Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS

With Black Friday looming large and the holidays following close behind, its time to roll out some gift ideas that are guaranteed to put a smile on the face of that special geek or geekette in your life. First up is the Canon PowerShot ELPH 300 HS.

This is a great little point and shoot camera; small, solidly built, and chock full of features. The 300 is a 12.1 megapixel digital camera with a 24 mm ultra Wide-Angle lens, 5x optical zoom, full 1080p HD video with stereo sound, and an optical image stabilizer. Canon’s HS system provides fast image processing and great low light performance, and it can capture 8.0 frames per second in high speed burst mode. Not bad for a camera you can slip into your front pocket.

I’ve been playing around with one of these for about 2 months now, and I’ve been very pleased with the results. Nice sharp photos, short time between shots, very decent battery life, and although it’s capable of all kinds of magical image processing, the thing I’m most impressed with is its Smart Auto setting. It reads the situation and adjusts accordingly, giving you the best picture possible with a minimal amount of effort. Just point, and shoot; as it should be.

That being said, I’m looking forward to trying out the Movie Digest mode this Thanksgiving. In this mode, the camera pre-captures a 4 second video clip before each still, and then stitches the whole day together in a file that you can play back as a montage. Cool.

There’s a nice review here on the Hunt’s Camera website, and I’ve posted a video review from infoSync below, because the only way to appreciate how tiny this thing is is to see it in someone’s hands. It’s tiny, but it’s solid. There’s a nice heft to it in your hand, and when it’s off, it turtles itself into a sleek, sturdy little package.

Hunt’s just dropped the price from $199 to $179, and I’m expecting them to bundle it with an extra battery or a nice memory card and case for the same or less this Friday. If they do, jump on it, you won’t be disappointed.

The nurses at Winchester Hospital are the best!

Same goes for my wife, who has been carrying the load on the home front. Working, running back and forth to the hospital, shoveling, shopping and shipping packages, she's truly tireless and amazing. Thank you!

Thanks also need to go out to all our friends and relatives who've pitched in with their help and support.

Not a week after I did a blog entry on my adventures at Snake River Canyon, some of that old baling wire that was holding me together snapped. How spooky is that?

The good thing is that it's really helped me to put the holidays into perspective. What's really important is the health and well-being of our friends and family, and how we cultivate it.

My favorite line from my favorite album sums it up best:

"And, in the end, the love you take/ Is equal to the love you make."

Truer words have never been spoken.

Safe Tech Toys For The Holidays

OK, unless you've been in a cave you know that there's been some serious issues with toys lately. A couple of weeks ago my grandson was showing me the cool bee he had made with his new Aqua Dots play set. A few days later I saw the news piece on how toxic this crap was and almost choked on my morning coffee.

I called my son even though it was 5:30 in the morning. Scared the daylights out of him, of course, everyone answers late night/early morning phone calls with a touch of dread, but I was freaked out enough about the story that I just didn't care. It turned out that he had seen the story also and had already scooped it and hidden it. Smart man, my son.

We were lucky this time, but I for one am not taking any chances this holiday season, and you shouldn't either. I'm going to give you some safe and really cool high tech alternatives today that are guaranteed to be a hit.

First up is the VTech V.SMILE game console. It's actually called a learning console and I have to say that it's a pretty apt description. We bought this for my grandson last Christmas and he loved it. It's geared for ages 3 to 7 so it grows with the child. The games/learning modules actually feature popular characters like Bob the Builder, Scooby Doo, Sponge Bob and Spiderman and do a great job of disguising learning as an arcade game.

The games are broken up by age group, 3-4, 4-5 and 5-7 and each group works on a variety of skill sets. The controllers are intuitive and easy to use and the console and games are quite reasonable. The console goes for about $49 and the games are about $19 each.

This has stood the test of time for us. It's still being used on a regular basis after almost a year, and I don't need to tell you parents out there that holding the interest of a 4 year old for a year is quite a feat.

Vtech also makes a system for children 6 and up, the VTech V.FLASH. Same deal, $49 for the console and $19 for the games.

There are some great add ons for both systems and plenty of games, so you can make buying them a family affair. Someone gets the console, others can pick up games or accessories. You also get the added bonus of knowing your not giving them some mindless piece of crap. Bonus!

Got a tween or teen? How about a reasonable but fully functional laptop? The Asus Eee PC is a close cousin to the Laptop for Every Child device but is a very slick computer that can be used by all. It's small and light and comes with a web cam, WiFi, Open Office and either a Linux or Windows operating system. It's flash based so there's no hard drive, boots up and shuts down really quickly, and according to all the reviews on the tech sites and, more importantly, the user reviews on Amazon, everything works right out of the box with no configuration necessary. Does it get any better than that? Why yes it does, the price is just $399!

I'm thinking this would be a great device for someone like my 83 year old dad. Easy to use, hard to hose.

There's not a lot of free disk space, only about 1.5 gb, but for mail and word processing apps it doesn't need much. Plus it has 3 USB 2.0 ports, so thumb drives and portable disks can solve that problem. Check it out.

That's it for now. Next time we'll talk about some cool toys for grown up geeks. I can't wait!