Canon Powershot S95, rating: 8/10

Good: Bigger lens, bigger sensor vs typical point and shoot resulting in seemingly clearer more detailed photos as well as very good low light performance.  Also, it has more background blur capability for near subjects.*  Numerous scene modes help deal with problematic focusing situations (such as those with glass) or fast moving subjects.  Fits in your pocket.  Currently less expensive than its replacement the S100.

Bad: Arguably still not as good as ‘real’ dSLR (sensor and lens still much smaller). Only 3.8x optical zoom.

* “A shallower depth of field may be desirable for portraits because it improves background blur, whereas a larger depth of field is desirable for landscape photography. This is why compact cameras struggle to produce significant background blur in portraits, while large format cameras struggle to produce adequate depth of field in landscapes.” — Cambridge in Colour

Picasa 3.9, rating: 9/10

Good: A bunch of new photo editing/enhancement methods.  My new favorites: Lomo, Boost, Vignette.  Face recognition seems improved.  Side-by-side photo viewing for original versus edited comparison.

Bad: Although admittedly a rare occurrence, I wish there was a way to create two separate photo edits from a single original without making a copy of the original.  I.e. somehow one managed to get two good subjects in focus in one photo and one wants to create separate photos from them.

Google Music

Good: A number of free tracks, good selection of purchaseable tracks, can be downloaded to your computer or streamed from the cloud, neat auto-playlist based on a particular favorite track.

Bad: Nothing so far

X Construction (Android)

A very diverting game for engineer types.  Good for burning a few hours at least.  There are 15 levels.  Full version was free for a day on Amazon.

Bloomberg App on Android

This app was very highly rated in Market.  It’s might be most useful for people who are fairly active investors, but even if you’re not, the Bloomberg news reporting is quite good.  I noticed it is one of the few ‘information’ apps which works reasonably well off-line (without data connection or wifi).  The trade-off offline is that it will try to poll for data and freeze momentarily [may depend on the speed of your phone] and then eventually revert to using its cached version.  It’s a good idea to start up the app while connected to wifi and you can read in free moments later on.  [A side benefit of offline reading is that ads do not show up.  Shhh, don't tell the app writers. (I'm sure they'll figure out a way to put them back up even when offline.)]

3/16/2011 follow up:  I found out that the app starts to slow down over time.  I think it may be because of some particularly inefficient data structure holding the indices to cached articles.  But there is a simple solution.  Go to settings: applications: clear data.  This wipes settings including news selections and stock tickers (stock quotes are not particularly good however with this app, so I wouldn’t bother entering them; use Google Finance instead).  But it drastically improves responsiveness of the app.  I think it maybe a good idea to do this monthly or even weekly.

6/24/2011: It seems that if you have no data plan, it’s important to go into the settings to turn off data.  You’ll still be able to use wifi to supply your data.  If you don’t do this, then the Bloomberg app hangs waiting for data which never comes — because obviously you have no data plan.

LITE-ON DVDRW SHW-160P6S

This is a really old IDE drive.  I am writing about this because it is a piece of sh*t.  I will never buy a LITE-ON drive ever again. At some point I got a firmware update for this thing which caused the drive door to never open if the drive is empty.  I was unable to revert the firmware update.  I have to force the drive open with a paper clip which doesn’t always work on first second or third tries and causes some motor to whir threateningly.  And so now I am required to always put a dummy blank disc in the drive when it is not in use.  Secondly at some point this drive lost it’s ability to read DVD media at faster than 1.4x speed.

I can hear laughter, but it’s not that funny.

T-mobile Comet aka Huawei U8150 IDEOS

Good: Android 2.2 (Voice input/dictation everywhere you use the on screen keyboard is awesome, swype less so), Android Market has lots of (free) apps, capacitive touch screen, Google integration is seemless, YouTube (flash?!) runs flawlessly, Facebook app already loaded, Aldiko reader is really great, fits easily in your pocket, Angry Birds is now supported [Mar 2, '11 version]!  Unlocked version is available at about the same price as the T-mobile prepaid one.

Bad: Small screen (2.8″ QVGA), wma format advertised as supported by built in player, but actually does not work (Update 2/11: So far I’ve found the $5 app PowerAmp is able to play wma). [I checked on android developer site and there is no native support for WMA.]  Pinch to zoom replaced by buttons (never had the feature before, so don’t care).  Seems a little slow at moments (still, not bad for a near-computer that fits in your pocket).

Comments:  The Google Voice app does work on Android, but Google Talk functionality where you can make a call using WiFi+Voip to a landline does not as far as I know.  (Google Talk instant messaging works of course.)  Maybe someone can write that app which will make the phone look like any computer where this is possible and free to US + Canada phones.  This would of course save minutes.

LG WM2050CW washing machine

Works like a charm.  Very energy and water efficient.  Need to put more clothes in mid-wash?  no problem.  Forget to set spin dry fast enough?  do second drain and spin only cycle.  Need a fast load? 20 minute cycle available.  Want to save money? get rebates from utilities and even state rebate (replacements only).

Cygwin: Unix environment for windows

Need awk, grep, perl, sort, tcsh, emacs, or even the mundane unix2dos for your windows computer?   This thing is really going to make your day.  Hint: look under cygwin/home/<userid> for your .cshrc/.aliases files, edit Cygwin.bat to call tcsh instead of crappy bash.

Blu-ray and 1080p

I finally had a close look at the amazingly perfect picture quality of blu-ray combined with a large full HD tv.  I think one thing that struck me unusually was that I actually felt like I missed seeing blurriness.  Now, this might seem like a rationalization — I actually have an old 720p tv with just a progressive scan dvd (480p) player — but the Blu-ray experience strangely felt more like watching tv (albeit hdtv) than a feature film.

It’s likely an entirely psychological effect.  Over time, I have associated the undistorted clarity of watching sports, dramas, documentaries, sitcoms and Jay Leno with HD television programming.  After having watched so many movies with blurry projectors and imperfect and grainy prints and slight out of focus aberrations from projection to a flat screen and wide angle lenses, and the imperfect mismatch of my dvd/tv equipment, this imperfect look is the look that I subconsciously actually associate with seeing a feature film.  Roger Ebert recently mentioned something like this in his dislike of 3-D movie experience (he says Avatar is an exception).  Part of the art of making a movie used to be having parts of the screen be out of focus and changing focus, having the entire field of view be in focus results in more work by the viewer to determine what he or she should pay attention to rather than having the director guide ones attention via this natural focusing mechanism.

I also wonder if computer effects nowadays seem to be rather too much in focus.  I.e. things that are computer generated are now rather too perfect and too clear, I think it might feel more realistic if such things were actually purposefully generated out of focus and with distortion of a wide angle ‘feature film style’ lens which I’ve read is the way Hollywood originally attempted to distinguish itself from television when color television came out (matching movies which had been in color for many years).  Now, one thing I don’t particularly like, is the Saving Private Ryan method of removing frames to increase jerkiness and old film-like quality.  Perhaps, it’s just going too far the other way.

It turns out I’m not alone in this line of thought:  http://www.militaryphotos.net/forums/showthread.php?173099-Does-Blu-Ray-defeat-the-purpose-of-film-by-being-TOO-clear