HAVA video capture has terrible audio

I used a HAVA video recorder recently, and I have to say that it’s one of the worst pieces of consumer electronics I’ve ever used. These are the typical problems I experienced:

• dark video (at least they do offer some controls at capture, but it’s not pretty)
• loud, distorted audio. By my measurements, the audio in the captured MP2 file is about 18dB too loud. Massive. Distorted. Ugly.
• out of sync audio, by about 250 ms. Ridiculous.
• constant device resets. The number of times I’ve had to run through the setup wizard just to get the computer to talk to it is beyond a joke.

Seriously, save yourself time and gray hairs, and don’t ever touch these units.

Scanning documents with Snow Leopard

How awesome is scanning documents with the new Mac OS X Snow Leopard!!!

There are several ways to do it, which are all very intuitive:

1. The Printer driver program – this is the app that appears when printing. There’s a scan button on the right of the toolbar.
2. The Image Capture application
3. The Preview application: File -> Import From Scanner -> select scanner.

All interfaces are very similar, and easy to use.

Additionally, a cool feature of Preview is the Adjust Color window, which operates just like iPhoto.

Now it’s so easy to scan documents, adjust them, change formats, etc; without needing a complex graphics program.

And Preview’s support for multiple page documents ties in with the auto-feeder on my scanner beautifully too.

iPhoto facial recognition = slow

I’m really looking forward to trying out the facial recognition in iPhoto ’09… but it’s been processing for about 50 hours and has just a spinning wheel still…

There’s quite a few people on the Apple Discussions with the same problem: here and here.

It does seem that this feature uses lots of CPU and RAM, so it would be nice to be able to turn it off…