I’m a tech enthusiast for sure, but definitely not a video expert. I’ve tinkered with some pro-grade Sony Mini-DV cams and poked around in Final Cut and Avid, but I don’t make my living producing video. This is a review from a very real-world, hands-on, subjective, opinionated perspective. I believe it doesn’t matter what the specs say if the experience can’t live up to them.

I really like that the Kodak Zi10 Play Touch comes with a good assortment of accessories out of the box:

• HDMI cable (although it is short)
• Soft carry case
• Hand strap
• Charging cord
• Quick-start guide
• 1000 mAh rechargeable battery

The Zi10 itself looks a bit “plasticky” for my taste. I like a more metallic, heavy-duty feel for my electronics. The upside is that, even with the battery installed, the Zi10 weighs very little.

I also don’t like the glossy finish, which attracts unsightly fingerprints in no time. I prefer a matte finish to anything that comes in contact with my fingers, but this isn’t a deal-breaker since it’s a purely cosmetic issue.

It should come as no surprise that the battery doesn’t ship fully charged. I left the Zi10 plugged in for about an hour before powering it up. When I did, it wasn’t fully charged yet, but definitely had enough juice to goof off with.

Setting the internal date and time on the unit revealed that the touch screen isn’t all that great. It’s overly-sensitive and takes a few taps to register a command in my experience. I also think the scrolling feature gives it too much momentum, so moving up or down the menu just a little bit becomes difficult.

I’m a tinkerer, so my first stop was the settings menu. I’m a man who loves options. I set it to full 1080p HD and browsed the other settings. I was pleased to find that one can set the microphone gain, LCD brightness, TV-out mode (NTSC or PAL), amongst other nice little features.

At this time I also noticed the switch on the top of the unit which controls the focus mode. The Zi10 handles close-up video nicely in macro mode, and normal mode for everything else. As far as I can tell, this is a feature lacking on other cameras in this class and price point.

I noted that when set to 1080p, my 16GB SDHC card can only hold about 2 hours of video (not the 2.5 that the card advertised). This doesn’t bother me for three reasons: I will probably never need 2 hours at a time, the cards are easily swappable, and the maximum card size is 32GB for a theoretical maximum of 4 hours at 1080p.

I started with a 5-minute test run. I walked around the house and yard, mixing a lot of factors:

• Low lighting
• Bright lighting
• Quick changes between low and bright lighting
• High color
• Still, slow, medium and quick panning / movement
• Loud and soft audio

After my 1080p test video, I shot a very similar run at 720p60. For the uninitiated, the trailing 60 refers to the framerate of 60 frames per second, as opposed to 1080p’s 30 frames per second. The extra framerate helps for high motion scenes such as sporting events.

My in-laws have a really nice plasma HDTV, so I thought I’d try the HDMI feature of the Kodak Zi10. I didn’t realize that the Zi10′s HDMI port needs a good bit of pressure to fully insert the cable. Once I found that out, the camera immediately switched to what I’ll call “remote mode.” The touch screen becomes a remote control for the video on the TV.

I was initially unimpressed with the video quality, probably because I’m a perfectionist and can easily spot compression artifacts and other imperfections. However, I found that these mostly resulted from the low light conditions of my first few minutes of footage.

Once I moved to a more adequately lighted area, the quality noticeably improved. I discerned fewer artifacts and more overall detail. The Kodak Zi10′s 1080p mode really looks great in good light and slow camera movement. Introducing a lot of camera movement did degrade the frame’s quality a bit, but not by much.

The Zi10 adapts very well to changes in lighting, making quick and automatic adjustments for exposure and white balance. Making very quick changes from dark to light conditions will frustrate it, but this is true of any non-professional-grade camera. Even though overall frame quality degrades somewhat in dark conditions, the frame does remain visible.

The onboard microphone is very sensitive, even at medium gain. It had no problem picking up little bird chirps and other subtle aural anomalies as I tested. Again, I really like that I can adjust the gain for certain situations if sensitivity is an issue.

It’s also worth noting that the Zi10 supports external microphones via a quarter-inch stereo input, for those wanting even better sound quality. This is another feature lacking in other comparable camcorders that I like.

This shooting mode produced a “smoother” video at a slight resolution penalty. The clarity and crispness of each frame looks slightly worse than 1080p mode, but the difference is not striking or unforgivable.

I did notice more “ghosting” artifacts in this mode, where parts of the picture “smear” across the screen. Once again, the difference is not horribly distracting, but definitely noticeable to the perceptive eye.

The extra framerate makes all motions smoother and more natural, even in slow pans. Strangely, in fast pans the framerate seems to flicker a bit, like the 1080p mode, albeit less.

In 720p60 mode I also tried the macro zoom setting, which makes tight close-ups much clearer. The overall video quality is very nice.

Switching from normal to macro mode introduced a hideous snapping sound into the audio track (due to the very sensitive microphone), so don’t plan on switching between normal and macro without some audio interference.

I decided to preview the shoots on my PC next. It’s really strange that the USB charging cable does not support data transfer; only the flip-out USB arm supports data transfer directly from the Zi10.

The upside is that the USB arm does simultaneously charge the Zi10, and one can always eject the SDHC card and copy data from an external reader if one wishes.

Transfer from my Lexar 16GB SDHC card took longer than expected. I found out that this probably has to do with its 6 speed rating; Kodak recommends SDHC cards with at least 10 speed rating for the Zi10.

Windows Vista reported a peak copy speed of about 3.12MB/s; about 1GB of video took close to 10 minutes to copy. I found this disconcerting, because the real-time video was about 10 minutes, which means the video copies to PC in real-time.

To be fair, this could result from a slow PC (Vista is notoriously slow at everything) or a slow-ish SDHC card. I certainly won’t fault the Zi10 in this realm, since I didn’t test it in optimal conditions. I fully intend to purchase a higher-speed SDHC card and test transfer speeds on my personal Linux boxes when the opportunity arises.

I decided to load up B&H to compare my purchase to other camcorders available, and immediately found that for the price I paid ($120 on sale at Target), I definitely got the best camera for my dollar as of the date of purchase.

I specifically compared it to the feature set of the Flip UltraHD, and found that the Flip lacks a lot of features that the Kodak Zi10 supports: removable/upgradeable memory, macro mode, and digital zoom to name a few. I do like that the Flip optionally supports AAA batteries (the Zi10 doesn’t), but that’s a small sacrifice for the Zi10′s many benefits. Flip’s website also notes that AAA batteries won’t last nearly as long as the built-in Li-Ion battery.

On the note of battery life, I haven’t yet depleted my first charge, so I can’t accurately comment yet. I’ve read that one should expect no more than one hour of actual use time per charge. Note that lowering the LCD brightness will almost certainly extend the life of the unit.

I don’t like that the Zi10 doesn’t have a flat bottom, so one can’t stand it up on a flat surface without the tripod, which is not included—a minor gripe, but a gripe for sure.

I also didn’t touch the Zi10′s social media sharing features, but it does natively support Facebook, YouTube, Orkut, Flickr and Email, amongst others. Sorry, no direct Vimeo support.

As of this writing, I can’t think of a better pocket-sized, entry-level HD camcorder for well under $200. The Kodak Zi10 Play Touch is lightweight, feature-rich and captures video with very good quality, certainly suitable for a video blogger or casual home movies.

Many argue that smartphones will replace handheld camcorders. For those only looking to produce video to share on social networks, this is probably true. But for those who want a dedicated device to capture home movies on for later editing and archival, an inexpensive handheld camcorder does nicely. I’d much rather accidentally trash a $120 unit than a $500+ smartphone, and I can’t easily lend my smartphone to a relative if I wanted to.

What is defragmentation?

The most widely-used Windows filesystem is called NTFS, or NT File System. When files are written to an NTFS partition, the Windows kernel finds the first freely available block of space to write those files. At first, there’s lots of free space. Over time, however, space fills up and finding long chunks of free space becomes difficult.

Over long periods of time creating and deleting files, the clusters of information that make up a file get “scattered” all over the physical hard disk’s surface. We call this process “fragmentation.” When Windows looks for a file, it’s no longer reading it from the same contiguous strip of sectors it was before. Now, it has to travel all over the surface of the hard disk to read the full file into memory for use.

Hence, defragmentation was born. Defragmentation seeks to undo the disorder and re-organize the disk. All versions of Windows ship with a built-in defragmenter, but it’s far from the best available and doesn’t run automatically. Even if these were true, it still couldn’t do as good a job as the process I’ll describe below.

How should I defragment?

Several commercial defragmenters exist, but why pay for what you can get for free? Jeroen Kessels, a very talented programmer, has released his excellent defragmentation software called MyDefrag for everyone to freely download and use. It features:

• A very lightweight download and installation size
• Very simple, automated defragmentation
• Lots of options for scheduling automatic defragmentations
• A nifty defragmentation screen saver to really stay on top of it
• Better, or at least as good as, all other commercial defragmenters
• Zero cost

I strongly recommend that everyone running Windows downloads and uses this utility. Before doing so, be sure to clean your hard drive of any unnecessary files. Do the following to make your defragmentation as quick and easy as possible:

• Run CCleaner
• Run ATF-Cleaner
• Uninstall any programs you don’t use
• Move any large file archives to a secondary hard drive (like photo albums or your iTunes library)
• In general, if you don’t use it or need it, delete it!

What’s the best way to defragment?

Simply downloading, installing and regularly running MyDefrag is a great start. But, there’s a bit of a catch. It turns out there are lots of files that Windows locks during use, which MyDefrag can’t defragment. The result is, in effect, a permanently fragmented hard drive. Some of these unmovable files include:

• The Master File Table (MFT)
• Anything running in memory, like antivirus programs or various Windows components
• The system’s page file (pagefile.sys)
• The Usn journal

To get these files properly defragmented, one must run MyDefrag from a Preinstalled Environment, or PE disc. My previous blog mentioned my discovery of VistaPE, a preinstalled environment for Windows Vista. You may be familiar with WinPE or BartPE for Windows XP, which is essentially the same thing.

Create or obtain and boot your choice of PE disc, then run the mydefrag.exe. Since MyDefrag doesn’t rely on the system’s registry or any other oddball dependencies, you can run it from any live environment.

Since none of the files on the target partition are in use (after all, you’re running Windows from a CD, not off the hard drive), almost all of them are able to defragment properly. Once you run MyDefrag this way once, these files should remain defragmented for the foreseeable future. You should now enjoy a fully defragmented hard disk and all the speed benefits that result from one!

Final thoughts

It’s worth mentioning that the notion of “fragmentation” is an example of Microsoft’s “defective by design” mentality when producing software. Filesystems need not suffer from this by nature. Most other filesystems, such as EXT2/3/4 in Linux or HFS+ in Mac don’t require defragmentation because the filesystem never allows the filesystem to become fragmented in the first place. For those of us stuck in Windows land, this approach is the next best thing.

That’s the lesson a fellow churchgoer found out last week when her laptop suddenly wouldn’t boot. I took a look, and heard the dreaded “click of death” coming from the hard drive tray. Thankfully, I know a thing or two about rescuing data from dying media. Here’s what I did.

Disclaimer: I offer this advice as a way that I solved a specific problem. The tools I describe below are very powerful and could very easily destroy your data if used improperly. In no way do I guarantee the following, and I can’t be held responsible for anything that arises from following these steps. Your mileage will vary. Limit one per customer. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Void where prohibited.

Duplicate the media

Don’t ever try to repair data on dying media. Every read and write sends it closer to permanent failure. The first step should always be to copy everything, as perfectly as possible, to an alternative media. In this case, this laptop shipped with a 160GB SATA notebook hard drive. Without an identical spare handy, I did the next best thing: clone the hard drive to a network share using my favorite forensics utility, Trinity Rescue Kit.

Using Trinity Rescue Kit

TRK is a freely-available, lean and capable live Linux distribution. The burnable ISO is available from their website. Once you boot TRK, you’ll end up in a root shell.

1. Mount the network share
   
   mkdir /smb && mount -t cifs -o username=xxx,password=xxx //server/share /smb && cd /smb
2. Figure out which hard drive to clone
   
   fdisk -l
   
   

   Depending on your setup, you may see many drives listed. If you don’t know which drive is the one you want, run hdparm -i /dev/sdX where X is the number of the drive you want information about.

3. Send a compressed image of the failing drive to the network share
   
   dd if=/dev/sdX conv=noerror,sync bs=2M | gzip -c > hard-drive-backup.img.gz
   
   

   This command will take a while to process. dd is very meticulous (it gets every bit of data off the disk it can) but it’s also very inefficient (it copies the entire disk, even blank sectors). My client’s 160GB HDD took about 4 hours to clone over the network this way. If you have an appropriate hard drive replacement, or you’d like to clone faster, consider mounting the dying disk directly to a third-party computer and clone over the native interface, either IDE or SATA. This will go much faster in most cases.

   Also, consider tweaking the value for block size (bs=2M). This sets the copy block size to 2 megabytes. Depending on the hardware involved, this may go faster or slower with higher or lower values. Try a few before committing.

4. Check dd’s progress
   
   

   dd is very terse, meaning it doesn’t really say much when it’s working. If you want to get periodic updates on its progress, press Alt + F2 to get the second console and run pidof dd to get the PID (process ID) of dd. You’ll see two numbers; pick either one, then run:
   
   watch -n 20 kill -USR1 DDPID

   where DDPID is the number you got from the pidof command. Then press Alt+F1 to go back to your main console and you’ll see dd’s statistics every 20 seconds. You can adjust the -n flag of the watch command to set the interval between updates.

Restore the backup

If all went well with dd, you now have an exact, bitwise copy of the entire failing hard drive—at least as well as the failing drive coughed it up. Keep in mind that a failing hard drive usually has at least a few bad sectors that may not copy properly. That’s OK, since the most critical data probably doesn’t fall on those bad sectors.

After making the copy, I recommend placing the failing hard drive in an anti-static bag and stored carefully in case it’s ever needed again. Then, obtain a suitable replacement. I find that clones work best when cloning to a disk of identical size to the source. In my case, that meant purchasing a new 160GB HDD. It is possible to clone to a larger drive, but that involves a few more steps to get it working with the extra space. You may not clone to a smaller drive without serious headaches! Trust me, don’t try it.

Once you have the new hard drive mounted, restore the image:

where sdX is the disk reported by fdisk -l.

You can check dd’s progress in the same manner as described above. Also, depending on your hardware environment, you may have better luck gunzipping the disk image first, then restoring the image.

Repair the file system

An NTFS file system on an image restored from a failing hard drive probably has been flagged “dirty” and thus probably won’t mount properly in Linux. For the next step, I strongly recommend running a full checkdisk scan on all NTFS partitions before doing anything else. Checkdisk (chkdsk.exe) is the only reliable tool for repairing NTFS file systems. There is no Linux / open-source tool that can do what chkdsk can.

The best way to chkdsk a partition is to attach that partition to a working machine running the same operating system as the rescued disk and run it from the host machine. In most cases, one can also run chkdsk from the Windows installation media. However, Windows Vista installation will not give anyone a command prompt to do so unless it recognizes the presence of Windows Vista. In my case, it didn’t, so I was out of luck. Or so it seemed.

VistaPE saves the day

In my case, I had successfully cloned the failing disk to a suitable replacement, but I still couldn’t get it to boot or recognize properly in the Vista setup disc. I knew the only possible solution could come from running chkdsk on the file system. Without any native Vista machines lying around, I had no way to do that.

I got anxious and decided to try booting my XP setup disc and ran chkdsk from that. Bad, bad, bad idea! XP chkdsk is NOT the same as Vista chkdsk. It trashed the file system and I had to re-clone the original disk all over again. Never use XP chkdsk for Vista!

Enter VistaPE, or Vista Pre-installed Environment. It’s like WinPE or BartPE for Windows XP, but just for Windows Vista. For those that don’t know, it’s a bootable Windows disc that allows running lots of nifty tools live on any computer—including chkdsk. Bingo.

VistaPE requires the original Vista install disc to create a live disc. I followed the instructions on their website and found it a bit difficult at first. Definitely be sure to put your project files and Vista source files at your root directory (usually C:\) and be sure there are no spaces in any of the file paths. That made VistaPE very angry!

Once I got my PE disc burned, I booted the laptop, ran

and about 3 hours later, rebooted into a beautifully and fully functional rescued Windows Vista! Three cheers for God, Linux and the hackers that made VistaPE. You all saved the day.

The logo visually represents a brand, but it is not the brand. Just as a person’s name is a representation of themselves, but it is not that person. My wife would still be my wife if I called her Heather or Phillis; her name is just an identifier. This is a fairly accurate representation of a brand’s relationship to its logo. The logo is an extension of the brand’s values, people, ideals, goals, and facilities. When done correctly, a logo accurately represents those elements—but it ultimately serves as an identifier to the world.

From a graphic designer’s perspective, the goal is to understand the unique elements that make up a brand, and then create a visual form that will encapsulate those elements into an image. Here are a few tips to better understand your brand and how that can translate into visual media.

1. What makes your company unique? Answering this question accurately is most important. Every company is unique and that uniqueness makes people come to you over someone else.
2. What are your goals? Where do you want to be in five years? Where do you want to be in ten years? Where you’re going is a target for how you want your company to evolve.
3. How do you see yourself? What are some attributes of your company? Are you caring, friendly, modern, old fashioned, techy, or industrial?
How do people see you? This question is hardest to answer, but taking polls of people who use your services is a good method of answering this. Take a hard look at your business and try to understand what makes people walk through your door.

Once you have answered those questions its time to start a reduction process. Filter out the bad or irrelevant information to distill it down to a few key words or short sentence that describe you. The goal is to take your company, in all its complexity, and distill it down to a simple statement or idea that resonates with you and that you feel rings true. That is your brand.

• http://www.reddoorla.com/ – Reddoor Creative
• http://www.kahrenkim.com/ – Kahren Kim
• http://www.artua.com/ – Artua
• http://ff0000.com/ – Red Interactive
• http://www.jiarenhui.com/ – Jiaren Hui

1. Inspiration for what a good business card can achieve.
2. Warning of what not to do.

It is truly amazing the difference between holding a quality business card in your hand, and one that clearly got less than two minutes of thought. From the design to the quality of paper used, it speaks volumes in seconds to the person who receives it. Even years later finding a good business card in my box—even one that I’ve seen a dozen times—gives me serious pause. It almost demands that I give it attention directly proportional to its quality. Not everyone can afford to have a graphic designer design their stationery system, so here are a couple quick tips for designing a business card.

• Use good paper. The cost difference between quality paper and cheap is almost negligible.


• Use time-tested fonts:
  
  Sans-serif
  
  • Helvetica
  • Futura
  • Univers
  • Gill Sans
  
  Serif
  
  • Palatino
  • Goudy
  • Bodoni
  • Trajan


• Use strong colors that will show up clearly on a white card.


• Keep it simple. Make the information on your card clear, well-organized and easy to understand.

• Never use thin paper. 30lb card stock (80lb bond) is the thinnest you should ever use. Your card will not hold up to travel at all if it is thinner than that.


• Never ever use Comic Sans, Copperplate, Times New Roman, Papyrus or Courier. These fonts will say nothing about you other than, “we are generic and uncreative.”


• Avoid yellows, heavy gradients or fluorescent colors that will be hard to read on a white background.


• Avoid photographs, cheap clip art or cliché icons. These will make your card look worse, not better. No one cares how cute you think teddy bear clip art is; they want your information.

Perhaps the only thing worse than not having a website at all, is having one that puts your business in a bad light. Old, outdated, or difficult to navigate sites can make your business seem less dependable than someone else, even if your products or services are actually better. A good website with good design can improve the perception of your company. It can educate potential customers about the products and services you offer and what you offer that is unique and better than your competitors.