Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

I just received an early Christmas gift - a Samsung NV10 digital camera. This ought be the smallest 10.1 mega pixels camera available today!

While the North American high quality digital camera market is flooded by Canon Digital Rebel XTi which weight 556 g (1.2 lb) and has a dimension of 127 x 94 x 65 mm (5.0 x 3.7 x 2.5 in), the Asian market is introducing an alternative product – Samsung NV10. The Samsung NV10 only weight 148.7 g and has a tiny size of 96.5 x 60 x 18.5 mm. Look at the picture, it merely at the same size of a 60GB iPod! It comes with a rechargeable battery SLB-0837(B).

With a sensor of 10.3 million pixels total, the maximum quality of image size Samsung NV10 takes is 3648 x 2736 which is almost the same with the Canon Rebel Xti. The Samsung NV10 also support 640 x 480 movie recording at 30 fps. The file formats generated by this camera includes JPEG, Exif 2.2, DPOF 1.1 and AVI / MPEG-4. It has a 35-105mm Lens with a 3X optical zoom. Samsung NV10 comes with an advanced shake reduction technology which I was quite impressed with. I took a few pictures while walking in the snow, the result was not bad at all. Not to mention the highest ISO sensitivity for this camera is ISO 1000. Samsung NV10 also support continuous shooting where the shutter speed is decreased to the minimal. My favorite feature of this camera is its 2.5-inch TFT LCD monitor which supports up to 230,000 pixels viewing point! It's a huge lcd display for a tiny sized camera!

The only thing I don't like is it's connection cable, where Samsung NV10 uses its own cable with a SE connector on the camera end instead of the standard ones. This makes the cable replacement a challenge and I have to carry it around at all times. You will need this cable to charge the battery as well. So, don't lose it!

I printed out a picture (8x11) taken by Samsung NV10, the quality is impressive! You can see the obvious difference from pictures taken using 5 mega pixels cameras at this printing size.

Anyway, going to bring it with me over the holidays and will tell you more about it after a few hundreds of pictures.

A heavy snow hit Vancouver over the weekend. UBC area banked over 6 inches of snow. Yeah, D'Arcy is probably thinking what'ya talking about? Half of a foot?! That's probably the lowest record of snow fall in Calgary or Regina throughout the winter. Although the temperature is only -7 Celsius but my Vancouver grown up co-workers are complaining they are dropped into an ice cube! They wouldn't believe me about “delivering news papers in the -35 Celsius temperature”. UBC was shut down on Monday due to power outage caused by the “heavy” snow? The city engineers are spraying salt like crazy all over the city. Hope they didn't have to “burrow” road salt from Calgary! :)

Remember this article on Chinese Gold Farmers where people are playing games 24/7 to “dig” gold and treasure out of on line multi-player games? Well, I think re-organizing the talented players to develop virtual properties in Second Life and then sell them to the Americans would be much more profitable. Think about it, while there are thousands of western individuals make a living by buying empty land, developing the land and then selling the land, why not officially start a company in India or China to do formal development in SL where the labors are much cheaper! There is my business idea of the month! I wonder if there have been people doing things like this... Gonna go do some digging...

LOL, guess what?! This idea has been long implemented by Anshe. Read the amazing story! The lady is originally from China and she has a studio in Hubei China where two dozen of local developers are doing virtual realty development in SL. I knew about anshechung.com, but didn't know their developers are in China. Brilliant people...

Times just released their "best inventions 2006" collection. Very impressive stuff! Here is my shopping list, for the far future of course...

1. "Floating Bed", man, this ought to be the best one among them all! Imagine sleeping on a "magic carpet" that is floating in the air at all times?! Not to mention it supports up to 2000lbs of weights! You can imagine the "fun" on this bed!

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2.I have always wanted a “bike car” when I was a little kid in China. The very first vehicle I ever rode in (that I could remember) was a old looking 3 wheel moped when I was 5 years old. This one is definitely taking it up a notch.

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3.Laugh out loud when I saw this one, a “robotic body double”! Yeah, I would love to spend a few weekend program the “Tim Double” to learn how to type and cough. This way, all I need is keep my office door shut!

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4.Yep, this is a “Solid Espresso”, my coffee drinking co-workers, yeah, I am talking to you, John and Liang! Eat it with a spoon!

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5.Here is another funny one, under “The Military”, “Convert Straw into Building Material”! I feel like “the first little pig”, “please, don't blow at my house, it's made outa straw”. Hey, here is another idea, let's rebuild Baghdad using straws!

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6.The ultimate toy would be this one – the “Magic Mirror”. A mirror looking display panel being programmed and linked to the household surveillance system. The “mirror” can communicate with you through a talking head. Yes, a virtual butler in a magical mirror for twenty thousand dollars!