Doing a bit of research online, I’ve found mixed information. The majority of the skeptics I have seen arguing against them seem to focus on the gimicky nature of the product description and/or inaccurately point to debunk stories on “similar” products. I use the term “similar” like I do because I really feel that after researching it, EcoBalls are a bit different than many of the products out there like it.

The one thing I found most interesting about all of the information I read online attempting to debunk them is that none of them paid any attention to the components of the pellets inside the balls. Reading that they had a limit on the number of wash cycles (albeit high one), I knew the pellets had to break down in some way. Digging a bit more, I found out the ingredients of the pellets are as follows:

higher alkyl sulfate non-ionic surfacant sodium metasilicate calcium carbonate sodium carbonate

For something claiming to be chemical free, that ingredient list definitely seems to point otherwise. Looking at the ingredient list more, I started to recognize some of them as stuff I had heard of before, interestingly enough from cleaning products. Let’s go through each one, one by one.

First we have “higher alkyl sulfate”. This is listed as an “adjuvant” which basically means it’s an inactive ingredient which serves the purpose of assisting the dispersion of the active ingredients. It can be likened to an emulsifier and I’ve found several references to it being used in cleaning products online.

Next we have “non-ionic surfacant”. This one is a wetting agent which assists in lowering the surface tension of water. This allows the cleaning solutions to have better ability to break up stains and soils. Again, a common ingredient in cleaning products.

Then we have “sodium metasilicate”. This is one is used to assist the surfacant above by reducing the hardness of the water. Interestingly, this one is both poisonous and reacts fairly violently to acids. For something claiming to be so safe, this ingredient doesn’t support that claim. It could be a small ingredient, though, reducing the potential for issues. Still something you want to make sure small children don’t ingest in any event.

The second to last ingredient is “calcium carbonate”. This one just about anyone should recognize and thus doesn’t need much explanation. It’s a common ingredient in many cleaning products it seems, especially “green” ones, so it’s presence comes as no surprise.

The final ingredient is “sodium carbonate”. This is better known to many as “Washing Soda”. It’s a water softener sold in most grocery stores which prevents calcium and magnesium ions from bonding to the detergent. It’s effective at removing oil, grease, and alcohol stains. Again, it’s presence comes as no surprise.

So, basically what we have here is moderately large plastic balls which contain a very mild detergent. It’s thus no surprise that they do a little better than doing laundry with just plain water alone. The large size of the balls would work well at mashing the clothes, sorta akin to a washing board, and the combination of the mild detergent should prove to be effective. It might not brighten your whites as much as the store bought detergent, but otherwise should clean just as well based on what I can gather without actually using the product. Also, since it doesn’t contain the fragrances which most have gotten used to in laundry detergents, the clothes won’t have that “fresh clean” smell. At about $70 US + shipping, not sure I am going to try them, but I wanted to post this so others doing research on the topic could form a more educated opinion.
 

Niche #1 – Taking my camera + laptop somewhere

I’ve went through many cases in this area and nothing has really stuck with me. What I have found that works best for now is a Case Logic bag they generically call their SLR & Computer Backpack. The problem I have with it is that to hold a camera + multiple lenses like they show in their photos you have to leave you camera lensless in the bag. I at first thought that wouldn’t be a problem, but I’ve found the inconvenience of having to assemble in the field makes that a bit unattractive to me. So what I did was rip out the dividers and put a camera + one extra lens in the main pouch and used the side pouches for things like a flash, a Gary Fong Lightsphere, or whatever else I needed with me. It’s not the most comfortable pack on long hikes, though, so I am still looking for something better. Here’s a couple shots of it courtesy of Case Logic:

Niche #2 – Taking just my camera somewhere

Sometimes I want to take the minimal stuff needed. Just my camera, maybe a flash, and nothing else. The best bag I have found for that is also coincidentally made by Case Logic, which also has a very generic name, the Large SLR Camera Case-5 Lens. Why the five is in the name I dunno, as it definitely wouldn’t hold five lenses. My only complaint with it is that I wish it was more sling like. I’ve seen many slings, but never found one I liked any better than this one, so I’ve stuck with it. It seems to work well and it’s made of the same material as the backpack which proved to hold up to rain and mud quite well and still keep the camera dry. Here’s a shot of it also from Case Logic’s website:

Niche #3 – Hauling all my gear somewhere

The requests for me to do headshots and related photography at Yahoo! have been picking up a lot lately, especially after I did the headshot for our new CTO, Ari Balogh. I’m not sure if anyone outside a select few knew I did his photo, so the timing is probably coincidental, but the point is still I have been doing more shots recently. I’ve also been having more requests than in the past to do photoshoots off of main campus where I have a nice studio I can use. This requires me to have the ability to easily haul a large chunk of my gear to other places arriving intact in one piece, and thus I have the following three Pelican cases. Pelican is the defacto leader of sorts when it comes to heavy duty robust cases and while they are a bit pricey, I feel they are well worth the money.

This case holds my camera bodies, several Canon flashes, my light meter, and other misc accessories. While I can’t remember the last time I used my 30D on a headshot, it does come in handy for corp events as it allows me to have a second lens ready for shooting without having to swap lenses in the field.

This case holds all my lenses, some filters for my 50mm, and my pocket wizards. I’ve found it extremely helpful to have several different lenses on hand because of the fact you can’t always predict the environment you will be shooting in (especially with last minute location changes). When it matters to get the shot right the first time, I make sure I am over prepared.

This is the case I affectionately call “big bertha” as it’s freaking huge. The picture really doesn’t do it justice, so the best way I can describe it’s size is that I have a Honda Accord and I have to put the passenger seat all the way back and it still barely fits in the front seat. This case holds most of my studio lighting gear, all but softboxes and light-stands, as I have heavy duty cloth bags for them.

Right now, the only niche which is really well filled is #3, the one using Pelican cases. I am still hoping to find something which works better for niche #1 and #2. If you know of any good products, I am sure either Terry or I would be all ears.

Being that I was already somewhat low on tea, I was like a kid in a candy store. They had a wall completely covered in huge cans of tea. It was as if I had died and gone to tea nirvana.

I’m somewhat ashamed to say I ended up leaving with 40 oz of tea, aka about 400 cups roughly. I decided to buy an assortment of 20 teas of all different varieties, ranging from white tea, to green tea, to black tea, and several in between. Here’s a list grouped by type of tea:

White Tea

Chinese Honey Dew White, Precious White Peach

Oolong Tea

Peach, Monkey Picked

Herbal Tea

Azteca Fire, Egyptian Chamomile, Yerba Mate, Very Berry, Apple Lemon Pomegranate

Rooibos Tea

Rooibos Orange, Rooibos Tropica, Rooibos Peach, Blueberry Bliss

Green Tea

Dragonwell, 9 Treasures, Jasmine Dragon Phoenix Pearls

Black Tea

Darjeeling Makaibari, Ginger Peach Apricot, Sweet Cranberry, Himalayan Majesty

So when you combine the above with the tea I already had on hand, you come up with a super wide assortment of tea. Here’s what I already had on hand:

Gen Mai Cha by Saphara, Honey Chamomile by Tulsi Tea, Jasmine Oolong by TenRen, and Earl Gray, Chai, Green Tea Mint, and Blueberry Rooisbos sold by Rishi Teas.

Time to go heat some water now and sit back and enjoy a cup! Call / email me if you want to stop by sometime and sample one.

When they arrived yesterday, of course everyone forgot they weren’t all for me and promptly accused me of pulling a “Bonforte” (Jeff Bonforte is a Yahoo VP who is notorious for buying new personal gadgets constantly, and never buying “just one”, but rather several even if the toy was expensive and/or he had no use for more than one). I finally got the chance to play with it tonight and overall have been very happy with the experience. A couple issues I found:

1.) Their installation is in a browser. Since Safari is my default system browser (as any self respecting Mac user would have it set to), the installation attempted to use it. Unfortunately they don’t support Safari and forced me to load a URL in Firefox instead. Thankfully they made it simple to do, but it’s still crappy they can’t make it work in Safari too.

2.) The app attempted to pull in my wifi password from the host OS. Since the machine never has been on a wifi network (heck, it doesn’t even have a wifi card) I am not sure where it got the password it thought would work. After sitting there watching it “attempt to connect” for a while I figured it was clueless, hit cancel, and then typed in the wep key manually. This worked flawlessly as expected and I was able to proceed finishing the setup.

3.) It seems that while you can configure multiple online services to upload to, you can only have one active at a time. Pretty lame if you ask me as I would love the ability to upload to both Flickr and Facebook, not just choose between them (especially since I can only choose online which I want to use). Another issue here is when I removed the Facebook account, it defaulted to selecting “do not share photos online” instead of flipping back to Flickr. The UI made this a bit more confusing since it hid that Flickr was even still configured, but thankfully it didn’t and Flickr still worked fine once I clicked the proper checkbox.

4.) While I can have it add the tag “Eye-Fi” to all photos it uploads, I can’t seem to have it add any other automatic tags. This would be immensely useful to be able to set a default group of tags to use on all photos, so maybe they will hopefully add this in a future update.

I’ve seen a lot of complaints online about it’s lack of ability to choose which photos to upload and other annoyances like that. Personally, that doesn’t bother me in the least because the intent I have for it is to sorta live blog my life. They are not meant to be high quality professional photos, they are meant to capture the moment. Since I am near the same set of wifi APs most of the time (home, work, friends’ houses, etc), the lack of support of public captured portals (aka coffee shop / hotel networks) doesn’t bother me much either. I know that once I get in range of one of my normal networks it will “just work” (assuming my camera is turned on) and my photos will be uploaded automatically. If you want one now too, Amazon.com will gladly take your money I’m sure.

If you are interested in seeing the photos uploaded by my camera, go here:

I will do my best to never delete photos and have it be a running capture of my life. If you decide to do the same, let me know your Flickr account!

• There wasn’t really much to the story. I felt the “idea” was a good one, just not well played out and really left you hanging in a negative way.
• The colors were washed out and over half the movie was blury. It appeared they did this intentionally (and not the fault of the theater). Personally I don’t care if they were going for a certain effect or not, it simply hurt my eyes.
• The roles seemed forced and nothing seemed real. Especially at the end in the final scenes (don’t want to give to much away, but you will know what I mean when you see it).

Overall I would give this movie a B- bordering on a C+. Watch it if you have nothing better to do with your money, but otherwise I would wait for DVD or watch a screener (if anyone wastes their time to make one of this movie).