The Beginning

This post is about the beginning of my journey towards making vlogs. Which in and of itself was unintentional.

Last year my health and consequently my disability degenerated and I became unable to keep typing/writing up blog posts as I had previously. I also began to have serious memory/cognitive problems as well so I began to rely on technology I already owned to help me remember and do day to day tasks.

The main parts were using my iPod to set off alarms during the day to remind me to check I had taken my medications and the other was use the voice memos application to make lists/remind of what I needed to do. This grew into making audio diaries for myself.


In November my Mum bought a laptop, and like most netbooks and laptops this had a webcam. Not great quality and created big files sizes and rather crappy videos to be honest but that was the start of me making videos. I started making video diaries in place of the audio ones I had been making for a few months.

I first bought a cheap HD usb powered webcam which I then used to create better and much smaller videos. Eventually fed up being 'tied' to the laptop when I wanted to make a quick video I went looking for a cheap/budget way to make videos without needing to always use the laptop. Esp. when I just wanted to make a quick video, setting up the laptop with the webcam seemed to take longer than making the videos did and also again as mentioned I was tied to the laptop.

So I thought of something like the Flip camcorder, something I had bought for my eldest two nephews a couple of years ago. But I knew they were expensive, more than I could afford or I could rationalize spending even if I could afford it. Which I couldn't.

I thought I'd see if there was a cheaper brand which would suit my then limited needs in the camcorder department.

That's when I found two things. Flip was no longer being made at all and was still 90% of the time still more than I could afford, and second that there were a lot of other makers making these 'pocket' camcorders as they were called.

After much research online I settled on a Kodak Playsport Zx5 which was on sale at Amazon at least 50% off. Which was double great as it would need accessories most especially a SDHC card because it had no real memory to call it's own.

So that was the start of my journey towards vlogging.