makumaro.net

On Modern Mobile Devices

It’s a habit now to take consideration of a subject and try to fit the background to lead the eye in a picture. The wooden ‘pole’ woman here contrasts nicely with the tree in the background, with both being straight and long objects.

Okay, geek speak ahead, you can stop reading if you aren’t interested in a geek’s perspective on the latest tech trends. Heh.

* * *

Woke up this morning to the Carling Cup semi final second leg match between Manchester United and Manchester City. It was an exciting match but my eyes were taken off the screen reading the updates on the new Apple iPad, a tablet computer where every media outlet was buzzing with excitement towards its impending announcement. Missed a couple of goals but caught the replays as I glanced through the details of the new wonder device by Apple.

Heh, reading tech forums and those people who bash the device do not understand the market that Apple is trying to cater to. I think the price is reasonable for the hardware you are getting. The 10″ IPS screen would be wonderful to show friends and family your photos. The instant on capability is what my netbook drives me insane on as even 30 seconds of startup time is an eternity for me at times when I just want to check something quickly. The 10 hour battery life is adequate for most plane rides to watch a movie, read a book or just listen to music. At under 700 grams in weight, I’d carry it with me everywhere.

Would I get one? I’d like one, but one of the higher end versions with 32GB of SSD and the 3G sim slot. Then I’d get a Telstra 3G sim card and the device would be really useful when I go travelling. No roaming charges and an instant GPS (I have a GPS sitting in my car glove compartment but use it much less these days as it’s kind of dumb that you have to key in the suburb, street name, unit number one by one before it pinpoints an address for you. Spoiled with having Google Maps where you just key in the address as you would normally spell out an address and it automatically pinpoints the location you are looking for, except that you need a 3G data connection to get this kind of service).

I need to try out an iPad to see how well it types using the on screen keyboard. I’m banging out this post on my Eee PC now and it feels more reassuring to type with the tactile feedback of the keystrokes on your fingers through a physical keyboard. My netbook also allows me to backup photos from my camera on my trips as I did when I went to Taiwan but I think it’s probably easier to carry an extra CF card for my D300.

No SD Card slot on the iPad but that would make it compete with Apple’s laptops, but I’m already thinking an iPad with a 64GB SSD, an SD card slot plus a Panasonic GF1 would make the ultimate travel kit for photographers.

Apple has released device after device that intrigues me but I’m still yet to commit to anyone of their products. Heh, I might bend on this one just to try it out.

* * *

Just installed Chromium on my Eee PC and suddenly browsing the web on Ubuntu feels more responsive than it’s ever been since I’ve been installing the various releases of Ubuntu on my Eee PC. The default Firefox installation is horrendously unresponsive for even day to day browsing and I tried Swiftfox, which is supposed to improve performance but still felt quite sluggish to me. So now I finally have Chromium running and it starts fast, switches between tabs quickly and loads pages fast.

I’m starting to feel like turning to Chrome as my default browser just because it’s so much faster. Having Webkit or Gecko as a rendering engine doesn’t bug me as much anymore since I don’t really spend that much time trying out the bleeding edge in CSS design these days.

Heh, Linux is just the polar opposite of what Apple has done. You can pick and choose whatever and however you want to run your hardware and even the lowly Atom feels speedy enough for my use in some tasks when you load the right software on it. Apple’s products are currently all streamlined and there’s a consistency throughout the user interface that makes it easy to pick up and the effort they put into simplifying it means you don’t have to worry about configuring anything at all. Depends on what kind of user you are (I’m a little bit of both) both Linux and the Mac/iPhone OS cater to very different uses.

A Quick Snapshot

The Twelve Apostles. It’s been probably 9 or 10 years since I’ve been onto the Great Ocean Road. As it was Australia Day on Tuesday, decided to take Monday off to take advantage of the long weekend. Drove off to Port Campbell to see the sights.

Heh, back then I only had a fixed focal length Nikon film camera and a 0.3 megapixel Fujifilm digital camera, neither of which will match the D300 or the power processing of Lightroom almost a decade later.

This photo here is my first attempt at trying a HDR (high dynamic range shot), which is basically 5 photos at various exposures using bracketing and a tripod (I didn’t carry one so I opted for the fencing) to get the tones and gradations of colours from each exposure and map it into a single image.

I thought I’d try something different with my photography, which should be what I’m aiming for this year, to push what I can create in an image and not just be limited to what I already know.

* * *

Have lots to do but very little time. Came back from my Great Ocean Road trip and had a barbeque on Australia Day. Heh, have a whole stack of reading material to go through, including photography ebooks, a guide to setting up a business on the Australian government website and various other miscellaneous websites I follow. Heh, if only I didn’t get tired and needed to sleep. Well, one can dream anyway.

More Geek

My cousin’s very interesting fork and spoon clock. Just aimed the camera at the clock and snapped a photo. Adjusted the exposure compensation of the image to blow out the wall and added a vignette to frame the clock. The end result is a monotone styled photo that focuses solely on the clock.

* * *

A little obsessed with configuring Linux on my Eee PC of late. Figured out what went wrong the other day and tried the entire install process again. Arch Linux is a little time consuming to setup (well, definitely not as time consuming as Gentoo, but I’ve not even bothered to try that distro) but what you get is a desktop with the bare necessities. Only problem was that I had to troubleshoot all the way through the boot process, which I guess the end result was that it made me more familiar with the process and the location of key files for configuration.

After a little more persistence, I’ve managed to get a GUI up and running on the Arch install. LXDE is fast but ugly. Heh, the Arch install is still tethered to a LAN cable at least until I figure out how to get the wireless working.

So I’m typing this on the Ubuntu installation on my Eee PC. The great thing with being able to install an operating system on removable media, you just pop in the SD Card with the installation you want and you get an instant operating system.

Ubuntu and Arch Linux could not be more different. Ubuntu has become more mainstream, and it’s a matter of just getting the installation media, loading it up and following the prompts until you get a working desktop. It took about 30 minutes on my slow SD card to install so I reckon a desktop would take a lot less time. Arch Linux on the other hand, even with the installation media you need to muck around with that a bit, and then you are greeted with the old text based installation menus, with choices that is Greek to most people. Installation also takes about 30 minutes, but you need to hand hold the computer to pick the choices to configure the system you want, and anyone not familiar with partitions/packages etc will not want to bother trying it. Even with the menu selections, you still need to do some manual editing of the configuration files, unlike the seamless auto configuration that Ubuntu performs for you. Finally after all the hair pulling, you are greeted with a command prompt when you finally manage to get the system installed and booted.

* * *

I’m just fascinated with how these things work, and I’m sure I can spend my time doing other stuff but it’s the process of discovery that keeps me interested. Heh, I wish I could apply that to some of the other things I do in life which does take more priority.

* * *

Heh, getting conditioned back to running. Perhaps the body has experienced it before, so it’s taking less time to adapt to running again. Did my round through the park yesterday and didn’t find it too difficult. Didn’t push myself too hard as well, but it wasn’t like a few years ago when my body would struggle to just run 3km. I could probably do 5 or 6 without too much trouble. Pacing myself better and will go for a run again tomorrow.

Melbourne weather is fantastic. 42 degrees on Monday, 7 degrees last night, and I even heard hailstones just before I went to bed. Note the large variance between temperatures. Heh, not checking the weather report but hope I get to run tomorrow.