Another year is coming to a close.  It's been an up and down year for myself and my family.  The best part of 2009 was the birth of our fourth child, Everett.  He's the best, youngest child anyone could ask for.  He is usually happy and ready to give you a great big smile.  My kids are definitely the best part of my life.  Now I'm ready for a new year and the challenges that await.  I thought I'd post my list of technologies that I will focus on in 2010.  There are so many interesting technologies and ideas out there to learn about and work on but there is only so much time in the day.  So I need to focus on the ones that interest me the most (right now).  I like the phrase "It's like drinking from a fire hose..." when it comes to learning about all the technologies that are out there.  So here's what I'm planning to work on in 2010.

Technologies I want to improve my skills in, develop with and write articles on during 2010

• Business Intelligence with Microsoft SQL Server 2008
• Multi-touch interfaces
• WPF
• XNA
• Windows CE
• .NET Micro Framework
• Robotics

I should probably try to narrow the list down even further but I really want to do at least one article and/or project in each of these technologies. Happy New Year to everyone and I hope all your New Year goals are achieved.

A question came up regarding the AVS Media Video Convertor application.  Someone asked if the video convert app will down convert HD videos.  The answer is yes and it does that quite easily.    First start up the app as shown in the first pic.  Choose which video format you wish to convert to, then click on Edit Profile button.

The edit profile dialog will pop up and you can choose to change the width and height of the output video.  You can also change the audio rate as well.  The app is very useful in converting video into whatever format and size you need.

Normally I don't like to brag about how small something of mine is but in this case:  My projector is smaller than your projector :)

I bought a Pico Projector Development Kit.  It is DLP technology made by Texas Instruments using LED lighting.  As you can see from the picture, it is barely the size of a business card.  It is about a centimeter thick and has a DVI-D input.  Unfortunately my laptop HDMI output does not properly detect the projector when I connect it.  I am working on that.  However there are smaller development boards that do work out of the box with the projector.  The dev kit is meant as a reference design for hardware engineers.  Anyone who wants to incorporate this into their product will need to go through all the trouble of designing proper housing that reduces the EMI generated by this device.  It is brand new and is bound to start showing up in lots of products.

Here's a link to someone who took it apart already....

I just recently purchased the Canon HG20 HD camcorder.  It has a 60 Gb hard drive and records high-def 1080p video.  It also has a 12x optical zoom.  I'm very pleased with my purchase.  It is an excellent unit. 

I bought it to start recording videos for the Robot Geek projects.  However, it does produce mts or MPEG Transport Stream files.  I attempted to run those files through Adobe Premiere & Media Encoder and MS Expression Media Encoder.  None of those apps would recognize that format.  Then I found AVS Media.  They have a product called AVS Video Converter.  It immediately recognized the format and allowed me to convert to whatever format I wanted.  Sweet!!  And then I realized that they have a video editing app.  I tried it out and it is a full featured editing app.  It has over 200 transitions, video effects and text overlay.  It's simple to set in and out points.  I was able to be productive immediately with this.  And the price was fantastic.  It is currently $59 for the video converstion and video editing apps, plus a host of other apps that are included.  I highly recommend checking it out.