Time for Textbooks

We’ve got a lot of family members getting ready to head back to school.

I remember the long checkout lines at the college books stores. Waiting in line so I could fork over $300-400 for text books wasn’t all that much fun.

Towards the end of my college run, it was becoming increasingly easier to purchase books online.

I would get text books from different sites on the Internet, but the clear leader that emerged was Amazon.com.

We now have a yearly membership with Amazon to receive free, 2-day shipping on items we buy from them.

I recently noticed that Amazon is offer a deal for students to receive free, 2-day shipping. That’s pretty good! I remember having to wait a couple of weeks in some cases to receive my books from sellers.

Now you can them like lightening!

Nikon D60 Fix in a Flash

We had the unfortunate occurrence of having the flash on our Nikon D60 camera break and the cost to fix it was about the price of getting a new flash that could attach to the top of the camera.

The external flash would be cool, but as the only flash, it would be a little cumbersome to hook on the external flash every time we needed to take a quick picture with the flash.

We came across a video from Northern Lights that shows what the problem was and how to fix it.  The fix took just a few minutes once we had the right precision screwdriver, and viola! we saved ourselves hundreds of dollars in repair costs and time without a camera.

The Internet is awesome!  Just a little bit of searching, and we had our answer.

Now that it’s fixed, ironically…we want an external flash

Since we fixed our camera, we’ve had the bug to get a flash for our camera. The advantage of an attachable or external flash is that you don’t get the harsh shadows on people’s faces or behind them on the wall when taking pictures inside.

The attachable flash points away from your subjects and bounces the flash off the ceiling (if inside).

There are lots of different price ranges for flashes out there. We’re partial to the less expensive SB-400 model made by Nikon so you know it will work with all digital Nikon SLRs cameras.

Here’s a video showing how the SB-400 can tilt because from the pictures, it looks like it can’t. But in realitiy, it is more compact making the camera lighter to hold compared to the big flashes, and it works just fine angeling the flash.

This is the flash we want to get someday (Birthday or Christmas, come soon!) for the following reasons:

• Smaller and more light than other flashes making the camera easier to hold
• Smaller also means I’ll be more likely to take it around with me in the camera bag and use it more often
• It’s not complicated so it’s very easy to use (other flashes are over-complicated)
• It’s made by Nikon for Nikon cameras so I know it’ll work

The flash can be found on Amazon, and it has over 257 reviews (most of them the highest rating of 5 stars).

You can read the reviews and see some example pictures here:

Nikon SB-400 AF Speedlight Flash for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras on Amazon.

Remember this commercial?

Happy 20th Birthday Mario 3!  I remember when this commercial came out and thought it was the coolest commercial ever:

That was 20 years ago. What’s funny is that I had a credit for the Wii and downloaded Mario 3 just for fun. It’s still a fun game.

Google Goggles

Google Android just keeps getting better.

Android is the operating system that powers dozens of smart phones, and this is just the beginning.

If only the Joker knew about this