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5×5 Windy Day from Rodfather on Vimeo.

First 5×5 Vignette. It was a very windy day so I took some footage of some plants & trees blowing in the wind.

Shot from Canon TX1 at 720P. The audio had a lot of wind noise even though I turned on the wind filter. It was ridiculously windy though so it was expected. My hat flew off twice during this time.

I did an experiment in post. Edited this with my 800Mhz Fujitsu U810 UMPC using Sony Vegas. While editing, the preview screen couldn’t really keep up but it wasn’t actually too bad editing HD footage on such a slow computer. I’m somewhat glad now that the Canon TX1 encodes to MJPEG. If it encoded to H.264, there would be no way I would be able to edit it since H.264 is so processor intensive.

I ended up encoding the final product to 720P WMV. It took 54 minutes to encode 25 seconds worth of footage.

I doubt I will edit HD footage on a UMPC in the near future, but it’s nice to know it’s even possible.

Download WMV from Vimeo page - 1280×720 30FPS (99MB)

So I try to boot up my Fujitsu U810 last night and something horribly goes wrong. It wouldn’t boot. Right after the BIOS information shows up, I could hear a bad clicking sound from the harddrive and it would immediately shut down and go through an endless loop of restarting.

To say the least, I was bummed out. I initially thought my drive was gone. I’ve already dropped U810 about 3-4 times and it always came back like a champ. I didn’t remember dropping it this last time but I could have jarred it by not gently setting it down on the table. Thoughts of replacing it with a $500-600 32GB SSD drive crossed my mind so I can prevent things like this happening since I am always mobile with this device and could use the extra durability.

So I pull out my thumb drive which contains Bart PE which I installed a while back in case something like this happens to any of my computers. As long as you can boot from the USB port, you can run this slimmed down version of Windows for diagnostics, testing, and recovery purposes. I basically wanted to check if my C:\ drive was intact so I could go on to the next step. Bart PE is great in that you can also get a network connection and backup the contents of your drive if you computer doesn’t want to boot up.

It turns out my harddrive was fine. Within Bart PE, I could see the entire contents of my drive and ran chkdsk which showed everything looked ok.

Then I remember the last thing I did. I put the U810 into hibernate mode. Ok, this told me the master boot record (MBR) was screwed. I have a dual-boot set up of Windows XP and Ubuntu and have GRUB as the bootloader. So somehow hibernating screwed up the MBR and left me with an unbootable machine.

So I began searching around for a Windows XP install CD. I did not have one. The usual solution for fixing the MBR is running a boot disk or Windows XP install CD, going to the recovery console, and running  fixmbr in the command prompt.

I searched around and found that the Ultimate Boot CD contained some utilities to recover the MBR. I downloaded the ISO and burned a CD with the MacBook. After connecting an external CD drive to the U810, I booted the CD to see if I can fix this thing. To say the least, trying to find a utility that worked was frustrating. Some of the utilities ran a virtual machine and left you with a DOS prompt without telling you the name of the .exe file to run. I ran several boot managers from the CD and successfully booted into XP, but couldn’t figure out how to fix the MBR with the boot loaders. At least I could get XP going, but there’s no way I’m going to carry around an external drive just to get it to boot.

After about an hour, I found partition application that successfully restored the MBR and used the XP partition as the default boot partition.

The next thing I did was wipe out the Ubuntu partitions, install Partition Magic, and resize the XP partition to use the cleared up space. I didn’t use Ubuntu much anyway. If I ever need to screw around with distros, I’ll go back to using VMWare.

So… phew.. damn I’m glad I didn’t have to reinstall the OS or replace my drive. Bart PE and Ultimate Boot CD saved my ass and prevented me from considering trying out Vista again.

I ordered some accessories last week for the Fujitsu U810 from the Fujitsu store.

One of the items was the docking station.  I finally brought it in to work today and took some snapshots with the iPhone.

On the back are 3 USB ports, VGA, LAN, and power.  The right side includes an additional USB port to make it 4 total.

There’s not much to it.  The piece of metal in the back slides in to make it more portable.  It works fine and will make it much easier to set up at my second location.

I’m sure most of you have seen the Everyday video where this dude Noah takes a picture of himself everyday for 6 years (and counting?).  Well at least you’ve heard the music in the NBA’s Where Amazing Happens commercials..

Anyway, now you can easily snap a photo of yourself everyday straight to the browser using a webcam with Daily Mugshot.

I’m not sure if I will keep up with this but since I have the Fujitsu U810 with me all the time with its built-in webcam, why not.  Maybe this will be a good incentive to live a healthier lifestyle and not look so much like a chipmunk.

Keeping current with Web 2.0 goodness, they offer an embed code to stream your mug to your favorite social network.

Via lifestreamblog.com

CarPC’s have been a hot topic here lately.  Steve ‘Chippy’ Paine just put up a short video on his UMPC moblog site showing how you can have a 15 hr CarPC/desktop PC using the Everun, Car dock, Samsung Q1 USB keyboard, and a Tekkeon MP3400 external battery.  Well, I have 2/4 items..  Looks to be a nice solution if you want to mount the Everun on to the windshield or a flat surfaced dash.

Here’s my mounting solution for the Fujitsu U810 using a ProClip vehicle mount and a RAM Mount cradle. 

Chippy’s UMPC miniblog.: Portable 15-hour car/desktop PC

I found out Inkseine was available a day early from Rob of gottabemobile.com so I went ahead and installed it.  So far it seems cool.  It works perfectly fine on the Fujitsu U810’s touchscreen.  I like the interface, but I’m not exactly sure what I’d use it for.  I’d still rather use Windows Journal for ink blog posts.  It’s fun to use so I suggest you try it out.

There’s been an annoying issue with the touchscreen on the U810.  If you don’t use it after a certain amount of time, maybe 10 seconds, it takes a second to get the touchscreen to respond again which makes inking frustrating.

I noticed the UMPC Portal forums, rexibaby posted a link to a comment in an Amazon review showing the solution to the response issues.

Chris Heitmann says:

In reply to #8:
After using the u810 for a day - I also became frustrated with the unresponsiveness of the Touch Screen after not using it for 10 seconds or so. It was so frustrating to me that I was beginning to consider a return. Fortunately I finally found the solution so I thought I’d share.
HERE’S THE FIX! (Instructions are for Vista Home Premium - might be different on XP)
Open up “Device Manager” in Control Panel.
Expand “Human Interface Devices”
Double Click “FCL USB Pen Tablet”
Choose the “Power Management” tab
uncheck “allow the computer to turn off this device to save power”
That’s it. Real responsiveness! This really makes a HUGE difference in usability. Even if you have gotten used to the way it works or you’ve never had another tablet so you feel it’s performing ok - try this.

I tried it out and it works.  The touchscreen is much more responsive now.  Happy inking!

Ok give up? Don’t care?

Here’s what is coming:

RAM Mount Cradle for the Fujitsu U810

CES ‘08 Photo by pocketables.net

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I still have the ProClip mount I bought for my Subaru.  Right now, the Samsung Q1 RAM Mount cradle is attached to it.  I did a video of my CarPC setup with the Samsung Q1 a long time ago.  It will basically be the same setup but with this mount attached.

I’m pretty excited.  The Fujitsu U810 doesn’t quite fit snug in the dash compartment of my car, so I really needed a mount.  This will definitely make it easier for using the U810 for GPS navigation, music, and lifestreaming/vlogging with the internal cam or Xbox Live Vision cam I attached to the dash.

Best of all?  It’s only $15.95.  (plus $29.99 for the ProClip vehicle mount).

Messing around with Sony Vegas. Took this at one of the Moss Landing Beaches.
Recorded with the Aiptek A-HD in low res mode (352×240).
Music by Glen Hansard from the movie Once.
Mobile post sent by Rodfather using Utterz.  Replies.

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Click To Play

Sat at the bowling alley with U810 and edited with Sony Vegas. Rendered to 320×240 512kb/s WMV.

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