Cannoning a Hero Fly on the Wheel

Cannoning the Hero Fly on the Wheel.

After having lost video footage three times on different occasions, in each one of my three GoPro HD Hero 3 Black Edition cams, and each time on a different memory card, I finally contacted what, erm, GoPro boasts as its, cough, «customer service». This «service» is absolutely sure that either (1) I am at fault or (2) my memory cards. With clear signs of having lost any sense of reason at GoPro I took finally their trademark advice seriously and have «go(ne) pro». So I got myself a shiny new FullHD video cannon, so to speak...

Contour ShuttlePRO Linux Woes

Contour's ShuttlePRO v2 multimedia controller surely is a fine piece of hardware which I like very much. However, the device developers at Contour messed up with the USB HID profile for sure. Unfortunately, in Linux this causes shuttle and jog events to get lost from time to time ... so I started to investigate...

Fallen Heroes: SD Card Err

When you are seeing this with
a memory card inserted...

Unfortunately, and based on my own in-field experience, I'm slowly coming to conclusions that GoPro's firmware in the HD Hero 3 is clearly unreliable. And this even as I carefully handle the cam, never running the battery flat, shutting down the cam correctly before swapping memory cards, and so on. In return, GoPro's famous firmware just has bricked the file system on a memory card for the third time. Unfortunately, you can't repair such a disk in cam or with the basic tools that come with all the operating systems – but fortunately, I found a way to salvage my video footage despite this mayhem, so please read on...

Backscatter 3.1: Big Pink Hero Eyes

As a self-confessed herograph («aberrations? This is art!») I nevertheless would like to try something new, not just plain fish eye shots. I would like to get closer to some of my photo motives, but the built-in fish eye limits the minimum distance. In several situations I could get closer, yet the GoPro HD Hero 3 lense was the limitating factor. Thus, I would like to experiment with a macro lens. In addition, I want to test green filters: do they give any benefits in the freshwater lakes I'm often diving in?

Three Heroes ... and mad as a Hatter

I've just returned from a weekend of ice diving ... well, it actually was more the next-to-the-ice diving, to be precise. I had the chance to test my new Backscatter Flip 3.1 equipment consisting of a +10 macro lens and a green water filter. The winterly Lake Plansee was an unforgiving test environment: really green waters and not much light...