A warning before we begin: The definition of “cheap” is relative – expect to end up near $1000 CDN after accessories and taxes are counted up. Then begins the hunt for bigger and better lenses. As always, caveat emptor.

The ‘prosumer’ digital SLR market is entering a more mature phase as of late. The first blockbuster SLR cameras aimed for beginners came out in August 2003 (the Canon EOS Digital Rebel) and January 2004 (Nikon D70). Since then, various worthy successors of the two heavyweights of the prosumer digital SLR market have been released, as well as a number of lesser-known but extremely viable competitor models (the Pentax *ist D springs to mind). As we all know, increased competition means bigger bargains for our hard-earned dollar.

What really tweaked the noses of bargain digital SLR shoppers this month was an offer by Canon Canada to take another $100 off the purchase price of the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT via mail-in rebate. Slightly complicating the reception of the rebate was the stipulation that the camera be purchased from an authorized Canon reseller. The following is what I consider to be the best cobbling together of low pricing and rebate eligibility.

1. Enter the eBay store for Canadian camera dealer Robinson’s Camera Centre.

2. Depending on your preference, bid on their offering of the Canon EOS Digital Rebel XT (350D) with or without the 18-55 EFS kit lens. With lens, expect a purchase price of $799.00 USD. Without lens, $680.00 USD. That translates into a Canadian purchase price of $910.86 CDN with the kit lens, or $775.20 CDN without. Add 7% for GST (no PST, as Robinson’s is located in Alberta) and a flat rate shipping fee of $30 for expedited delivery for the final purchase price of $1004.62 CDN, or $859.46 CDN.

Refrain from getting into a bidding war on the item. If you can’t win it at the initial offering prices listed above, wait for the next auction on the same item.

3. After winning and receiving the Digital Rebel XT, mail away for the $100 cash back rebate from Canon. This will drop your final purchase price to $904.62 CDN, or $759.46 CDN without the kit lens.

That’s everything – save for the memory card(s), carrying case and other lenses you will inevitably end up purchasing. The mail-in rebate’s final expiry date is the end of June 2006, so it might even be worth your while to stay on the lookout for even better deals on the Digital Rebel XT – but ensure that your place of purchase is an authorized Canon dealer to maintain eligibility on that rebate. Good luck!

Buy Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter (XBOX 360) and XBOX Live for ONLY $79.99 and SAVE $70! ($45 Instant Savings, $25 Mail-in Rebate)

Mail-in rebate will be in the XBOX Live Packaging.

The game everyone’s raving about on the Xbox 360 and 12 months of Live for $10 more than you’d pay for purchasing Ghost Recon by itself? You can’t lose!

In one of the most overlooked stores in 2003, the Copyright Board of Canada ruled that downloading copyrighted music from peer-to-peer networks was a legal practice for Canadians. The legal rationale? We pay for those downloads through a tariff when we buy MP3 players, or blank digital media like CD-Rs and DVD-/+R discs.

In its decision Friday, the Copyright Board said uploading or distributing copyrighted works online appeared to be prohibited under current Canadian law. However, the country’s copyright law does allow making a copy for personal use and does not address the source of that copy or whether the original has to be an authorized or noninfringing version, the board said.

Under those laws, certain media are designated as appropriate for making personal copies of music, and producers pay a per-unit fee into a pool designed to compensate musicians and songwriters. Most audio tapes and CDs, and now MP3 players, are included in that category. Other mediums, such as DVDs, are not deemed appropriate for personal copying.

Since that time, the government and various groups like the Canadian version of the RIAA have been grumbling and working on chucking out the tariff system in order to return to making MP3 downloading an illegal practice. Now it looks like those efforts have been stymied: A variety of sources are reporting that, last week, the Copyright Board of Canada released its proposed tariff for 2007 for the private copying levy.

According to p2pnet.net, this tariff we’re paying (rather generously I might add, considering blank media is hardly always used for audio recording purposes) doesn’t cover copying music to an iPod or other MP3 player. I’m not sure what they’re basing that on, but it makes little sense: How can you place the tariff on MP3 players and simultaneously tell us we can’t actually use those players for what we just paid extra to do?

The City of Toronto recently set up a website allowing the public to view complaints lodged about apartment maintainance over the last two years at City of Toronto: Apartment Standards website (the actual search engine for complaints history is here).

They’ve also got an official City form for maintainance requests available in 20+ languages if you feel it’s time to scare your landlords into action.

Running a search on my Sherbourne St. apartment turned up no complaints over the last two years. Too bad “overly slow elevators” isn’t considered a reasonable maintainance duty in need of correction.

With the 2006 International Consumer Electronics Show now underway in Las Vegas, details regarding the pricing of next-generation optical media are finally becoming available.

While players for the lesser-enthused HD-DVD format are ringing in at a moderately high amount of $500 USD this March, Pioneer’s unveiling of a Blu-ray player has turned heads with its impressive array of features – and also with its impressively high price of $1800 USD.

So where does that leave Sony’s PlayStation 3 console? We’re supposedly expecting it to launch in Spring 2006, meaning one hell of a margin for Sony to be eating to drop the console down to match the Xbox360 in price – or even cost just a couple hundred dollars more. Muddying the waters a little further is Microsoft’s announcement yesterday regarding their Xbox360 and its upcoming HD-DVD support. Does this even the console playing field?

My best guess about what to expect next is really what I’ve said all along: A Spring 2006 launch for the PlayStation 3 is next to impossible. We’ve not seen a single leak as to pictures of the PS3 or its peripherals and we’re now just – what, 3 months away from deadline? How about launch title previews? Anything? Unless Sony is pulling off one hell of a security job, I’m thinking 4th quarter 2006 at the soonest.

Now there’s an answer: The Viewing Distance Calculator takes in your viewing distance, screen shape and TV diagonal size/width and spits out a whole bunch of useful numbers.

This, of course, disregards two established rules of thumb:

1. Buy the largest TV you can comfortably afford.
2. Viewing distance = (Diagonal measurement of the TV) x 3

So, taking into account my apartment’s layout, we’re talking 148.8 inches from the sofa to the TV stand, or 12.4 feet. Plugging in those numbers with a prospective 42″ widescreen TV nets me a maximum recommended viewing distance of 15.8 feet. I am, however, outside the maximum viewing distance for an immersive THX experience (6.6 feet). A 46″ TV might do the trick…

For better or for worse, I tend buck the trends when it comes to consumer gadgets to try and be a little different from the rest of the crowd. When everybody was going with the Apple iPod, or Dell DJ or Creative Zens, I went with industry pioneer Rio and bought a Rio Carbon 5GB in Pearl. Since I try not to base my buying decisions solely on being different, I did come to love the enormous battery life (20 hours), driverless USB operation and tiny size.

That spate of happiness lasted until a four foot fall broke the jog dial on the side that controls volume. And then Rio’s owners decided to close down shop. Though after some careful surgery my Carbon remained functional, I was back in the market for an MP3 player.

So now I find myself a happy Apple iPod Nano owner. Can’t complain about the player – sound quality is terrific and the battery will last me long enough for my purposes. But what to do about that easily scratchable surface? My answer, after careful research at the iLounge Forums (previously known as the iPodLounge Forums) came in the form of the CoreCases Black Nano Case: “The ultimate screen protector for your iPod Nano. Two piece anodized aluminum case with built-in clear screen protector.” User reviews for the case are all around positive, and at $19.95 USD (+ $10 USD shipping to Canada via USPS) the price isn’t that bad either.

So if you’re looking for an iPod Nano case, give CoreCases products a glance. In fact, check out my own media folder Miscellaneous for proper pictures – the one the official site provides isn’t enough to base a decision upon.

TORONTO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Dec. 7, 2005–mail2web.com, a world-wide application provider for consumers and businesses and a brand of Softcom Technology Consulting Inc., announced today the official launch of its own MediaBlog service. This free service goes beyond traditional web logs or blogs by providing support for any file type a member may want to upload and share through a personal, customizable space on the mediablog portal (http://mediablog.mail2web.com/).

In addition, the mail2web.com MediaBlog supports making blog posts directly from popular mobile phone applications such as Nokia’s Lifeblog, included on most of Nokia’s latest handsets as well as support for Apple® iTunes Podcasting.

“We wanted to build upon the success of our email retrieval application and provide our loyal customers something they have been asking for,” said Tony Yustein, CEO of SoftCom Technology Consulting Inc. “While there are a lot of free blog services in the market, in my opinion most have deficiencies. In developing our own product we took the opportunity to address those shortcomings.”

One of the main shortcomings mail2web.com identified were file restrictions. While traditional blogs only support images, mail2web.com’s MediaBlog product allows members to upload any file type, from a Powerpoint® Presentation to a MPEG4 video file. There are no identified restrictions on file size or file type.

1. Given k sorted streams where each stream could possibly be infinite in length, describe an efficient algorithm to merge the k streams into a new stream (also in sorted order).

2. Given a set of KEY->VALUE pairs such that each KEY is unique, describe a method of storing these pairs on disk, and a method for accessing the corresponding VALUE given a KEY. Assume that RAM is fixed at 1gb and the set of pairs requires 40gb. (Hint: Try to minimize page-transfers.)

3. Given N computers networked together, with each computer storing N integers, describe a procedure for finding the median of all of the numbers. Assume that a computer can only hold O(N) integers (i.e. no computer can store all N^2 integers). Also assume that there exists a computer on the network without integers, that we can use to interface with the computers storing the integers.

4. Given the sequence S1 = {a,b,c,d,…,x,y,z,aa,ab,ac…. } and given that this sequence corresponds (term for term) to the sequence S2 = {1,2,3,4,….} Write code to convert an element of S1 to the corresponding element of S2. Write code to convert an element of S2 to the corresponding element of S1.

5. Given a binary tree with the following constraints:

a) A node has either both a left and right child OR no children.
b) The right child of a node is either a leaf or NULL.

Write code to invert this tree. (Hint: Draw this out.)

6. Given a square with side length = 1, describe all points inside square that are closer to the center of the square than to the edge of the square.

7. How many 0’s are at the end of N! (Hint: look at the prime factorization of N!)

8. Given an array A[string], an array of strings where each string represents a word in a text document. Also given 3 search terms T1, T2, and T3 and 3 corresponding sorted sequences of integers S1, S2, and S3 where each integer in Si represents an index in A where search term Ti occured (i.e. S1, S2, and S3 contain the locations of the search terms in our array of words).

Now find a minimal subarray of A that contains all of the search terms T1, T2, and T3. Extend this algorithm for an arbitrary number of search terms. (Hint: Think of the brute force algorithm first.)

9. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

10. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?

11. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

12. How many gas stations would you say there are in the United States?