatically compress the output of your pages before it’s sent to the visitors’ browser.

All you have to do is add the following line to the top of any php page you want to compress: ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”)

For example, if your page looks like this:

<?php

echo “This is my page”;

?>

Your finished, compressed, file would look like:

<?php

ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”)

echo “This is my page”;

?>

I also read somewhere (and if I can find the post again, I’ll update this post to give that person credit), that you should add an if statement around that line to make sure the visitor’s browser supports gzip. I’m not sure if it’s absolutely necessary these days, but I added it just to be safe. So, the line I add to my files is:

if(!ob_start(“ob_gzhandler”)){ ob_start(); }

Now, I’m not an expert at compression or anything, but it works and that’s good enough for me until I find out there’s some sort of problem with doing it that way. By the way, you can test your page to see if the gzip is actually working or not by going to http://www.whatsmyip.org/http_compression/. Another thing I should mention is your server has to have the zlib php library installed and active. You can read more about that at http://php.net/manual/en/book.zlib.php

On most of my large files, I was able to compress the output by as much as 90% in some cases. The larger your output is, the higher compression you’ll achieve. I’m not sure if this is the “correct” way of adding the compression to wordpress, but all I did was add the line to the header.php file in my template. I tested the site and it’s gzipped!

Of course, there’s also the added bonus (more likely the reason you’d want to do this for a really large site) of saving on your bandwidth usage. For really large sites, the cost of bandwith can be pretty large, but I think I like the idea of it speeding up the site for my visitors even more than the bandwith savings.

I hope that helped everyone as much as it helped me. Thanks to the guys over at WhatsMyIp.org for the information.

I’ve always subscribed to the “don’t reinvent the wheel” theory in everything I do, especially when trying to develop software. However, sometimes the wheel turns out to be a little lopsided.

Over the past few years, I’ve used a couple of different classified ad systems to run my fairly successful RV Classified Ads website, that my dad and I own, called www.RVClearingHouse.com. The first system I used was custom built and we paid $5,000 for it in 2000 and it worked really well. Well, long story short, we had a problem with the company that built the software and they turned off the site.

I then built my own system with PHP and MySQL, before I really knew what I was doing. It was simple and worked OK, but still wasn’t scalable. My company owns and operates over 2,300 small websites, so by the time I needed some new software to run my classified site, I figured I should just buy a turnkey system instead of taking the time to write my own. I did a little research and found that most people recommended the GeoClassifieds system, and I bought the $100 version first to try it out, but decided it was too limited and upgraded to the $700 version on a gamble. 3 years later, I’ve had nothing but problems with it and am now taking the time to develop my own, that will hopefully work much better than my first attempt.

I’ll admit that I’m pretty lazy when it comes to programming, so I looked at some various frameworks and decided that cakePHP worked the best for me. Now, some of you out there may agree or disagree with me, and that’s perfectly fine, but for me cake seems to do the job. I figure I have a couple more months of fine tuning my code before I migrate my existing ads (roughly 9,000) into my new system.

When I started brainstorming, I decided it would be a good idea to be able to add any custom field that I wanted to, based on a category. For instance, if I wanted an Items for Sale category and a For Trade category, the for sale category would need a price field, whereas the trade category would most likely not. I’m not sure if the method I chose to go about setting up custom fields in the database was the “correct” way to accomplish it, but it seems to work fine. Until I come up with a reason why it’s a horrible way, then I’ll stick with it.

Anyway, that’s about it for my first post. It doesn’t give you much useful information I guess, but at least you can get a sense of what another wannabe programmer is up to in the world. I’ll be back with more amazing adventures of The Geekinator!