Toys, SD Cards and iPads
I am a geek. I’m not sure when it happened; maybe I always was. Maybe I was waiting (unbeknownst) for the digital revolution. No, that isn’t it. I have analog roots. In the 80s, friends and family would ask me to “fix” their VCR that kept flashing 12:00. The more adventurous would have me set it up to record something that they wouldn’t be home to watch (probably an episode of Cheers). Among geeks, I rank fairly low. I don’t own a soldering set, never built my own Tesla coil and can’t fix my son’s RC car. I can, however, crimp a network cable, work with most computer hardware and software with confidence, create a passable website, program my DVR and set-up my mother-in-law’s photo frame. What I really like are toys; the kind of toys that are displayed at the International Consumer Electronics Show each winter in Vegas.
Imagine my thrill when I discovered that I could get two of my newest toys to work together! Last November, I got an iPad. I love my iPad, but its main problem is getting stuff on it. It’s easy enough to download a book or an app, but your own pictures are added by synching it from a computer; a small, but extra, step in displaying your photos. For Christmas, I got an Eye-Fi camera card. Using your home wifi, it can be set to upload your pictures to Facebook or some other social networking site without a computer. Fast forward to April – iPad 2 is released with a camera. But it’s only a cell phone quality camera and that’s not nearly good enough for me. However, Eye-Fi releases a firmware update that turns all of its cards into mini-wifi networks. In other words, my iPad and my Eye-Fi card can talk to each other anywhere, not just at home. The setup is a little tricky (detailed instructions are on their website), but once it’s setup, it works well. You take a photo and then it appears on your iPad. It is by far the coolest thing that I have seen in awhile.
