Today I got my hand on a nice new gadget. The gadget in question is a Panasonic SD card camcorder. So I thought that I would share my opening thoughts.

I have been looking for a Hard Disk camcorder for a while now, and I also needed one for work, however there are few, reasonably priced hard disk camcorders that are compatible with iMovie 08 and therefore when I saw this SD card one was compatible then I snapped it up at a good price. The advantages of using a hard disk or SD camcorder are that you do not have wait for the tape to play into the computer before you can start messing with your movie. However they do have their disadvantages, the main one being that the quality of the movie that is shot is not as good as a DV camcorder. With me not wanting to shoot movies that will end up on DVD I thought that I would give this one a try. Most of the movies that are shot end up on the web at around 500 pixels wide and therefore I am hoping that it will do the job.

First impressions are good. The camcorder is very light weight and is in fact much more like a camera than a camcorder. The small sample clip that I shot was decent quality although I hardly used it really. iMovie seems to pick the camera up a dream and drop the clips into the iMovie library really quickly which is great. So, so far so good, but I will keep you posted on the quality!

My latest gadget arrived today after a rather rapid delivery from eBay. I had heard that you could record audio onto your iPod and so after a little research from my friend Mr Google I found that the gizmo that I needed was a little gadget called iTalk.

The device is made by Griffin Technology, manufacturers of many iPod gadgets. It is tiny, about the size of a cigarette lighter and it attaches to the dock connector at the bottom of your iPod video (mine is 60gb). Then you have a simple menu option to record. Speak away and the microphone built into the iTalk device does the rest.

I was skeptical at first when I was looking to buy as I wasn’t sure that the audio quality would be up to it, but it really isn’t bad at all from the built in mic. I really do want to get an external 3.5mm jack plugged mic that will fit into the iTalk unit and then clip to your tie for example and I think that the sound quality of the outputted .wav file will be better. If anyone can recommend a mic then I would be grateful. All in all a good £12 spent.

I have been after this for a while as there have been more than one occasion when I have been out and about and I have wanted to go online, in hotels and other places etc. Today my mobile broadband arrived, from the Three Mobile.

Its a nifty little device and so far so good as I am getting speeds on up to 700kbps which is fine for general browsing.

Over the last 3 or 4 months I have been embarking on a learning revolution. The learning being about creating websites using the Internet. The minutes that I started using WordPress I immediately thought that it would make an excellent Content Management System (CMS), and I was right, as I have learn’t in the past few months. Armed with all this knowledge I have now launching Education Themes.

There are many authors out there that are producing what are known as ‘Premium WordPress Themes”. Premium in that they do that little bit more. Brian Gardner of Brian Gardner Media has produced some excellent easy to use premium themes, that are designed for using WordPress as a CMS. Being a teacher I have thought for a while now that WordPress could be used as a CMS in school and colleges in order to make it easier for staff to manage their websites.

Armed with lots of learning in the recent months and endless amounts of trying things again and again until I have gotten them right, I have launched (as part of Equal Design) Education Themes. Education Themes will produce Premium WordPress Themes that are suitable and tailored for use in schools and colleges. We are also going to be providing some other services such as installation, theme customization and other bits and bobs.

The first theme, Green Leaves, was released yesterday and can be purchased from the Education Themes website. The themes will all be released under one licence, that being a multi-user, developer licence. For more information on this, visit the website, as the license details will appear their shortly. I am now working on the second theme, Blue Waves, which you can take a sneak preview of here. Both of these themes are best suited for school websites.

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Education Themes Website
Green Leaves Premium WordPress Education Theme Demo
Blue Leaves Premium WordPress Education Theme Demo

Over the past couple of weeks I have been working on a new project – educationthemes.co.uk. The site will be a place where education establishments can purchase premium WordPress themes to use on their websites, whether for departmental use or for school’s and colleges themselves. During the development of the website and the themes I have grown the loath Internet Explorer 7 and therefore here are the top 4 reasons I think it should be banned as a browser!

1. Annoying Pop Ups

So there you are surfing away happily browsing through well known sites that we all know and love and we get the pop ups starting. The one that really gets on my nerves is the one that tells you that the site might be a ‘phishing site’. My response is no I hate fishing, no go away! And it is one of those menus that you can’t just ignore as it sticks in the middle of the page annoying you until you do something. Urgh!

2. It Looks Rubbish

When Microsoft made the step from IE6 to IE7 they changed the look and feel of the interface radically. What they thought was an excellent effort at slimming down the interface and removing the clutter, was in fact one of t he most annoying things ever. They removed the menus at the top which was really annoying (and yes I know that you can get them back) and they have changed the function location to much for my liking.

3. Tabbed Browsing

Now don’t get me wrong I am a great fan of tabbed browsing and this is one of the features that was long overdue in IE. However they have sort of got it wrong as when you open a new tab it sticks some stupid ‘about: tabs’ link in the address bar. You start typing away with the address that you want and inevitably the URL ends up wrong. What a crazy idea

4. It Doesn’t Display Web Pages Correctly

This is the problem that I have been having with it over the last few weeks. You can make a website using proper CSS layout. Look at it in Firefox, Opera and Safari and it will display perfectly while you sit back and admire your work. Fire up IE and you see a completely different web site. It is clear that Microsoft have something very wrong with this and it is really annoying. As I write this I still have not managed to fix my site in IE. A real pain.

So we need to start a campaign to stop people using Internet Explorer and use something else. I would recommend Firefox. Comment if you agree (or disagree for that matter!).

I have been running quite a few websites for a while now. First of all there is this one, the blog, there is my videos and photos website and also there is the Equal Design site that has just started. However I have been pondering how to use my ‘personal’ sites best for a while now. Here is what I am thinking.

I find myself having about 3 – 4 personal (and by that I mean about me) sites on the web, however I only every really get chance to update one of them. The one I update of course is this one, the blog. Most people seem to know about this (those that know me anyway) and therefore it is the one that they check. Therefore I have been wondering what is the best way forward with my sites.

I have decided that Mark Wilkinson Photos and Videos will be no more as of today. I am not going to update them anymore and instead I am going to use this site as the home for all of my content. I suppose the next question I asked myself is do I change the domain of the blog over to my main domain markdwl.co.uk? I have decided not to and it will stay on Penny4Them. It is a good name which I like and it has lived here for getting on for two years now and therefore it is going to stay here.

So I am going to continue to do what I have been doing with photographs and that is to post everyday pictures here and I will link to the galleries of all the photos, probably on flickr. As for video content, which I hope to expand in the near future, depending on time, I am going to post it write here. Therefore I am going to be adding 2 more categories to this blog, photos and video and then post things in the appropriate category.

I am still thinking about a dynamic homepage that brings in the latest posts from ‘selected’ categories but that will mean changing the look of this blog, which I am still finding a good design (thanks Simon!). So there you go, keep you eyes out for some new content and categories soon!

I love gadgets and always have. I am a self confessed geek and proud of it! Today got me thinking as I was working away on the computer ‘what are my top 6 favourite gadgets?’ You know the things that I really couldn’t do without. So here goes.

Mac Mini

I have written Mac Mini here but really I mean any Mac. I had an iMac until recently and that was great to. Macs are great. They are just so easy to use and unlike PCs at times, they do exactly what you tell (sometimes you get the beach ball of doom but not often!). The Mac Mini is so compact it fits anywhere. I actually use 2 of them. Once is downstairs next to the TV that looks after all my music and streams it wirelessly around the house and the other is my desktop computer that I use all the time. Without this piece of kit my life would be very different so it has to be number one on the list.

Mobile Phone

I am not a great geek in terms on mobile phones. In fact often when I tell people what type of phone I have they are often shocked and they assume (being a techy) that I will have an all singing all dancing sort of phone. My Sony Ericsson K750i is great. Its 2 megapixel camera takes good photos in good light, but I only use this in an emergency. It is really easy to use and up to now it is reliable. I think people are getting to carried away with phones. At the end of the day they need to be able to text and phone people and anything else is a bonus. Anyway it keeps me in touch with those that I need to so it is a great little gadget.

iPod

The invention of the iPod has got to be one of the best inventions of modern times in terms of consumer electronics. What it has done for the way we all listen, store and manage music is phenomenal. I have an iPod Video 60GB which I have had for a while actually. Like most Apple products that I have experienced it performs really well as is a doddle to use. It allows me to keep my music, photos and also contacts with me wherever I am which is great.

Panasonic Lumix Camera

This has to be the best camera that I have had. It is almost like an SLR camera (I think they call them bridge cameras) when looking down the view finder you are seeing the digital image exact. It also has a massive 12x optical zoom which is very handy. It takes some great photos.

Card Reader

My small portable card reader is another essential piece of kit and for 99p it has probably been the best value gadget I have. It makes transferring photos from the camera to the computer much easier as you don’t have to mess around trying to find the wire that came with the camera. Just pull the SD card out of the camera plug in to the card reader and then it just acts as a flash drive.

Flash/Pen Drive

I have had one of these for a while now and the first one I bought I still have. It is a crucial 256mb drive and it cost me a whopping £40 about 5 years ago. Now I use a Bubsi 2GB drive which was actually bought from Argos as it was on a saving and I had one of those £5 off vouchers they do at Christmas. They are really handy little things for transferring files here there and everywhere. Great when you use a number of different computers like me.

So there you have it. They are my top 6 gadgets, what are yours?