So I\’ve been using a Canon PowerShot S10 for the past 3 years for my digital pictures. It\’s a decent camera, but it\’s too slow; shutter lag is too long and the menus are sluggish. Plus I was ready for more manual features. For my next camera I did some research and narrowed it down to the Nikon Coolpix 4500 and the Canon PowerShot G3.

Both are 4 megapixel, 4x zoom with a ton of manual features, like aperture priority and shutter speed priority. The Nikon has that cool twist-body design, plus the lens doesn\’t need to extend. The Canon has a flip out and twist LCD, but the lens extends so the startup time is a little slower.

Ultimately I decided to get the G3. It has a way longer battery life, shorter shutter lag, and the lens is a little faster (F2.0 vs. F2.6). With a lens adapter it can use regular-sized camera filters which I can also share with my film camera. And for some reason the Nikon was hard to find, as not many stores had it.

I ordered the G3 and got it last week. So far it rocks. Pictures are really sharp and vibrant. While using it in manual mode, though, it\’s easy to mess up the pictures, so I got a lot of crappy shots. But I also got some incredible pics. I\’m gonna have fun playing with it.

Oh man, this 20 Questions game is insane. It\’s correctly guessed everything I threw at it, even the obscure things like pencil lead, a tree stump, and a metronome.
[ From Kottke.org ]

Words That Sound Dirty, But Aren\’t. The Bolshoi\’s doing the nutcracker in my pants!

This sounds almost too good to be true: a father and son team built an electric car that gets 80 miles per charge. But it performs like a sports car, 0-60 in 4 seconds, top speed of 130 mph. At 3,050 lbs it\’s heavy for its size, so I don\’t know how they pull off those numbers.

Looking at the specifications on their website, I think I know how they did it. It\’s powered by 2 motors, one for each wheel with a combined 1,000 lb-ft of torque. Jesus christ! That\’s as much as some big rig trucks have. Imagine if they put those in a traditional gas-powered car.
[ From Rebecca\’s Pocket ]

Correction to the correction: Kill Bill will be 2 movies, released close together. That other Ain\’t It Cool link was outdated news from February.
[ Thanks to Peter for the update ]

The Mini has a great ad campaign where the cars are done up like famous tv cars (like the General Lee and Knight Rider). This site has some cool unofficial ads, including the A-Team van and the Batmobile.

DP Review previews the Nikon D2H, a new 4 megapixel digital SLR. It\’s notable because there\’s a 802.11b add-on which can wirelessly send pictures to an FTP site. It can shoot 8 frames a second and it has a huge 2.5\” LCD.

So in Star Wars the ships are named after the letters they resemble (so an X-Wing looks like an X, a Y-Wing looks like a Y, and so on). This dude made ships out of Legos for all the other letters of the alphabet. They\’re very impressive, with lots of little details like exposed machinery and circuitry, and detailed cockpits. Some of them, like the F and N-wings, are really creative.

He\’s also auctioning off M-Wing kits with instructions and everything.
[ From Slashdot ]

Ok, Kill Bill won\’t be in 2 parts now. Well, whatever, I hope something comes out in October.

Quentin Tarantino\’s next movie Kill Bill is now going to be released in 2 parts, with the first part coming October 10th. The article doesn\’t really say why though. Maybe they thought 3 hours of this kind of stuff was too much:

\”Kill Bill,\” not unlike other films that Mr. Tarantino has made, is intensely violent. That will limit the people who can see it, particularly the younger action-film audience that studios covet. In one spectacular fight in the \”House of Blue Leaves\” nightclub, nearly 100 people are killed, according to one person who worked on the set in China. Much has been made of the notion that Mr. Tarantino wanted the blood to be a particularly vibrant red.

Sounds really bad ass, I can\’t wait.