This is a review long overdue. I recently purchased a bunch of Sanyo Eneloop batteries for my flash, and other battery operated devices (like my XBox controllers and wireless mouse and keyboard) and since I’ve had relatively bad luck with rechargeable batteries, I went and did some research on something that would make sure my Eneloops would be well cared for.

I had read about the MAHA-C9000 battery charger on the photography forum I frequent and everyone who had one had nothing but good things to say about it. So on their recommendations, I decided that I too would go out and purchase one. While it’s a little more expensive than your run of the mill charger, I figured that if I’m going to buy fancy/expensive batteries, I might as well make sure I protect my investment with something equally fancy/expensive.

I did some digging around online and for US customers, Thomas Distributing seems to be the best place to order from and in Canada, Paul’s Finest has the charger for the same price. While I don’t mind ordering online, I always want to see if I can get what I want locally since it’s just easier to walk in and pick it up instead of paying for shipping and all that. In Vancouver, only a small handful of places advertise it online but everyone had it for ridiculous prices (ranging from $90-$100CDN). In addition, no one really had an up to date site and just didn’t feel right.

Enter Vancouver Battery. While their price was $90 like most of the others, they at least appeared reputable and for me, warranted an email to check out if they would be willing to price match Paul’s Finest.

Danny, who I believe is the owner of the store, replied extremely quickly to my email and was right off, willing to price match any Canadian website which was great news for me. He wrote up an invoice for me and made sure it was available for me the next day in case he wasn’t around.

The next morning I headed out and met up with Danny who is a very knowledgeable and very friendly guy. They carry all kinds of batteries from tiny hearing aid batteries to notebook batteries to sealed lead acid batteries. Pretty much anything you could want

Their site may not always be up to date so I recommend emailing them to get latest pricing on whatever you require. I will definitely go back to Vancouver Battery the next time I need more batteries.

Stay tuned for a review on the MAHA-C9000!

Microsoft Office Live Workspace allows Office 2003 and 2007 users (with the workspace plugin available after you login) to store and share their files online from anywhere with internet access. The service is completely free to use and looks to be a pretty neat solution for people to manage project files with remote users or even just to use personally to gain access to stuff you might need at work or elsewhere.

Files can be grouped in Workspaces so that you can have multiple projects on the go at one time.

Looks to me like it’s Microsoft answer to Google Documents except with a direct tie to Office vs an online interface.

Update: So I had a chance to give this a go and while it’s great for a single user to access files between home and work, the plug-in needs a little work. I tried sharing a workspace with a friend and unfortunately, it appears that shared workspaces are not accessible through the Office plug-in. Hopefully Microsoft will fix this since to me it’s a pretty big missing component.

Thanks to Google, YouTube will be adding live streaming to it’s list of features by the end of 2008! There are a few others doing this right now like justin.tv and ustream.tv but they’re not the greatest services in my opinion. Hopefully YouTube will be able to do it right!! It would be even cooler if they managed to allow live streaming from a cellphone too!

We’ll just have to wait and see.