While browsing the Internet looking for an upgrade to the Gallery software I use to put my pictures on the ‘net I came across something called "Eye-Fi".  Apparently, you can now buy an SD card that can connect via WiFi and upload its pictures to various online services, including a number of photo gallery packages, and social networking sites like Facebook.  When you’re out shooting pictures, it behaves like a normal 2 Gb SD card.  When you return home to your WiFi network, it automatically connects to the network and starts transferring the pictures when you turn on the camera.  Assuming your camera uses SD cards, you don’t need to do anything other than pop it into your camera and start shooting.

In theory, you can probably use it with any open access point, too, but many WiFi hotspots require you to login with a browser before you can use the access point.  According to the Eye-Fi website, you can’t use it with those types of access points at this time.  It supports the various levels of security that exist for WiFi such as WEP, WPA and so on.

The Eye-Fi seems to cost about $100 from various online retailers, which is about four times what a 2 Gb SD card cost me about a week ago.  Seems quite reasonable to me.  I might have bought one when I bought my new Canon PowerShot SD850 IS last week if I’d seen it on the shelf.

This is a very cool sounding piece of kit.  Check out www.eye.fi to see for yourself.

Recently, I started using Microsoft’s Windows Live Writer (WLW) to compose blog entries offline. It has made blogging much easier.

Earlier this morning, I encountered the following error message when I attempted to post a new blog entry from my notebook:

The last thing I’d done, aside from writing the entry, was adding a couple of new plugins to WLW. Standard troubleshooting techniques would suggest this as the first place to look, but when I uninstalled them I still encountered the same error.

Next step was to try to re-create the problem, so I switched to my desktop, which didn’t have the plugins, and attempted to use WLW to edit an entry. Same error.

Logging into the server my blog is hosted on didn’t immediately reveal any problems, so I dug deeper.

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