iCin

Camcorder
accessory manufacturer Bella has just announced a new device that will
let you toss those MiniDV cassettes straight out of your bag and replace
them with your iPod or nearly any other USB 2.0-compliant storage system.
The Catapult, as it’s known, is an paperback-sized digital encoder
that plugs into any standard or HD camcorder with a FireWire port and
processes the video as you’re recording, eliminating the need to convert
your footage later on.

from the Engadget

This is something we have been fantasizing
about since
we got the idea of attaching a tiny camera and microphone to our glasses
and recording our whole life in real time. Why not, we wondered, capture
the resulting video directly to the 30 gig hard-drive we habitually carried
around on our person – our iPod?

Impossible, we were informed by helpful
commenters, for
a number of reasons, the most convincing of which was that iPod hard-drives
only rotate at 5400 rps, which is not fast enough to capture digital
video in real time.

Perhaps the Catapult solves this problem by "encoding" the
signal in a format that can be smoothly recorded at 5400, but we would
have to see it in action to believe it. Plus, we still haven’t gotten
over our deep disillusionment that our
LAST iPod only lasted 13 months
before it turned into a $300 doorstop.

At any rate, this whole mobile recording bottleneck is
only a temporary workaround until we have wireless mobile feeds directly
from glasses cams on people with MUCH more interesting lives than the
Dowbrigade,  onto the Net, live and in color, up close and personal,
uncut and raw, each wired individual a permanent personal channel available
to subscribers or browsers, human nodes in the ultimate reality show.

thanks to Steve Garfield for the head’s up