(Huge apologies to David Duchemin for the title of this post. You should go see him if you want to learn about Vision instead of gadgets…)

I had planned to publish my own photography and gadget gift buying guide (some might simply call it my wish list!) this year, but I’ve seen plenty of other great lists already. So I decided that what we really need is one simple place to go to get a list of lots of other great lists. Maybe next week I’ll even write up a list of lists of great lists. But for now, one big list will have to do!

So here, it is: a Gift Buying Guide Roundup for photographers and technophiles:

(This list is still getting updated Regularly, jump down to the end for the latest goodies!)

• I have to start with a plug for my own photography. Check out my online portfolio from some beautiful landscape and nature imagery from the Canadian Rocky Mountains and Prairies. Prints, products, and more!
• Right after my portfolio, Scott Kelby’s Annual Gonzo Holiday Gear Guide is always the first place to stop. For 2009 he broke this down into Part 1 and Part 2
• Terry White’s Annual Holiday Gift Guide is also a must read every year.
• See Photography Bay for their Best Digital Cameras & Holiday Shopping Guide
• Digital Photo Buzz brings us a really great list of essential photography gear and books in their First Annual Holiday Gift Guide
• John Batdorff compiled a nice list of gadgets and books for “self-proclaimed photo-geeks”
• Scott Bourne brings us his Holiday Photography Book Buyer’s Guide
• Gizmodo has an interesting Gadget Gift Guide based on user submissions. Looks like it’s continually being updated, so you could even go there to add your own ideas!
• CrunchGear has a list of gadgets to buy for the “Technologically Impaired“
• While not strictly for the holidays, B&H has a really useful Point-and-Shoot Buyer’s Guide
• While I’m at it I might as well point you to my own list of recommended Photography Books for Beginners and another one list of books about Nature and Wildlife Photography
• Outdoor Photographer has a Holiday Buyer’s Guide
• Heninger Fotographik added a great gift guide today for anyone from the art lover to the Photographer to the backpacker.
• Scott Bourne pulled together “The Photographer’s Dream Holiday Gift Guide” full of very high end gift ideas.
• Jeff Revell put together a nice list of things that he wants. I think most other photographers would also love these things!
• Syl Arena just put out a great list of “Cameras For Kids, Tweens, Teens, & Young Adults“. This is not specifically a gift guide, but cameras make great holiday presents!
• Photography Bay has added a new list called “9 Photography Gifts on the Cheap“. This just might be the best list for this holiday season if you’re looking for something to buy your photography friends!
• Just off the press: the Photo.net Holiday Gift Guide. The photo.net members and editors compiled the best things from their wishlists for the 2009 Holidays.
• For those of you that don’t like to spend a lot of money on your photography and lighting trinkets, check out the “DIY Photography Holiday Gift Guide“
• The Master of Vision himself suggests that since most of us really don’t need any of that shiny crap anyway, we should all buy Goats instead. He’s probably right.

I’ll continue to update this list as I see more seasonal buying guides for Christmas and the Holidays. Keep checking back for more ideas about what to buy for yourself and your friends over the next couple of months, and feel free to send me links to your favorite buying guide as well.

Don’t forget that at this time of year it’s perfectly normal to lust after new gadgets, books, and other gear, and it’s OK!! You can confess all your sins, beg forgiveness, and do your daily penance after the holidays are over. A dozen refrains of the Photographian Chant (“Gear is Good, Vision is Better“) for two weeks should suffice.

Dropbox announced today that they now have a free dedicated iPhone App to allow you to access your files at Dropbox directly instead of requiring you to go through the web interface. I’ve only recently started to use Dropbox, but this is definitely one feature that will make the service a whole lot more useful for me.

Instant access to my important files from anywhere is very cool. Of course there are already several other ways to use the iPod Touch or iPhone as a filing cabinet for key documents, but none of them are very convenient to access or to update. Because of that I simply haven’t used it for that purpose. But now I will!

If you’re not familiar with Dropbox, here’s a brief introduction:

Dropbox is software that syncs your files online and across your computers.
Put your files into your Dropbox on one computer, and they’ll be instantly available on any of your other computers that you’ve installed Dropbox on (Windows, Mac, and Linux too!) Because a copy of your files are stored on Dropbox’s secure servers, you can also access them from any computer or mobile device using the Dropbox website.

With Dropbox, your files are always in sync.
Let’s say you’re editing a document at home. As soon as you click ‘Save’, Dropbox will sync this same file to all your other computers (and now your iPhone!) instantly and automatically. It’s as if you saved the document to all of your computers. This gives you the freedom to work on any of your computers and always have the files you need.

Dropbox lets you share files easily.
You can easily share entire folders or photo albums with Dropbox. Simply put the folders you want to share in your Dropbox, and invite people to them. You can also send people links to specific files within your Dropbox. This makes Dropbox perfect for team projects.

With Dropbox, online backup is automatic.
Every time you put a file in your Dropbox folder it is automatically backed up to our secure servers. If your computer has a melt-down your files are safe on Dropbox and can be restored at any time. Our free 2GB account is perfect for backing up your documents. We offer larger accounts (up to 100GB) for backing up your music and video collections.

Dropbox lets you go back in time to undelete or undo changes to files.
Every time you save a file in Dropbox, Dropbox syncs it to our secure servers. Dropbox keeps a history of every change made so that you can undo any mistakes and even undelete files. By default, we keep the last 30 days of undo history for all your files. We also have an unlimited undo option called “Pack-rat”.

Every Dropbox user automatically gets 2 GB of storage for free. You can pay for extra storage, but you can also earn credits to increase your free allotment by referring other new users (up to a max of 3 GB). In fact if you use the following link, you can help me increase my free space… Thanks!

https://www.dropbox.com/referrals/NTI4MjQ1MzI5

Reactions from the mainstream media went from surprise, to shock, to outrage when Amazon recently opened up the Kindle for shipping to a large list of countries, that did not include Canada. The Kindle is a “Wireless Reading Device” (commonly known as an eBook reader) that includes free global wireless coverage and doesn’t require a computer to access new content from the Kindle Store.

I personally don’t really understand what the hype is about this class of device. I much prefer reading my books in paper form, or to have all the other features of a mini computer that are built into my iPod Touch. But there are many people out there who rave about these things, and they love the convenience of having nearly instant access to hundreds of thousands of books, newspapers, magazines, and blogs on a device with a screen that “Reads like real paper without glare, even in bright sunlight”. I’d love to give one a try, if only to see what the hype is all about.

For any of my fellow Canadians that have been waiting to get their hands on one, your time is now. For only $259 US you can order one now and have it with plenty of time to spare before Christmas!

The Kindle Store: More Than 360,000 Books
At Amazon, we’ve always been obsessed with having every book ever printed, and we know that even the best book reader is useless without the books you want to read. We are fortunate that we have tens of millions of book customers at Amazon, and as a result, we know the books customers want to read and we prioritize getting those titles. Today, the Kindle Store has more than 360,000 books available, including 101 of 112 New York Times® Best Sellers, plus top newspapers, magazines, and blogs. Our vision for Kindle is to have every book ever printed, in any language, all available in under 60 seconds.

I recently gave the i-GotU GPS Dataloggers what I would call a pretty scathing review.

I’ll let you read the entire review yourself for all the pros (there are a couple) and cons (there are lots) about the device, but the short story is that while the device works reasonably well, in my opinion the software that it ships with and the device itself are flaky and need massive useability improvements. Note that my review specifically covered the GT-200 unit, but the GT-120 has essentially the same feature set and therefore the same pros and cons.

I would not recommend this device for any serious photographer looking to geotag images with the GPS coordinates at which the image was created. There may be people for whom this gadget would be great (for an interesting (and far less negative) review please see the recent article over at imaging-resource.com), but I am simply not one of them.

Now to the update… I recently took this device with my on a week long trip from Calgary, Alberta, through Glacier National Park in Montana, down to Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, back up to Writing-on-Stone Provincial Park in southern Alberta, and then back home to Calgary. For almost the entire week the device tracked my route and location perfectly. I charged it every couple of days and I have great data from Glacier and Writing-on-Stone, and for most of the 4 days in Yellowstone. But. Not. All. Of. Yellowstone.

Mysteriously, the unit simply stopped recording for an entire day in the middle of the trip. It didn’t shut off. The battery wan’t dead. It continued to blink at regular intervals to show that it was alive and well. It even blinked appropriately when I hit its button (yes, it has only one) to mark specific waypoints. But it didn’t record any of it.

I made over a thousand images that day as we travelled extensively through the park, including several hours of walking at Upper Geyser Basin (home of Old Faithful). I’m not amused.

I was already considering getting rid of my GT-200, but this trip was the final straw that clinched it. Anybody want to buy it?? Who can suggest a better one for me??

I like to watch TV.  My computer is setup in front of my big screen so that when I’m editing photos or otherwise geeking out (which happens a lot) I can have the TV on in front of me.  I watch a lot of live sports, especially NFL in the fall, the Tour de France in July, and the Olympics ever second year.  And of course I watch NHL hockey.  I’m Canadian…

But other than watching live sports, I live a very busy life and I normally can’t find the time to sit down to watch TV at the same time my favorite shows are on (prime time is an imaginary thing in my world).  And I don’t like to watch most of the garbage that’s on outside of prime time which is generally when I do finally get to sit down to watch TV.  So that’s why I like to watch pre-recorded shows such as those available for download from many, many resources on the internet.  (I’ll leave it to you to Google “download TV” to find some of those sources.)

One major problem with downloadable media (including movies, music, TV shows, and even other web distributed content such as video feeds from YouTube, Vimeo, and Viddler) is that it comes in a wide variety of formats, qualities, and aspect ratios. And most people have no way of getting that content to their television without going through major hurdles.

There are many ways to get that content onto the TV, but until recently none of them were very easy.  Over the years I’ve gradaully migrated from being forced to watch the content on my computer, to being able to burn VCD’s (video CD’s) or eventually DVD’s to watch on my DVD player attached to the TV.   Burning discs has never been fast, and for most people it involves converting the downloadable AVI files (also known as DivX or Xvid files) into a DVD format that the DVD player and the TV could recognize.  This can take hours even for a typical episode of a TV show.  This got better when DVD players started to be able to play DivX and Xvid files without conversion (even now those players are pretty rare), and better yet when you could plug in a USB thumb drive containing your content (extremely rare).  Unfortunately these players are only as good as the firmware they come with, and they typically don’t keep up with the newer media codecs.  That results in media files that can’t be played on the player or that pop and skip and lose synchronization between the audio and the video.  Not to mention that it can still take significant time to copy the files from the computer to the device.

What I’ve really wanted for a long time is to be able to directly connect my computer to my Home Theatre AV system using my local area network.  I really don’twant to have a separate computer in my living room (ie. a media center PC), and I don’t want to be limited to the codecs that Apple Supports on the AppleTV.

There didn’t seem to be an ideal solution until I recently heard about the Popcorn Hour products, which belong to a class of devices known as “Networked Media Tanks” (NMT). These are uber gadgets for the uber geek, and they do exactly what I want:  they play almost any visual media format I want to display on my TV; they connect to my network, wired or wirelessly; they are very small and very quiet; they work.  As a bonus they are basically small computers (running an OS variant of Linux), so they are infinitely customizeable and they can be seen and controlled by the other computers on your network, and even from over the internet.  They are UPnP and DLNA compatible (if you don’t know what that means, don’t worry about it; it’s a good thing) and they can stream media to AND from your other network devices.  In short, they are awesome!

I recently picked up a Popcorn Hour PCH-A-110.  It came in a nice box with everything I needed to hook it up to my TV, including an HDMI cable (it works fine with standard def TV’s too).  I added an old laptop hard drive that I had lying around (it will accept most 2.5″ or 3.5″ SATA HDD’s, but you don’t even need to install one if you don’t need it), and I plugged it in to my network with an ethernet cable.  I’m still working on getting it connected wirelessly, but that’s not a big deal for me right away.  In a very short time I had it up and running on my network and I was able to watch TV shows and movies directly from the other computers on the network.  I was even able to watch some episodes of MASH that I have in Matroska (.mkv) format that up until now I’ve only been able to watch on my computer using the VideoLan VLC media player.

The audio and video quality is amazing and I’m extremely happy.  My favorite part is that I was able to copy all my TV shows and movies over to the internal HDD for instant access, I’ve got utorrent setup to automatically download new episodes of my favorite TV shows onto it, and I’ve programmed my Logitech Harmony Remote to control it.  It fits seamlessly into my existing Home Theatre setup and my life just got a little bit easier.  I’m a very happy Popcorn Hour owner.