As most SLR camera owners will tell you that it's probably best for you to keep your camera in a nice dry container. It could be just an airtight storage box with silica gel in it, or it could be an actual electrical climate controlled dry box. I can't bring myself to buying a dry box, so silica gel it is for me then. So previously I stuck either a pouch of silica gel or one of those thirsty hippo things into the box, and it worked out well except I had to change them after a few weeks.

Today I bought this.

They call it a rechargable dehumidifier. It works just like silica gel, but once it's done it's job instead of throwing it away, you plug it into a wall socket to recharge it and you can use it again. This thing isn't really anything special, it's basically contains silica gel inside, as well as a heating element. Whenever silica gel is full you can in theory just bake it in the sun, microwave it, etc. etc. and it'll be ready to suck moisture again. So with the builtin heating element you can basically do it in an easy manner.

This is NOT the first time I got something like this, a while back I already bought one of these so called rechargable dehumidifiers. It stopped working after 2 months, what's different now? That one looked the part of a chapalang branded product with dubious quality issues. This one looks... errrr... like it'll actually work for a while longer. I highly doubt it'll hit the 5 years it says on the sticker but consider this post a timestamp on how long/well it worked.

I was trying to take a photo of a crystal statue to see what results I'd get. A side flash made the details stand out, and well it looked like a cube of glass.

Then I positioned my flash so it shot from the top, and the cube started casting some flares.

Closing the aperture darkened the pic to give it a more errr.. gem like look? And reduced the main glare point. (err... what's the term for it? hotspot? reflection?)

But then again we can cut glare just by taking the shot from another angle.

I'm sure the semi pro wants to say something about the flares, I just found it interesting how the light X'out when it hit the top.

And here's a shot where I try to be make the shot look nicer with some bokeh at the side. And I took it at an angle too!

Then when viewing the pic on the screen I find out I made the same mistake again whenever I take stuff with my macro lens. I forgot to wipe down the thing to remove all the dust trails from it! :P

I was in the middle of writing a sample page to create a compeling Silverlight install experience (ie. anything better than the plain Install Silverlight Now button that appears in Silverlight Streaming hosted apps) so I can show how well the user can be guided to install Silverlight for a project we're working on.

As I hunkered down and got ready to hit the code, I find a link to... a white paper and sample code on how to make great Silverlight install experiences.

Well.. that sure saved me a lot of trouble! :P

Well.. here it is after only 4 days, I've got WZ's during the Windows Mobile Experience Roadshow.

So... that portable Mega Drive thing that I got the other day and I commented the build quality sucked?

Mommy dropped it on the table a few days back, and the speakers stopped working, and neither did the TV out work.

I took the thing apart but didn't see any problems. Luckily WZ was still attracted to it though he kept wanting the TV Out which I couldn't give him.

Then this morning WZ dropped the thing onto the floor while playing. And the sound came back... I haven't tried the TV Out yet but I think it should work too.

Damn.... this thing sucks doesn't it?