Continuing with the iPad

Picked up a bluetooth keyboard today for use with the iPad; not all that much more to say than "it works" although emacs bindings don't work the way they do in normal Mac apps, and least things like keyboard-oriented cut and paste are there. (I also picked up the two "real" SSH clients, iSSH and SSH Terminal - as much to encourage competition as anything :-) I do use the iPad for work email as well as personal, and now that I have a keyboard, well, there have been occurrences in the last two or three days where I'd have logged in to work remotely rather than waiting... it's not that I have any shortage of laptops, but waiting for one to boot, and the extent to which I get "sucked in" once I've done so has led me to avoid working on things from home if I'm trying to head in anyway (now, if I can do something at home that lets me *avoid* going in, that's another story, but a much less common one.)

And as you can see, I type significantly more (and less visibly, significantly faster) with an actual QWERTY keyboard in front of me. We'll see if that leads to more blogging, or promoting this to a "more real" blog, instead of continuing to pretend it's a playground for mobile client use...

Next round of mobile toys

Finally picked up an iPad for myself, now that the 3G ones are out. (I was going to wait for a model with built-in webcam, but the weight of my normal laptops is bothering my knees - and the iPad totally handles reading/viewing without compromise, and that's the larger part of my computer time.) Continuing the mobile client tradition, I am composing this on the iPad using BlogPress and the on-screen keyboard. However, I actually want to write about cameras...

I've been carrying the dSLR with a big lens - either the 500mm mirror lens, or the 55-250mm zoom. I can't really snap off shots with it, like I did with the SX-10IS, it really needs to be aimed, and even in live view the auto focus isn't enough. I missed three shots on Saturday for this reason alone - a deer browsing above the retaining wall on route 2, a flipped over car on the outbound side of Belmont hill, and my car's mileage hitting 88888 (I did get a bad phonecam shot of it, but not really suitable for my gallery of numerologically interesting mileage readings.)

The end result is that there is a shiny new Canon, the SD4000IS, which has 320fps video, a backlit CMOS sensor with allegedly awesome low-light modes, which is now going to be my close-in/impromptu camera. I'm still going to carry the Rebel XSi with something long mounted, but that may go back to being an "event" camera. Who knows, I might even start taking pictures of people, instead of "things with wings" and architecture...