Nikon Coolpix L110

Several months ago I purchased the Nikon Coolpix L110 camera. Since then I’ve taken thousands of photos and hundreds of videos with the camera. It has proven to be quite a capable camera in its price range with many strengths and few weaknesses.

Specifically regarding strengths of this camera, the Macro mode is fantastic. If you enjoy taking close-up photos of flowers, bugs, fine detail of artwork, etc, you will enjoy this camera as it takes excellent macro photographs and allows you to get extremely close to your subject. The L110 also has an amazing 15x optical zoom. A 15x zoom is equivalent to a 420mm lens and this lets you really zoom in tightly which makes it great for wildlife photography, travel, sports and nature photography. Image stabilization helps you get those zoomed shots by helping reduce hand-held camera shake. Don’t forget to turn off image stabilization if you are using a tripod. Image stabilization is only to be used when hand-holding the camera.

THE 720p HD video capture of the L110 is surprisingly good. While most camcorders in the under $300 price range only provide mediocre at best still photography capabilities, the L110 which provides excellent still photographs also produces excellent HD video. The larger form factor of the L110 makes taking videos a lot easier too compared to holding a smaller camcorder.

On the not so great side the L110 audio quality leaves a lot to be desired. And low light performance, particularly video, is not very good. In low-light situations you will see a lot of graininess in the video and the frame rate seems to drop as well. Still photography is possible in lower light situations since the camera does have a flash. But if you are looking for manual control of your camera’s aperture, shutter and ISO, you will be disappointed in the L110 as there is little manual control available.

I’ve posted a fairly complete review of the L110 on Amazon. If you read my review on Amazon, be sure you also read the comments as many people have asked questions that I’ve attempted to answer as best I can. A lot of information not in the review is presented in the comments. I have also produced this hands-on video review.

Here are some representative photos taken with the Nikon Coolpix L110…

When I’m cycling, I’m most concerned about traffic coming up from behind me. I want to do all I can to ensure that distracted motorists will be able to easily see me. To help make sure this happens, I always use a tail light.

One of the best tail lights I’ve found for cycling is the Planet Bike Superflash tail light. It is extremely bright and can easily be seen even in bright daylight. At dawn or dusk, it is incredibly noticeable.

Typically the light will be mounted on your seat post or attached to the back of an under-seat bag. It runs on 2-AAA batteries and battery life is excellent. I easily get a season out of one set of batteries. It’s diminutive size belies it’s amazing performance. The superflash is about $20 and available from Amazon.com

Here is my complete video review of the Planet Bike Superflash Tail Light…

I’ve got several Sandisk mp3 players… Sansa Fuze, Sansa Clip and Sansa Clip+. They all exhibit a peculiar issue with track listing names. The “problem” is that there seem to be duplicate track names for all the music that I’ve added to my Sansa by dragging the tunes in from iTunes on my Mac.

I was fortunate to have an extremely helpful and knowledgable chat session with a Sandisk support person named “Apollo D.” In conjunction with that chat session and some additional Googling this issue, I have finally found a solution for this vexing problem.

Basically the “._” in front of the track listings is a result of the way that Mac OSX handles filenames. When you drag your iTunes tracks into the Sandisk player, the “duplicate” file names get created as a result of this MacOSX naming issue. What is bothersome is that you cannot delete the files directly from the player because as soon as you click on one of them, the player scans to the next “real” file and begins playing it. So you never get the chance to get to the delete menu on the player to delete the “duplicate” file name. Furthermore, these duplicates are not really music tracks anyway and don’t play. You also cannot see these files when the player is hooked up to your computer so you are not able to delete them this way either.

The solution is relatively painless and here is what you want to do to rid your Sandisk player of these files. If you must know more, then just Google…there are many places that discuss the “dot_clean” terminal command.

1. Make sure that the System Settings > USB mode on your player is set to MSC.
2. Hook your Sandisk player up to your computer via USB.
3. Launch the Mac OS terminal (Applications>Utilities>Terminal.)
4. At the prompt, type in the command:dot_clean
5. Hit the space bar one time to insert a space after dot_clean
6. Locate the icon of your Sandisk player on your desktop and drag the icon of the player into your terminal window. This will copy the path of your Sandisk player into the terminal window.
7. HIt Return
8. That’s all there is to it. You terminal window should have returned you to a new line after completing the command you just issued.
9. Unmount your Sandisk player.

Now after the player refreshes itself after it has been disconnected from your computer, you will notice that all the “duplicate” tracks have been removed.

If you add new tunes to your player after doing this the first time, you will have to follow this procedure again to rid the newly added files of the ._ track names.

I posted a while ago about what I felt was a disturbing trend in pricing that some of the companies that sell “premium” WordPress plugins were moving towards. I won’t repeat myself as the post is available here.

In the wake of that original post, some feathers were ruffled. I will admit that I was challenged by the frenzy of comments to take a fresh look at my viewpoint. The result is that I have tempered my views somewhat. There are some “premium” plugins that are way more complex than I alluded to in my post. An example of such a plugin would be Gravity Forms. Definitely a notch or two above others in terms of coding complexity and support offered.

However, I still believe the model of pricing based on annual renewal fees sucks. And if you are not a developer by occupation, yet still run a few sites and purchase a few “premium” plugins, you will quickly be running up a costly to maintain annual subscription model to support your “premium” plugins.

In any case, I was mildly amused when I became aware of a relatively recent video published by Cory from iThemes in which he was making the justification for his company charging for their products. You can view the entire video, but below the video in this post is the pertinent portion of what he had to say…

“…our true ideal customers will come back and say “no no no, we want you to charge us money for this because we want you to be in business. We want you to be in business a year from now, five years from now, when we come back for updates or need more help, support, all that kind of stuff.” … and trust me, as our true clients, you want us to make money cause you want us to be here and I’ll say this one warning to those few that are lookin’ at different other companies and everything… I like to talk mostly about us but I’ll just say this one warning ,is that you really need to look at those, where you invest that money to make sure those people have a long term sustainable business model wrapped around those products because in a year, six months from now if they vanish off the face of the earth…. you wanna know that they’re going to be there for you when you need help. And so that’s why I’m confident, that’s why I share this about pricing, about getting paid and all that kind of stuff.”

Sounds like what Cory is trying to say is that when you buy something from them (iThemes), that they are “going to be there for you when you need help.” So it would stand to reason that if you bought something in late November 2008 and that if you had a problem with it scarcely 5 months later, you’d eagerly get the support you needed from iThemes, right? I mean afterall, they charge money and all that good stuff to be there for you when you need help and support. That’s what he said, right?

Well, let’s investigate that statement a little bit. In November 2008, I bought the 2009 Theme Club membership from iThemes. It was not inexpensive. As the months went by, I found that several of the themes that were part of that slowly growing bundle of themes contained bugs and in some cases had features that did not work. Seemed I was frequently visiting the forums to report the bugs I had found.

Specifically, the theme BizCard was coded to have an address field that could be filled in from the Dashboard. It had several fields; Street 1, Street 2, City, State, Zip, Phone number and email address. The problem was that due to an error in the coding of the theme, the Address 2 field did not work correctly. I posted this issue in the forums several times and got no reply from iThemes. When I emailed iThemes for support, I received no solution or fix. I then made a Tweet about my experience and Cory replied to me in this way… (keep in mind, this is from the guy who has just told you that iThemes is “going to be there for you when you need help”)…

Here is what Cory told me in his reply…

michael, i always appreciate your input – but seriously?! we’re not even actively selling it – think we might have more pertinent issues?

What could be more pertinent than supporting a buggy theme that your company developed?

So do you get the support you pay for with iThemes? I sure didn’t. Good luck with that.

I have a love/hate relationship with cycling mirrors. Most of the ones I’ve tried, and I’ve tried quite a few over the years, just haven’t worked out well. I think I’ve finally found one that works pretty well and is fairly flexible in where it can be mounted.

On my road bike I found three areas where it seemed to be good. I mounted the mirror in three different locations; At the end of the bottom of the bars, around the brake hoods and just below the brake hoods on the handlebar. My video review will demonstrate these three positions.

The mirror is very light, weighing about 2 oz. The light weight of the mirror makes it less prone to vibrating. The mirror surface is convex which results in a distorted view and that makes it hard to judge distances using the mirror. However the convex shape gives you a wide angle of view and seeing approaching vehicles is much easier with this type of mirror.

I paid about $25 from Performance Bike and think it’ll do the trick for me.

Some of the other mirrors I’ve tried but didn’t like for various reasons were the…

CycleAware Reflex Mirror: This is a helmet mount mirror and it vibrated quite a bit. Also, it was always getting whacked out of shape when I’d take my helmet off. I found it difficult to adjust and the mirror gives a very small field of view. It takes some getting used to.

Blackburn Road Mirror: This mirror has a bracket that mounts over the brake hood. I didn’t like it. The mirror vibrated and the extra thickness around the brake hood just bothered me.

Everyone will have their preference, but right now I like the Ultra Light bike Mirror by D+D Oberlauda. I got mine at Performance Bike.

Here is my video review…

There is irony in the fact that the amazing WordPress platform won’t cost you a penny to install and use since it is released under a GPL license, but heaven help you if you decide to start adding plugins. If anyone questions the greed taking place in the WordPress plugin development world, just take a look at the alarming trend of charging, what is arguably ridiculously exorbitant rates, for “premium” plugins.

This whole “premium” thing has been going on for a few years now… premium themes, premium plugins, premium hosting and premium this & that. It’s getting out-of-control and I am getting pretty fed-up with the entire situation.

I applaud the authors who spend countless hours developing useful plugins in the same spirit that WordPress itself is being developed

As far as open-source in general, I am a huge fan. I am also a huge fan of shareware and donation-ware. Once or twice a year I purchase bundles of shareware from places like MacHeist and MacUpdate. So for the record, I am not against paying for software, whether it’s a plugin or full-blown app. What I’m against is people or businesses who take advantage of other people and suck you into these ridiculous annual fee types of situations. It’s a freakin’ plugin, not a gym membership.

WordPress has the right idea. Matt, we all thank you very much for releasing WordPress under the GPL. Many fine plugins are open-source too. I applaud the authors who spend countless hours developing useful plugins in the same spirit that WordPress itself is being developed.

Users, if you use a plugin and it saves you time, money and gives you needed functionality, then donate to the plugin author for crying out loud. Otherwise this trend to charge for “premium” plugins will continue unabated. “Premium” does not necessarily equate with quality, by the way. This is actually a topic for another conversation, but I’d love to see a credible, rigorous, peer code review process for all WordPress plugins. If your plugin doesn’t stack -up, then it should be banned from seeing the light of day, or at least banned from the WordPress plugins repository. Also realize that you may not need a plugin to accomplish some things either. Not only can poorly coded plugins have  negative effects on site speed and performance, some might just be downright  dangerous and leave you open to exploits. As WPSHOUT mentions, “You don’t need a plugin for everything.” If you’re going to have the audacity to charge a premium price for your plugin, at least back it up with peer code review. Someone could make a lot of money offering this “accreditation.”

Please explain to me the justification for charging $50, $75, or more, ANNUALLY for a plugin that provides essentially a single function? It’s bad enough that these developers charge a premium price but the new game in town is to force you to re-up annually. You think Photoshop CS4 is expensive? Well add a half-dozen “premium” plugins to your blog and you’ll have paid the equivalent price as you would pay for Photoshop, if not more. Yeah, I’d say that’s pretty ridiculous.

I was actually going to “upgrade” my SEO plugin to the “premium” version. Why was I going to do that? Because I actually do believe in contributing to plugin authors and recognizing the hard work they do. Once I went to the plugin website, I discovered that in addition to the cost for the actual plugin ($39 on sale), the author charges an additional fee for support and upgrades ranging from $10 for one month, to $49 for 12 months. What? I’m paying for the plugin AND an additional amount for support and upgrades? Almost $100 for a SEO plugin? Crazy. For the record, a properly designed theme and WordPress alone will give you good SEO in most cases.

How about a nice Forms plugin. I’ve used the most excellent Forms plugin, cForms for years. I’ve also contributed many times to the author of cFroms. Oliver is a great guy and has put in hundreds and hundreds of hours developing cForms, yet he does not feel the need to charge a “premium” price for it. His price is $0. cForms won’t cost you a penny to use unless you choose to contribute, as I have. It’s an extremely powerful plugin that does many things that the “premium” forms plugin doesn’t do. And what does the “premium” forms plugin cost? Would you believe $199 for a developers license. You can buy FileMaker Pro for not much more, an extremely powerful, full-blown application. Should a plugin cost as much or more than a full application? Apparently quite a few WordPress plugin developers think so and judging by the trend, it’s a growing issue.

Ah, the astute reader will notice a new term thrown into the mix… “developer license.” You pay a huge amount more for the privilege to use the plugin on more than just a single site. So if you only want to use it on a single site, then you’ll pay $39. If you want to use it on 6 sites, then you’ll have to pay $199. You want fries with that Coke?

Let’s take a moment and do the math… You are a website developer and plan to build or update a total of 6 websites in the coming year. You’ve decided you want to use the premium Gravity Forms plugin, instead of the free cForms. That’ll run you $199. Ka-ching!

Throw in a little All-in-One SEO Pack – Pro version plus 1 year of support. $39. Ka-ching! plus another $49 for support. Ka-ching! (Headspace, a great alternative, is free.)

Now let’s throw in a little database backup plugin. Most people would use the free and excellent plugin, WP-DBManager, but not you. You’ve got money burning a hole in your pocket and fortunately there is a backup plugin that’s got your name on it… BackupBuddy, by the same great team that brought you overpriced “premium” WordPress themes. Today is your lucky day because BackupBuddy just recently became more expensive. Yup! Apparently $25 for an annual single site license wasn’t enough for the iThemes team… they just raised the price to $45. But don’t worry, you can also buy the “developer” plan for the low, low price of $150. Ka-ching!

So let’s add things up shall we?

$88 – All in One SEO pack
$199 – Gravity Forms
$150 – BackupBuddy
___________
$437.00

Your “free” installation of WordPress has just gotten pretty expensive hasn’t it?

I get the feeling you’ve got a bit more money that you want to spend so let’s just add a few more. How about a plugin to add rotating banners. Sure, there are tons of free plugins to accomplish that task but we want to spend MONEY. I’ve got just the plugin for you, Billboard + Rotating Images Pack… just $90 for the developers license. I know what you’re thinking… that’s such a good deal you want to buy two of them. Well you won’t have to because the developers license lets you use it on unlimited sites. Woo-Hoo. But don’t worry, you can pay again next year when your time for support and upgrades runs out. Ka-ching!

$437 + $90 = $527

We can do better than that. Let’s spruce up our site with a new “premium” theme. How about Thesis? Why not. It’s “only” $164 ( at least until v 2.0 comes out at which point it will cost more.) Let’s go for it. And even though it’s a developers license, you’ll still get to pay more because for each site that you deploy the theme on that you don’t own, you pay an additional fee. Oh yes, it’s true. Tack on another $36 for each additional site up to 5 or $32 for up to 10 sites you build using Thesis that is not your own personal site. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

$527 + $164 + $32 + $32 + $32 + $32 + $32 + $32 = $883

Not quite up to $1000 but I could easily get us up there if I tried.

Here’s the point. WordPress is an open-source, GPL’d platform that is free to use. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of plugins that provide great functionality that you won’t have to purchase or pay an annual fee for the right to use or obtain support. You may or may not be asked to donate. If you use the plugin, you should donate. It’s the right thing to do. It compensates the developer for the time they’ve spent on developing the plugin and possibly providing support.

If plugins were priced reasonably, without all the BS annual plans, support fees and yadda yadda, I’d buy them. What’s reasonable? How about $5-$20 period. One-time. Period.

Vote with your pocketbooks people. Support open-source, shareware and donation-ware. Email your favorite plugin developers and thank them for their work and contribution to the WordPress community. Unless you want to get nickle-and-dimed to death by those who make their living off a platform that has been provided for free, support freeware, shareware and donation-ware. You might want to even explore other CMS platforms such as CMS Made Simple, Joomla, Drupal or Concrete 5.

If you are using BigCommerce as your online store/cart, you may want to remove the footer link back to BigCommerce. This tutorial will demonstrate how to remove the “Sell Products Online with Big Commerce” link and text in the footer of your BigCommerce store template.

I’ve been absorbing the most excellent book on CMS Made Simple published by Packt Publishing. Written by Sofia Hauschildt, a tutor, consultant and programmer, CMS Made Simple 1.6 is a beginners guide to learning the basics and so much more of CMS Made Simple, an open-source, content management application.

I first started using CMS Made Simple to build web sites about 5 years ago. I have also used WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, RapidWeaver and hand-coding to build websites. But CMS Made Simple is one of my favorite tools to use because you can get started with it very easily and produce a great website without knowing much about what goes on behind the scenes. Documentation has always been hard to come by though. The wiki and user forums are the best places to visit to glean information and ask questions. But the developers have clearly stated that CMS Made Simple is geared to web developers and not so much to neophytes who need a lot of hand-holding and who need relatively basic questions answered.

CMS Made Simple 1.6 is the book that neophytes need. It takes a very measured and slowly paced approach in presenting small doses of information to enable almost anyone to get the CMS installed and operating in no time at all. This is done as a ‘case study” whereby you build a CMS Made Simple website with a capable tutor by your side… Sofia Haushildt.

The methodology used in this book is straightforward and effective. You are told what you will be doing, you are guided through the process of doing it, then you are told what you just did. It is this repetition of information that facilitates the learning process, especially for block-heads like me. I learn best when I am able to observe someone doing something then doing it myself. That is exactly what this book does… it teaches you by doing. There are ample screenshots at every step of the journey to further illuminate the tasks. Furthermore, there are quizzes that test your comprehension of the material covered. If you diligently follow through in a linear fashion, you will learn all the basics and so much more of how CMS Made Simple can be used to build a great web site.

I was particularly impressed with the aplomb in which Sofia approached Smarty. Smarty is the template engine used by CMS Made Simple. Without an understanding of what Smarty is and how it works in your templates and pages, you would be at a huge disadvantage when approaching a web design project. Her treatment of the subject leaves you with a very good understanding how Smarty functions and gives you many ideas of how you can use Smarty tags to simplify site design by harnessing the power of Smarty.

As you continue through the book you are gently guided into more advanced topics and taught how to incorporate various features into your website such as form pages, inserting YouTube videos onto pages, learning how menus and sub-menus work and are displayed and so much more.

There is an excellent discussion of how just about any web template can be converted to work with CMS Made Simple and it is surprisingly easy when you apply what you learned about Smarty tags to that task. You also learn how to build a template from scratch as well as how to import templates obtained from other sources.

Many code snippets are presented in the book. Unfortunately the book does not include a CD containing code snippets by chapter. But the publishers website has all the code available for download in a zip file so that is a big help since it obviates the need to tediously type error free code from the book.

If you want to learn CMS Made Simple, get this book. It’s as simple as that. What you learn in these pages will save you hours of frustration and question asking in forums. This is arguably the best introduction to CMS Made Simple that you will find. The book is not just for beginners either. People who have been developing web sites with CMS Made Simple already may likely find valuable tips and information that they did not previously know. This book is not a reference book on CMS Made Simple however, so if you are looking for a comprehensive reference book, this will not satisfy that need. In spite of that though it actually is quite comprehensive in that it does cover every important area of using CMS Made Simple in a really well written way. Sofia writes clearly and in a very straightforward, uncomplicated way. I have shelves of computer books and this is what I would consider a top-shelf book.

I’d like to give a plug to CMS Made Simple as well. I know that WordPress is all the rage. I build many sites using WordPress myself. But if you are not building a blog-centric site, WordPress is not always the best way to approach building a page-based website. CMS Made Simple is a worthy consideration. It is very easy to learn and use. It is under continual development and has an active user forum. I like it a lot and it is so much easier to get your head around than Joomla, Drupal and other CMS’s. Check it out and see for yourself.

Now if you’ll excuse me,  I need to try and persuade Sofia Hauschildt into writing a book about Magento…

With the update to Magento 1.4.0.1 I discovered that any Product Name that contained an ampersand character, like “Loaves & Fishes” was not being displayed properly. Instead of the ampersand character showing, the entity was showing instead, "&". Curiously, the ampersand was being displayed in other areas correctly, such as the breadcrumb.

This caused me to investigate. I discovered that a number of other people were experiencing similar issues with ampersands not displaying. I filed a bug report with Magento and a couple days later I received a response. It seems that this is a behavior that actually has a toggle.

If you are experiencing this yourself, go to Catalog>Attributes>Manage Attributes, then click the “name” attribute code in the first column to open the properties window. Scroll down in the window until you see “Allow HTML-tags on Front-end” and be sure to set the value to “Yes.” Save your changes and then check your store. This should fix the problem and you should now see “&” instead of “&” in the Product Name.

I’ve just received the book, CMS Made Simple 1.6 – Beginners Guide and will be doing a full review of it soon. In the meantime I just wanted to give a brief overview of the book, of which I have high expectations. I’ve been using CMS Made Simple to make web sites for over 4 years. It is very competent CMS but there has been a real lack of documentation. Even the CMS Made Simple website lacks complete documentation so I was very happy to hear that a beginner’s guide had recently been published.

The book takes a “case study” approach which is actually a very good way to present the information you would need to build a site using CMS Made Simple. I’ve only skimmed through the book but have already gained a fairly good appreciation for the approach the author takes.

Stay tuned for my complete review that will be forthcoming.

You may also visit the Packt Publishing website to see more of this book including a sample chapter.