My main points of interest these days are technical diving, photography and video. This isn’t to say that I don’t look at other stalls, but I do tend to stay away from the dive tour/tourism stalls altogether, so you won’t see any of those covered. However, I am a bit of a gear freak, so I went in most of those booths that had new gear to display at the show.
First up: Rebreathers
Dear Blackberry Pearl,
I didn’t mean to leave you but your slim, non-QWERTY keyboard just isn’t doing it for me any longer. While I love your consumer appeal and sexy crappy phone cam, I’ve figured out that your smaller screen size and my larger eyes just aren’t a good fit any longer. It didn’t help that your flimsy design didn’t hold up very well and the final straw was when the trackball stopped working. So the way that I see it, you pushed me away to my old flame phone and made me realize just want I was giving up to be with you.
It’s not you, it’s me and I’m back to my Blackberry 8700c.
Apeks, the UK manufacturer of diving equipment or kit as they call it in Britain, has come out with a new “DIR doubles” regulator.
These look to be the same bullet-proof Apeks regulators but have all the ports on one side and are matched as a left and right pair. With this arrangement, you have your hoses routed in the correct down position.
Kinda of a neat idea, and if I were in the market for new regs, which I’m not, I might consider these for my doubles-only reg set.
The are available for approx 549 euro for the pair. However, I still have no idea why a pair of regulators is called “Tec 3-set”
A California dive company has release a new product that they claim will help reduce Decompress Illness. Called Safe-d-stop, it consists of 4 main components: 100% O2 cylinder with 20-foot regulator-whips, a trapeze bar that extends 15 feet, and a surface-floating bag with attached dive flag. The bag is also the carrying/storage case.
So you float this thing out, deploy it, then do your dive, come back, do 5 mins decompression or safety stop, on 100% O2 , surface, put this thing away and drag it back to shore.
The thought is that the O2-stop is a better decompression stop, as you aren’t absorbing any nitrogen (N2), because your Oxygen-window open and are now off-gassing more N2 than simply on air alone, which is only 21% O2. This is also what is done on a technical dive, it allows for a faster decompression and gets you out of the water faster.
However, you have to watch it. Your body can only take so much O2 at a time and too much oxygen can result in oxygen toxicity or ox-tox. Ox-toxing underwater can be a little troublesome, since it’s comparable to a grand mal seizure where people typically spit the regs out of their mouth and drown.
So I’m not sure this is worth that potential hassle or the $1200 expensive. However, they have made a clean, compact, system that would be great for remote locations
So, if I were an instructor, I might consider buying one of these things and using it for classes. Check out this video, they made it look really easy to deploy, but I can’t imagine trying to drag this thing out into the surf on beach dive unless you had a bunch of people helping you keep track of it when a wave hit you.
SeaBob is more underwater jet ski that DPV as it works well on the surface or under water. It uses a combination of a 5hp electric motor to drive an jet stream that shoots you through the water at approx 12 mph. That’s faster than some boats.
It sucks in water and spits it out the backend, just like a jetski. It has an dashboard with an LED display that shows you how much power you have left and the lithim ion battery lasts about an hour.
It’s positively buoyant, so it floats back to the surface when you let go of it, like after you hit that pier pylon. It’s good to a maximum depth of 120 feet.
These aren’t cheap as you’ll pay between $10K to $15K, which is about as much as some boats. Check out this video.
I installed Windows Vista one of my computers at work. I mainly did this to see what all the hoopla was about, so of course I decided to install it, yah know, just to see what the fuss was all about.
I was underwhelmed. While I liked the clean look of the interface and the widgets, that you could install on the desktop, it really wasn’t any different that Windows XP but with tons of DRM. So with all the hysteria of Windows Vista and the related hardware upgrades that they are suggesting, I decided to take a look at alternatives. I kinda like the Mac OSX interface. However, since you can’t just install Mac OSX on any ‘ole machine you want, I thought, “Maybe I should take a look at Linux again.”
So I went and installed Ubuntu, which folks have been saying is contender for as a true alternative desktop operating system. I was impressed, it installed in about 20 mins and after I figured out how to disable the integrated video card in the computer and then found the correct driver for my ATI video card, it worked like charm.
I’m still playing with it but I’ve expanded my test.
My new goal: Can I use Ubuntu to replace my Windows laptop at work?
I’ve plateaued in my current fitness goal of losing 30 pounds. This happens, the body adjusts and in some cases begins building heavy, dense muscle while removing fat and you end up staying the same weight.
There are only two things you can do, eat less or increase your energy consumption, i.e. workout more. Since I’m only on 1700 kcals a day, I really don’t have much room to move the needle on the intake side, so I need to increase my activity.
So in addition to working out 3 days a week and scuba diving every Saturday, I’m walking the dogs two days a week before I go to work.
In addition, I scored a Nintendo Wii and will be playing Wii Sports for 30 mins a day. Since you need to use your whole body, like say in boxing, it raises your heart rate and gets you off the couch.
We will see how this goes, I might need to start running..ehhh…on the days where I’m not working out with my trainer.
Pretty cool. Microsoft came out with a new desktop blog writing application that can connect to now only it’s own Windows Live Spaces but most of the custom blog platforms out there, including my favorite: WordPress.
It’s called Windows Live Writer, it’s free and available here.
It’s very MS Word like in it’s operation, true WYSIWYG authoring, but light-weight enough to make edits quick and easy. I also like the built in spell check and the familiar format options that we all know and love.
I’m going to play around with this one for a while, in fact I am writing this article with it, and while it won’t replace the portability of using the Wordpress web interface, it does give you options.
I got a Blackberry Pearl to replace my Blackberry 8700c. I like the fact that it’s smaller, has a camera with a flash and plays mp3s and videos. In addition, it a good phone, has amazing battery life, has bluetooth and looks good oh yeah and does email/calendar really really well, because of course it’s a Blackberry.
It has Suretype, a software replacement for a full keyboard which uses prediction software and a dictionary to guess which word you are trying to enter. It works very well, not as well as a full keyboard, but I’m not writing novels on this thing, usually just short messages. I actually don’t mind it now, it took a little while to get used to but I quickly over came any obstacles in my acceptance.
The camera on it is ok, not great but it’s good for stupid little quick pictures of your co-worker doing something funny or a pet doing something cute. It also plays mp3s and some videos. While it’s nothing to challenge an Ipod or Zune but it’s pretty good for a person who doesn’t already have an mp3 player. The upgradeable internal memory will take up to a 2 GB in the MicroSD format. The device also functions as a thumb drive, so you can load any document that you’d like onto it.
So far, I like it and while the media playback won’t replace my Ipod, the email and phone functions make this my current favorite.