Cable Rolling

If you ever shoot any events with a big-time crew for a company like ESPN, one of the most important things to know is how to roll cables using the "over-and-under" method. This helps avoid the cable getting tangled up and makes the next set-up easier. It's not easy to learn without seeing it, but here are two articles that may help.
This one is about audio cables, but the same principles apply.
This one is from Pro Lights and Staging News, which is a little off topic, but it looks like it could have some other interesting articles. I'll check it out further when I have more time. Here's the gist of the article:

How you take it up is important too, for your sanity and the life of the cable. Learn how to over and under cable. It’s really easy. Create a loop a foot and a half to two feet or more. Keep looping the cable again and again, letting it roll underneath itself when it wants to, usually every other loop. To most people this sounds incredibly elementary, but most stagehands around the world don’t do it, either because of ignorance or apathy. That’s why I also suggest that you wrap your own cable. Don’t let a stagehand do it unless you know him or have seen him do it. Usually a quick lesson won’t help either. You can, however, let a hand help you pull or untangle wire. Wrap you own stuff and it’ll last a lot longer. You’ll also keep your sanity the next day when it just flows off the roll as you load in. My experience with triax and BNC cable is that if you wrap them in a larger three-foot or so loom, they last longer and roll out better.

Proper cable rolling might seem like a minor thing, but if you work with a crew that loads and unloads equipment every day, at best, you'll look like an amateur if you don't do it right, and at worst, you'll really piss some people off if they have to re-do all your cables at one in the morning when they're trying to pack up.

AIVF

The Association of Independent Video and Filmmakers has a pretty good site with a lot of resources (mostly for docs or feature films, rather than shorter projects like commercials or music videos). There's some good fundraising info there and if you join, you're eligible for discounts on important stuff like health insurance. I'm not a member, but it might be worth joining if you're a freelancer.

Disposable Video Camera

CVS pharmacy will start selling the world's first disposable video camera at the end of the month. It will shoot 20 minutes of video and cost about 30 bucks. But it has no outputs or tape, so if you want to actually do something with the video, it will cost another $13 to burn it to a DVD.

The new camera from San Francisco-based start-up Pure Digital Technologies, doesn't use videotape. Instead, it saves images to internal memory -- like the video mode of a digital camera.

Using just three buttons, consumers can capture up to 20 minutes of digital quality video and sound in either separate segments or clips, CVS (Research) have said.

The video camcorder's 1.4-inch color playback screen lets users watch their home videos and delete unwanted segments. Once they finished shooting, consumers will have to pay an additional $12.99 (£7) for processing the footage onto DVDs at their local CVS store since there's no other way to watch the footage recorded.

It could be handy for emergencies, I guess. I don't think too many consumers will be using these for almost fifty bucks a pop, though. It might be cool for some sort of community video project - give a bunch of kids cameras and let them shoot their own stories, but with only 20 minutes of footage, they'd have to be selective with their shooting.

Home-Made Equipment

Here are a few links with plans for equipment of various sorts:

Do It Yourself Video

Stick to What you Know
go to the "Behind the Scenes" page for some interesting stuff

HomeBuiltStabilizers.com
A bunch of different stabilizers, jibs, and dolly plans

Ron Dexter

I came across Ron Dexter's site today. Wow! There's something for everyone- shooting tips, how to build equipment, even tips on using drywall screws. There's probably 200 film and video related articles here, and all the ones I read were interesting, even if not immediately useful. There are a few typos here and there that caused me to re-read a line or two, but that's a small price for this much info. Check it out.