Insta360 X5 accessories you have to re-buy

If you already own an Insta360 X4 and decided to get the new X5, here is a list of things you will have to re-buy, according to Insta360. This page will be updated as we get more information:

X5 Accessories to Re-Buy

Per Insta360:

As X5 is different in size and internal structure from X4/X3, most accessories are not cross-compatible, including the battery, Invisible Dive Case, Lens Guards, and Quick Reader.

– Insta360
  • Battery
  • Battery Charger (new design, charges 2 batteries instead of 3)
  • Invisible Dive Case
  • Lens Guards
  • Quick Reader
  • Rubber Lens Cap
    • “The Insta360 X4 lens cap is not compatible with the X5. Our X5 has a new rugged, replaceable lens design that’s different from the X4. While some accessories like the 1/4″ mounting point are compatible between X4 and X5, specific accessories such as lens guards are not cross-compatible due to changes in size and optical performance. If you need lens protection for your X5, we recommend using accessories specifically designed for the X5 model.”
  • …and more to be added.

Find something else? Please leave a comment and I will update this list.

Steve Bjork in the movie Rollercoaster (1977)

My late friend, Steve Bjork, had quite an interesting life. While I do not know anything about his childhood an upbringing, he did share tidbits about his later years. In the 1970s, he worked for Magic Mountain (known as Six Flags Magic Mountain after 1979) in Valencia, California.

A number of movies have been filmed at Magic Moutain over the years, including National Lampoon’s Vacation which used the park as a stand-in for the fictional Wally World. It was also used in one of the Beverly Hills Cop movies.

But long before those 1980s classic was: Rollercoaster.

Filming on this epic 1977 disaster (?) movie began in 1976, according to the wikipedia entry on the film. Steve had mentioned he was an extra in this movie, and I had thought maybe he just went down and lined up to audition. (That is how it worked when me and some friends “auditioned” in high school for a movie that was filmed in East Texas.)

Steve mentioned he was in a scene loading a roller coaster. I wondered if we could find him. Thanks to the help of Eric, who was able to locate where I could watch this movie, I began scrubbing through the film looking for any scenes showing a roller coaster load area.

Finally, at around the 1:44 mark near the end of the film, we found him. Ladie’s and gentlemen, a young Steve Bjork!

Steve Bjork in Rollercoaster (1977) at about the 1:44 mark.

As the coaster car pulls back into the station, several costumed park workers quickly go to the car to start unlocking the lap bars so the riders can get out. At the far back of the room is Steve. The movie stars are riding in the back and you get to see Steve in two different clips of this scene.

For comparison, here is the earliest public photo of Steve I could find, which appeared in the January 1983 issue of SOFTLINE magazine:

Steve Bjork in SOFTLINE, January 1983, p54.

I have not checked to see if he can be spotted elsewhere in the film, so if you decide to look for him, let me know if you find something new.

Thanks for helping me find this, Eric!

Insta360 X5 “confirmed”

Well, the same day Insta360 made the announcement that a new product would be announced on 4/22/2025, videos start popping up on YouTube. Folks who had been using the camera ahead of release were being allowed to show some video (including side-by-side comparisons of the X4 versus the X5 in low light) and, oddly, showing replacing the lens — without being able to say the name of the product or that it has user-replicable lenses.

It was quite clear that this was scripted or at least directed since multiple videos from different YouTube accounts showed them doing the same steps.

Soon we had the name, and specs and prices posted on X, and even an “unboxing video” showing the contents of the box.

Tomorrow morning we will know for sure, but it does seem clear this will be an X5 with better low light capability and user-replaceable lenses.

BEWARE of “unsponsored” videos. Go to any event and you will see the sponsor section in the show guide (or a big wall of logos somewhere) listing all the “sponsors” of the event — you will see “lodging sponsors” and “food sponsors” and all kinds of things. Insta360 is known to be “hardware sponsor” for videos, providing them with gear and accessories. These “creators” will say they are “unsponsored” when they probably mean “I wasn’t paid to make this video.”

But they are sponsored with hardware. Be wary of any videos you watch that say “unsponsored” that come out immediately — they clearly were given hundreds of dollars of product so they could do the video ;-)

Those of us without hardware sponsorships will just buy the camera and show you some footage as soon as the product is shipping.

I am preparing to do a new batch of comparison videos like I did with the ONE X2 and X3, then again with the X3 and X4. And all of mine will be using “automatic” settings with no post-processing of the video.

More to come…

Insta360 X5 (?) camera coming out 4/22

Insta360 has announced a new product reveal for April 22, 2025 at 9 a.m. EST. The name of the product is unknown, but the promo video clearly shows 360 camera stuff. This would make it a follow-up to the Insta360 X4 (which was a follow up to the X3, which was a follow up to the ONE X2, which was a follow up to the ONE X).

“All Day. All Night. All Angles.”

In addition to seeing that it is a 360 camera, there are also demonstrations of low-light video recording. The existing X series cameras have never done well in low light.

Also, at the end, someone smashes the lens with a hammer, then is shown replacing it using some kind of suction cup tool. This indicates user-replaceable lenses.

Improving low light is much needed. The lenses are a nice-to-have since a protruding/exposed lens on each side of the camera means damage can occur easily. Yet, I have never done damage to any of the 360 cameras I have owned over the years. Still, better to have this capability and not need it, than need it and not have it.

Unlike previous Insta360 releases I have followed, this time the video bloggers seemed to be allowed to release sample footage. As soon as this teaser posted, several other videos showed up with side-by-side videos comparing this new (unnamed) camera with the X4 or GoPro Hero 13. The low light capability far exceeds either of those.

While none of them can say the name of the product or mention specific details, apparently Insta360 allowed them all to start sharing footage ahead of the official announcement.

I am looking forward to seeing the details on April 22, 2025. When I receive my unit, I will begin posting some raw comparison videos of it versus the X4. Most of the “experts” do alot of manual settings, editing and processing so you never get to see what the camera is like “out of the box” when you just click record.

More to come…

TIL how to build a PC .exe on my Mac, and RUN it on my Mac.

For reasons that are not important (or at least not interesting, or maybe both), tonight I was researching to see if I could build a PC .exe on a Mac. I asked Copilot, and it suggested I install the “MinGW” cross compiler tools.

Installing MinGW cross compiling tools on a Mac

Using brew, I typed:

brew install mingw-w64

Now that it was installed, to build a simple “hello world” program, I could start with this:

#include <stdio.h>

int main(void)
{
puts ("Hello, world!\");
return 0;
}

And from the directory where that file is located, I can type:

x86_64-w64-mingw32-gcc helloworld.c -o helloworld.exe

And thus…

allenh@Mac HelloWorldPC % ls
helloworld.c helloworld.exe

Neat. This might let me toy with some C source code to figure something out for work without having to get on my PC or run Windows on my Mac.

Then I wondered: could I run it?

Copilot said I could, if I had wine. That sounds like a great idea, but I was sure the AI was confused.

Wine Is Not Emulation

To install Wine, I needed to type this:

brew install --cask wine-stable

Away it went, but I noticed it told me (on my non-Intel Mac) that this would also require Rosetta 2, which is Apple’s Intel emulation layer they used early on when transitioning Macs from Intel to ARM processors. To get that, I did:

softwareupdate --install-rosetta --agree-to-license 

Well, that took no time at all, especially compared to how long MinGW and Wine took to install.

So what now?

Run, EXE! Run!

wine helloworld.exe

…though that did not get me too far, because security.

A quick visit to System Settings and Privacy & Security let me go here and throw caution to the wind…

Well, why not Open Anyway… A few clicks later and…

I’m bored. Let’s go ride bikes.

But first… I tried “winehello world.exe” again (though I had to change back to the directory where it was located).

Sometimes “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze,” and I know I am really late to the wine party, but I thought it was neat.

Until next time…

Five nines and 99% uptime

How reliable is your internet provider, or webhost provider?

Many years ago during my Microware era, I had some outsider exposure to the wireless communications industry. This was a long time ago. Cellular phones were still mostly analog, other than the GSM network. (After a layoff, I spent about a year selling cellphones from a now-defunct “leader in wireless activations” and I think it was VoiceStream or something that had GSM phones in our area. Few customers wanted them because the digital coverage was pretty limited to just large cities at the time.)

But I digress.

A term I learned was “five nines”. This was a level of reliability expected out of these cell phone towers. Five nines is 99.999%.

Do all those extra decimal places really matter? We were told that even promoting 99% was terrible, and 99.% still was problematic if the service was important.

This stuck with me, and years later I would see claims of reliability from high-speed internet providers (initial cable modems for my area; I had the first install of one in my neighborhood, but that’s a story for another time). 99% sounded great to me, but the reality was … less great.

To help you visualize how reliable “99%” is, I made this spreadsheet:

DaysHoursMinutesPercentMin DownHours Down
3072043200994327.2
307204320099.943.20.72
307204320099.994.320.072
307204320099.9990.4320.0072

You can see that a service offering 99% uptime would be down over 7 hours per month.

At 99.9%, you only lose 43 minutes per month. Much better. Clearly, an extra decimal place goes a long way.

And the industry standard of “five nines” would allow a service to have less than 30 seconds downtime in a month.

Here is the wikipedia page that discusses this, with even more stats:

High availability – Wikipedia

With that in mind, what do you think the uptime is of your high-speed internet provider? :) And what do they claim?

Until next time…

m

As I drove to work one morning, I noticed some interesting abbreviations being used on my traffic report phone app. (I’d normally say “GPS app” but then folks always say “you need your GPS to get to work?” No, it’s not about navigation. It’s about traffic reports, police incidents, closed exits and other things.)

But I digress…

In America, “m” is an abbreviation for “miles.” For example, mpg (miles per gallon) and mph (miles per hour).

“m” is also an abbreviation for meters, as in mps (meters per second) or 3m (three meters).

When I see “5m” I assume this is meters.

But “m” is also an abbreviation for minutes. If you see this:

4h3m30s

That clearly looks like hours, minutes and seconds. And if someone sends a text saying:

BwoopyBob: be there in 3m

…that seems to mean minutes.

Context is everything.

My navigation app shows speed, distance and time. All of these things are “m” words: miles per hour, miles to go, and minutes until arrival.

So naturally, they have to alter the abbreviations.

Minutes is shortened to “min”, which we usually assume means minutes or minimum, and miles is “mi” since, I assume, the app also supports metric distances and would use “m” for that. And miles per hour is displayed as “mph” as I’d expect.

I wonder what other “m” units are displayed by this thing?

  • m
  • mi
  • min
  • mpg

Seeing one alone is not enough to understand what the “m” means, and even having a numeric unit may not help… Is 30m thirty miles or thirty minutes or thirty meters? Or something else?

I guess my point is, when abbreviating, always add context. Your users/readers will appreciate it.

Until next time…

Branson, Missouri…

Any CoCo folks near Branson? There is a place there called Retromania which is an 80s themed “attraction” with some 1980s arcade games, a few pinball machines, an 80s horror movie themed haunted house, VR and lots of 80s memorabilia. While I didn’t see any CoCo related stuff on display, I did see some Atari and Odyssey hardware. I kinda want to bring a CoCo ROM-PAK to donate to the display next visit ;-)

Color BASIC supports two letter variables, except when it doesn’t.

Over on the CoCo Facebook group, in a discussion about “why is I always used for loops”, Rob R. left a comment that caught my interest:

“… I have a vague memory that (at least on the Mod I) there were one or two letters that weren’t usable since they could be tokenized to a command. At least some two letter variables would be verboten, like ‘TO.'”

– Rob R. on Facebook

This made me wonder: how many are there? Here are the ones that I think would be problematic:

  • AS – in Disk BASIC, there is an “AS” keyword used for the file system. “FIELD #1, 10 AS A$”
  • FN – as in “DEF FNA(B)=B*42”
  • IF – as in “IF A=1”
  • ON – as in “ON X GOTO/GOSUB” or on the CoCo 3, “ON BRK GOTO” or “ON ERR GOTO”
  • OR – as in “IF A=1 OR A=2”
  • TO – as in “FOR I=1 TO 10”

Using any of these such as “TO=1” or “FN=3” will create a ?SN ERROR.

Are there others?

Also, some of these will work in Color BASIC that will not work if you have Extended or Disk BASIC:

  • “DEF FN” was added in Extended, so on a Color BASIC machine you should be able to use FN as a variable.
  • “AS” was added in Disk BASIC, so you should be able to use AS on Color and Extended BASIC.

I wonder how many folks wrote BASIC programs using variables that were not allowed when they later added the Extended BASIC ROM and/or Disk BASIC, and wondered why they stopped working?

Until next time…

Website hosting…

I have been doing website hosting as a hobby since the mid-1990s. I just set up a “business card” site for a local cafe (Douglas Cafe in Urbandale) we frequent. We’ve also done projects for them including making new menus, table top signs, window vinyl lettering, and street signs. To help boost their new website, I just wanted to post it here for the search engines to find:

https://www.douglascafe.com

While I do not actively persue website hosting anymore, I still have about 75 sites hosted here. My web hosting account is going up 25% my next renewal, so I may very well have to re-activate this as a business that takes money.

More to come…