Twelve games and a drenching

A ‘new’ old adventure

I finally tracked down a copy of “Command & Conquer - the first decade.” I’ve been looking for a while for this version, rather than the original Command & Conquer game that doesn’t work on Windows XP (or it doesn’t for me, anyhow). This collection is the first twelve "episodes", i.e. C&C, Red Alert, Tiberian Sun, Generals, the expansion packs, and so on. I’ll let you know how much fun I have. I wasn’t having much luck finding it until EB Games had themselves a sale, and finally brought some in. The last time I saw the collection was over three years ago, and I had to turn it down at the time because I didn't have the money—nearly $90. Thankfully I didn't pay that much today, due to the special, I only paid $35.00

The key to future typing

Anyhow, I’m typing this on a new cheap keyboard, because somehow my keyboard got drenched in tea when my teapot overflowed onto it. It feels quite different from my keyboard, so no doubt it’ll take me a while to get used to it. I had to go for a bargain keyboard, and I can feel it. My finger memory will need to be retrained as my previous keyboards were a different feel, with keys in slightly different places than this one. The Enter key is flaming huge in comparison, and the pipe symbol ‘|’ and backslash ‘\’ are down beside the right hand shift key. I haven’t had a keyboard like this for years!

I had a bit of an adventure when I bought the keyboard though. I need a PS/2 dongle to connect to a KVM I’m using. The first keyboard that I bought didn’t have the dongle in the package, so I had to take the keyboard back and get another one that had the PS/2 dongle. Now I’ve got it home, and it works well aside from the squashy keys. Let’s hope that this keyboard doesn’t have another spill, though the price is at least cheap enough to afford a replacement in a reasonably short space of time. I know I’ll hang onto the dongle though, so that I don’t have to go through the hassle of buying a keyboard just for the dongle.

Repair of an older computer’s OS

Some days, it just doesn’t pay to get out of bed. Someone I know had one of those days recently. They got given a computer by their boss, that had Windows XP installed onto it, but nothing had been updated since. They requested that I come over to help them as they couldn’t get email or the Internet going. When I got there, I immediately pulled the USB cable out of the DSL modem, which at least fixed the Internet problem, but only in part. I even managed to plug a printer in, plug a digital camera in, and print photos, all without issue. But I got stumped on the email, so I left it for the owner to talk to the ISP about. Yesterday, they spent most of the day on the phone to the ISP, trying to sort out the email problem, with the eventual decision by the ISP that the computer must be somewhat broken. That’s when I suggested they bring it over here, so I can work on it at my leisure. So far, it's got to me with these symptoms:

• Updates won’t install onto it, due to the OS being not patched.
• Google Chrome can’t be installed on to the OS, as it hasn't been brought up to SP3
• Service Pack 2 won’t install on the OS, claiming it can’t be installed on this version of the OS
• The web browser won’t go to Skype.com, the browser sits and waits, but doesn't go any further. The same thing happens when the user clicks the “webmail” link on the ISP’s home page—the browser simply sits there and the progress bar moves up to about five bars, then seems to stop.

Frankly, I smell a rat, and no doubt I'll be spending a fair amount of time just getting the computer to “do email”—I’ll let you all know what luck I have.

Another calculator, same as the first?

A new purchase

I recently got another calculator for $10 from an online store. I saved $19.95, so I was happy. There was a reason not to be happy, but more about that later. It's still my first honest-to-goodness modern Hewlett Packard calculator—my previous HP was a HP34C and died long ago. But something struck me as soon as I received it in the post. It's another one of these calculators with a display that has two lines, one for the input calculation, the other shows the output from previous calculations. The display's almost exactly like the Casio FX-82MS with the same characters and annunciators, and the HP 10s even has a very similar keypad layout, only the occasional keys have been transposed, and the directional keypad is in a different position.

As well, the internal menu system is exactly like the FX-82MS, to the extent that if I compared the HP documentation and the Casio documentation, I'd find no mistakes on either calculator. Their documentation certainly differs though, even though they've both printed their respective instructions on a single sheet in multiple panels, the Hewlett Packard documentation is separated into distinct pages, and those pages don't take up an entire column as the Casio instructions do. I also found that the self-test on this calculator is almost (but not quite) identical to the FX-82MS. The key combination to start the test off is even the same: Shift-7-On. Once starting the test, keys in the keyboard test are pressed in exactly the same order as they would be on the MS, which makes for a slightly odd order on the HP's keypad. And I still haven't found out what all the numbers mean at the end.

So, is it a clone?

It's not absolutely a clone, and it has the advantage of being solar-powered like the FX-85MS, though I haven't seen one of those in this country. Nice for when you've got some nice bright sunshine, it keeps the watch-cell battery topped up with solar power, and makes the battery life a lot longer as a result. It also has a slide-on case just like the Casio, but slightly differently designed. The fit is tighter, for one, so the top's not quite as likely to fall off inadvertedly. It has exactly the same default ranges too, so if you couldn't find the FX-82MS, this HP 10s would do fine and be literally a drop-in replacement for it.

The LCD display and the colours selected for the fascia and keys mean that everything can be read clearly, and is easier to read than the MS, and it reminds me of the other white calculator body I have from Casio (the FX9750G Plus). However there's a slight anomaly when you look at the M+ key, the DT is supposed to be associated with it, but the way the design was done for that key isn't quite as together as for the 82MS. However, I can certainly live with it. The keys have a good positive travel and don't have a tendency to offset, unlike the keys on the Casio body which can on occasion look a bit higgledy piggledy. All in all, the Hewlett's quite a good calculator, though the lack of programmability is reflected in its price. It seems strange that somewhere in the documentation on the HP web site, there is mention that the calculator has 128 Kilobytes of memory, I'm trying to figure out what on earth uses up all that space, given there's no programmability.

And the reasons for being unhappy?

About the only problem that I had was when I first received the calculator and turned it on, the display wasn't quite right. In that top line of the display, there was a missing line of dots. I'd normally have shrugged this off, but in the case of this calculator, there's little enough font information as it is, as the font on the top line is only six pixels high by five pixels wide, with an additional pixel's worth of space between each character cell. So having every single character missing its second line of pixels was a bit disconcerting. If it wasn't so cheap, I'd have probably returned it to the retailer by now, asking if I could have another one of the same value. But the cost of return is nearly as much as the calculator cost me to begin with, so I probably won't bother. And as it was, using the self-test cured the missing line of pixels, so I don't have to send this back to the company after all. I would have felt like a charlie if they'd slung it back my way saying "It works, deal with it". I was also hoping like anything that this calculator was programmable, but it was not to be. Ah well.

Accuracy!

For simple tests, it shows roughly the same degree of accuracy as other models, though there are some differences. For example, this test:

(asin (acos (atan (tan (cos (sin(9)))))))

results in the figure

9.000000002

being displayed, instead of the FX-82MS' result of 8.999998637. So maybe there are differences after all. After taking away the 9.00000000 and then multiplying by 1E9, we get 2.124, which makes me wonder if this calculator has an extra couple of digits of precision up its sleeve. Weird.

Where are the corners?

A new toy from the Rubik stable

You’ve heard me talking about my Rubik’s Cube family, not once, but several times and also about the other non-cube members of the puzzle family. Well, today I bought another non-cube puzzle. This one contains three clear spheres that are hooked together with pivots, and if you look through, you can see six little coloured plastic balls, nestling in the centre sphere. The outside one’s got knobs on, and there’s a steel ball bearing on each of the two inner spheres. So not only do you have to fight logic, but now you have gravity to contend with too. It’s called the Rubik’s 360°, and it's not like any other puzzle I've ever played with.

Why another puzzle?

I’d like to use the excuse that I was getting ready for Brain Week, but frankly that’d be a bit pointless after Saturday. No, I simply liked the look of this puzzle, and thought I’d add it to my collection just because I like it. It also happens to be my equivalent to purchasing an Easter egg—except this one will last much much longer, after the chocolate has become a dim and distant memory. It's also better for my waistline, not that I have much of one anyhow. In addition, I would like to add a couple of other puzzles that I don’t already have, the Megaminx and the Holey Megaminx. I suspect the second will be easier to do because there’s no centres to match the rest of the face against, but I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before... anyhow, they  both have twelve faces, each  face shares its pieces with five other sides, and they do look quite difficult. One variant has six colours, where opposite sides have the same colour, but the other variant has twelve colours, to remove the chance that two pieces with the same colour pairing can get mismatched. No doubt there'll be other puzzles I want to lay my hands on. Not only are there single-layered versions, but there are double-layered Gigaminx, three-layered Tetraminx, and four-layered Petaminx, though I've no idea what the last one looks like. I've also seen online versions of the Megaminx, and it's easy to use but hard to get used to without the real thing in my hands.

Have camera, will snap

A new dawn

A few months ago, someone I knew was finishing a course, and I was invited to the leaving ceremony. That was fair enough, except his mother, with even more unsteady hands than me, wanted me to use her camera to take some pictures of the ceremony. It was at that stage that I found out how badly I sucked at photography, and how badly the camera did its job. It was a little point-and-shoot camera, but I don't remember it having any optical zoom.

I gave up in the end, only having taken about five shots. I've no idea how any of them turned out, nor have I asked since. It was way before then that I decided I wanted to get into digital photography, but it was at that leaving ceremony that I decided I was never going to pick up one of those little cameras again. At least, not without a much better idea of how to get the best out of it.

I finally entered the age of digital photography today, with the arrival yesterday of my first proper digital camera. No, I'm not talking about those hosey little webcams, that can barely reach 640x480 for motion, and maybe 1024x768 for still pictures. Nor the webcam that happens to be on my cellphone, at 1.3 Mpix, which only does 1280x1024 for a maximum size. Instead, this little camera (the Fujifilm Finepix S5600) which was first released five years ago, features 5 Megapixels on the CCD. That doesn't sound like a lot in these days of 10/11/12/14 Megapixel cameras, but it still manages to show a respectable 2592x1944 pixels in 4:3 mode, or 2736x1824 in 3:2 (the same format as 35mm film.) That allows for a full size print roughly A4 in size, and that's without enlarging it.

I have a whole lot yet to learn about how exposure, aperture, shutter speed and ISO rating all interact to produce the perfect picture, but with this camera, I get to find all that out, as I'm able to tweak most of these settings by hand. Of course, the camera has a really good automated mode for those point-&-shooters that don't want to fiddle, but I decided early on that if I wanted to get into photography, I wanted what I see through the viewfinder to be exactly the same as the picture I get in the camera. Unfortunately, this camera doesn't provide that, though it's pretty darn close. There's two reasons. First, it's not a dSLR, though it looks like a baby brother of one. I have to admit though, that a lot of the reviewers that reviewed this camera when it came out said that it's pretty close in features to the bottom end dSLR cameras. The second reason is the failing that all cameras have: the viewfinder. In this case, it's a 115,000 pixel 1.8 inch display, and though it's crisp and clear, the resolution and its size really lets it down. The viewfinder is no better, though you at least have the advantage of sealing out the remainder of surrounding light, pretty useful when it's bright sunlight and you can't see the screen even with the brightness pushed up a bit.

Looking up the first review of the camera, with its impressive (for the time) optical zoom basically decided me on it. All the previous cameras I had looked at in the same price range featured 3x optical zoom and maybe a bit better digital zoom. There's plenty of things on the Internet already steering us away from digital zoom, as it typically reduces the number of pixels it initially captures. So I wanted high optical zoom, even with the need for something to stabilise the camera with. My only remaining problem was how much I was going to have to pay for it. Luckily, I stumbled across two things. One: somebody to sell it at a price I could afford. Two: something I could sell that would give me that much money. I sorted those both out, now I have the camera in my hot hands. I was exceptionally lucky, as the owner basically threw in everything with the camera that wasn't any use with other cameras they already owned. The fact that it is a second-hand camera helped to drop the price too. It's not ancient, which means that it has more of the modern technology inside of it to help out.

In addition to the camera unit, and the two cables that came with the camera, I also got a camera bag, a 2 Gb xD card, a 256 Mb xD card, a circular polarising lens, and a lens hood that also features a 52 mm thread and an additional 55 mm thread for adding other filters or lenses. All of this means that if I can find further lenses (whether 55 mm or 52 mm, or larger if I purchase step-up rings), I can actually make the S5600 the core of my own little optical warehouse. This comes with a qualifier though, they have to be suitable for digital cameras, and they have to work with the lens that's there already. The large 10x zoom can be expanded further by a 2x telephoto lens that can be added, which makes my total optical zoom ratio up in the low 20s. And that's before I kick in the digital zoom, not that I ought to be using that anyhow. If I want to go in the other direction, I can screw on a wide angle lens, which gives me a slightly wider field of view than the admittedly underpowered native 38 mm minimum focal length of the camera.

But first, I need to learn the ropes. That means getting to grips with all the features this camera has, before I start adding bits to it that I don't understand why I'm adding them for. So, needless to say, I'll be a happy snapper. No, there won't be too many pictures featured out of this camera that'll actually make it onto the Internet, but I hope you'll be happy with the ones I do show you all. And with that, I'm off to go get another shot.

Disproving theories is easier than proving them