The best thing I’ve come across lately is called CHDK.

CHDK is a firmware enhancement that operates on a number of Canon Cameras. CHDK gets loaded into your camera’s memory upon bootup (either manually or automatically). It provides additional functionality beyond that currently provided by the native camera firmware.

It’s pretty sweet. I haven’t really explored the finer details, but the feature that I’m excited about is the ability to run scripts.

Scripts like time lapse photography.

Ever since we lost our Nikon camera in Mexico we haven’t had anything (save the computer + webcam) that could do time-lapse photography. Which obviously isn’t very practical if I’m outside of the house. My trusty(-ish¹) Canon A540 doesn’t have a time lapse mode. But now it does, and I can make time lapse videos again, and I didn’t have to go spend $300 on a new camera.

So to celebrate I made this video when we went to dinner tonight:

(3.6MB / 00:27)

¹It’s been draining batteries like crazy lately. I first thought it was that my rechargeables are starting to reach the end of their life, but normal disposable AAs drain just as quick. I don’t know…

Less than two days after I posted about the SDK and waiting for June for iPhone apps and blah blah blah … I jailbroke my iPhone again. This time I used a program called ZiPhone. Man, was it easy. Plug it in, run the program, and bam! 45 seconds later I was installing apps. A far cry from the command line crap I had to deal with the first time.

The best app I’ve found? MobileScrobbler. Gone are the days where I have to update my last.fm charts with the iPhone work around (sync, mount the “fake iPod” disk image, update, unmount). Plus, there was a chance you could wipe out all the hard work you’ve done by accidentally scrobbling something from iTunes before you updated from the iPhone. Nope, the tunes are now scrobbled as I’m listening to them (so the chart on the sidebar over on the right are up-to-date).

A few other cool programs I installed:

• Taskbar Notifier — get notified of new email, SMS, calls, etc. on the taskbar. No more needing to go to the home screen to see if you have new messages
• colloQ — IRC client
• MobileFinder — a file browser

I’m not installing a lot — it’s easy to install a bunch of programs and bog everything down. There are a lot that I’d like to try out though…

I used to jailbreak my phone, but right around firmware 1.1.3 I went back to the stock iPhone. Why? Well, I really didn’t use many of the apps and my phone got cluttered and started to run slow, mostly.

Now that the Apple iPhone SDK is out, “real” (and legit) applications for the iPhone are on the horizon. Yeah, we have to wait until June, but that gives people plenty of time to make some awesome apps.

Here’s my wishlist of apps that I might actually pay for:

• Instant Messenger — iChat is a given, but I’d like an all-in-one app like Adium.
• Password Manager — preferably one that would sync with a Mac desktop application; most preferably one that syncs with SplashID (since I already paid for that).
• RSS Aggregator — preferably one that can download & store feeds for offline reading.
• Podcast Aggregator — maybe tie it into the RSS reader?
• Image Editor — doesn’t have to be as robust as Photoshop, but I’d like to be able to crop, adjust levels/hue/saturation/exposure/etc and save the image. The iPhone camera is pretty good, but there is an occasional photo I take that I’d like to edit on-the-fly before I add it to my moblog.
• a Woman’s Calendar — keep track of my cycle, when I should expect it, and keep track of other “womanly” things like migraines and cramps. Yes, I admit it. I’d love an app like this. The best one I’ve ever found is for the Palm OS, and I’d like an iPhone version with the same features.

That’s all I could think of right now. Some games would be nice…