Pocket camera: Canon Powershot S90 (the recent S95 is probably even better). Takes the best photos I’ve seen from any camera that will fit in a pants pocket, and works pretty well in low light too, so you can shoot indoors without a flash.

Neck strap for SLR: Luma Loop (http://www.luma-labs.com/products/loop). Way more comfortable than a standard neck strap, especially for heavier camera/lens combinations, and really practical — easy to slide camera from hanging position to shooting position, easy to detach camera to hand it to someone else.

Digital SLR < $1000 (DX): Nikon D90 (upcoming D7000 should be even better). Great controls and hand feel, great set of features, great pictures.

Digital SLR, full-frame (FX): Nikon D700. Ditto what I said about the D90, except even better controls and even better pictures, especially in low light (high ISO). Heavy and expensive, but that goes with the territory for now at least.

FX lenses:

• 50mm F/1.4: natural length fixed lens, fast for low light

• 24-85mm zoom: good zoom range for walkaround lens

• 70-300mm VR zoom: gets you close, zooms far out enough to leave on the camera most of the time

• 17-35mm F/2.8 zoom: super wide angle, fast enough for low light and background blur

DX lenses:

• 35mm F/1.8: natural length fixed lens, fast for low light

• 18-200mm VR zoom: jack of all trades, good enough for almost anything

• 12-24mm zoom: super wide angle

Note that all the FX lenses work fine on the DX camera too, but the field of view is reduced, which makes some of them less useful. The 17-35 is a really useful zoom range on the DX camera, though, and with the reduced field of view, vignetting is not a problem.

This is all stuff I own, would buy again and would recommend.

One thing OpenWRT can do (if you run it on a router with USB ports) is stream video from a webcam using mjpg-streamer. Pretty useful if you want to put a webcam in some random place.

(The current version of OpenWRT, backfire, needs additional nondefault packages involved: see http://blog.bashroom.com/2010/05/04/webcam-streaming-with-openwrt-backfire/.)

I tried this with an old webcam I had lying around, but the old webcam predated the UVC (USB Video Class) standard, and I couldn’t get it to work. So then I bought a couple of the cheapest webcams on Amazon that claimed UVC support.

Not too surprisingly, neither one worked right away — when I start mjpg- streamer as described in the abovelinked article, it would say “Unable to set format: invalid argument”. This turns out to be because these cheaper cameras don’t support MJPG in hardware, only YUV output; mjpg-streamer can convert but you have to pass -y to it.

So for OpenWRT, I edited /etc/init.d/mjpg-streamer to add -y to the —input argument.

The resulting stream is choppy, and gets backed up several frames, but is good enough for my purposes. It also spikes the router CPU to 100%, even on a newer faster router I have, so I told mjpg-streamer to stream at 1 fps, which is not that much choppier and still good enough for my purposes (edit /etc/config /mjpg-streamer to do this).

Moral of the story: it’s probably better to buy a webcam known to support MJPG in hardware.

(Thanks to https://forum.openwrt.org/viewtopic.php?pid=98294and http://arthurhong-linux.blogspot.com/2008/11/mjpgstreamer-or-uvcstreamer-always.html for helping me figure out the YUV format problem and solution.)

Useful tip: for carrying a pocket digital camera, keep it in a $5 microfiber bag like the ones used for sunglasses (easily obtainable at a sunglass store if you don’t already have one).

It adds nothing to the size, so the pocket camera still fits in your pocket. It protects the screen, and keeps the camera reasonably free of dust. It doesn’t protect it against drops, so don’t drop your camera — sure, you could get a padded case but then it’s no longer a pocket camera.

I’ve kept my last 3 pocket-sized cameras in nothing more protective, while they lived years in my pocket accompanying me on various adventures, and they’re all faring fine, except for one which I landed on in a skiing crash. Oh well.

Kellan Elliott-McCrea on data portability at Flickr

“With Flickr you can get out, via the API, every single piece of information you put into the system.”

I think this makes a pretty good definition of the minimum standard for data portability that online services should be held to — to paraphrase, anything you put in you can get back out.

Having read the debate between John Gruber and Tim Bray and Gruber again on the subject of physical vs onscreen keyboards for smartphones, I wanted to chime in.

Having used a Treo for 2 years, then an iPhone for 2 years, then most recently a Palm Pre, I have two more observations to make on the buttony-vs-glass keyboard issue which I haven’t seen made elsewhere.

1) Not just foreign languages: even in English, anything that isn’t a word doesn’t benefit from autocorrect, and I find it relatively easier to type on a physical keyboard without autocorrect than an onscreen keyboard with autocorrect. I notice this with: names, swear words which aren’t in the dictionary, abbreviations, passwords, and code snippets. The onscreen keyboard with autocorrect does a pretty awesome job with dictionary words (I think it’s instructive to note, here, that T9 also handles this case, if not perfectly, at least surprisingly well). Another, possibly less contrived, case, which pisses me off if I’m trying to be meticulous — capitalization. Sometimes I type ID and I want it to look like that either as short for identification or for Idaho, and turning it into I’d isn’t cool.

2) After using an iPhone for 2 years and after initial reluctance finally giving myself over to it, I found I could type about as fast as I could on the Treo keyboard. But, at a much higher cognitive load. On a full-size keyboard I can pretty much type without thinking, and to some degree can hold a conversation and type a queued thought at the same time. On a physical cell phone keyboard i.e. Treo, typing requires more concentration but I can still queue up bursts of keystrokes while doing something else. Typing on the iPhone, even after 2 years, generally requires all my concentration. Partly because I need to watch the keys to see that I hit the right ones, partly because I can’t always trust autocorrect (and with low but still annoying frequency, it’ll take something I typed correctly and turn it into something else). So I don’t find a hardware keyboard to be particularly faster, but I do honestly find it to be less stressful. I can type the same thing at the same speed with less mental load, more confidence.

(Overall, the Pre keyboard is not as easy to use as the Treo’s, but I still find the above two points to be true of it.)

I also don’t think this really changes Gruber’s (a) and (b) conclusions in his second article; Apple’s not going to add a hardware keyboard to the iPhone and they’ll still have plenty of customers. That doesn’t mean I have to like onscreen keyboards, though.