I knew Kata made bags for video gear, and off and on I've seen their camera bags. They're an Israeli company, although like everyone else their stuff's made in China. Their bags are kind of tough, like some Israelis I've done business with. Kata make body armour as well as camera bags, and it looks like the same designers may work on both. They don't make what I specifically use - chest mount bags - but their holster bags are quite close to what I need. I discussed a little with their support people online and eventually picked up their largest "holster" bag, the H-16. This is sized for 1-series cameras, so it's big enough for anything I'm going to carry in it.

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I don't know anything about video, but my camera takes it and I need to figure out how to produce the stuff. I'm sure this information's out there somewhere, but I've been unable to find it, so here's what I found.

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I was slightly surprised that google didn't turn up a solution to this one right off the bat, but it didn't, so here's my solution. I needed to extract metadata from some images, specifically the stuff which Windows Vista lets you edit from within the explorer - author, title, comments, that sort of thing. A quick check with PS suggests that these fields map variously back to the IPTC (IIM, legacy) and IPTC Core Exif fields; so long as you know which is which you can set the data in either place.

I recall from earlier work that IIS6 doesn'tnecessarily behave the same as IIS7 regarding the way the file system (NTFS) handles and presents extended properties; these days all my stuff is on the newer system so I don't care about IIS6.

There's not much to this, but you need to figure out which fields are which... I did this for the fields I care about in the code below. The file's data is utf-16 coded, which is slightly fiddily to deal with too.

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Almost everything I buy has to be ordered online as in the uk there are really no high-street shops which sell anything worthwhile. Mostly the process is easy: I order things, and then they arrive the next day or the day after that. The catch is that you don't find out how good an online retailer is until something goes wrong. At that point you find out very quickly which retailers are good and which aren't, but it's too late.

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