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

They made them good, back in them days

Well, not that good really, but okay. I'm talking specifically about a little hand mixer with two beaters, I'm not sure if it was a little Kenwood or a Sunbeam. However, back in those days (I'm talking about the 1980s here) they didn't bother putting on stupid secure screws so Joe So Lame Lewser couldn't get in and try to fix it herself. They just put on two Phillips screws, and left it at that. The reason I mention this is: I've just saved myself what could have been a very costly repair bill by repairing the mixer myself. Thankfully the fix was simple. If the mixer had those "other" screws in, the ones with the heads that only professional repair places should be able to undo, then I probably wouldn't have been able to repair what ended up to be a dead simple fault.

The symptoms: one of the two mixer blades would lock in, but the other one would no longer lock in, and kept falling out. I got a little sick of trying to use it with just one working blade, so I undid the two screws, hoping like anything I could get it back together again even if I couldn't fix what was originally wrong. Luckily I found what was wrong. Inside the mixer, a clip-washer had come off one of the rotor-gears, stopping it from working properly. After a good ten minutes which included removing the entire motor from the housing just to replace the clip washer, I finally got the clip washer back on, put everything back together again, making sure I put both springs back where they belonged (one had fallen off) replaced the washer I'd forgotten to put back on the first time, and shrugged my shoulders at the other missing washer, as there wasn't much I could do about it. As far as I could tell, the old mixer still worked in every other regard, so I had no reason to spend any more money getting a new one, so needless to say, I'm pretty pleased with myself. The only problem being, I still haven't finished the job, the other beater still flaps around like anybody's business, but hey, I did it myself. Chalk that one up to home repairs everywhere.

As long as you're extremely careful, and don't do anything stupid, a lot of simple faults can actually be repaired without having to cart the item off to a professional service centre. In saying this, don't bother with the repair if the item's still under warranty. And if the dead/missing/broken/faulty part involves items with more legs than you've got eyes, then forget it too. You'll only break the warranty, and you may end up with an item you can't repair (because you lack the tools/expertise/parts) and have to pay the full cost of the repair instead.

It’s all shiny, captain!

To be fair, I haven’t seen this message in Google’s Wave interface very often, but this is the error message you get from the Wave interface when something’s gone pear-shaped. They generally provide a input box where you can type in what you were doing (“Looking at a wave”), and submit that to the technical people. You then have to refresh the page. This is much simpler than some other things I’ve seen happen, where browsers promptly die, very occasionally taking the operating system with them. Yes Sue, I’ve seen that happen.

It’s certainly in a “closed beta” stage, though “semi-open” would be a more correct term, as Google have been handing gobs of invites out to those who politely ask, or to those who get given one by a waver who is already on line. And you can tell the functionality’s not all there, though there are certainly things you can do. Who would have thought you could stream video and music twenty years ago? GoogleWave reminds me of a house that’s just being built, so random decisions about the wallpaper are getting made before some of the walls are even up. They’re sort of stringing cabling through the joists to bring power to the plasma television they have up on the wall behind me. And they’ve already changed what goes on the floors about seven times before they standardised on white concrete. Or was that wood panel? Nope, it was ceramic tiles, I think. But I think you get the point. We’re still finding out how to tie in everything else from twitter to blogs, music to live video, email, MSN chats, and lots of other stuff. But the remaining problem is: how do we use it without referring to whatever else we’ve all been doing before Google Wave came along?

That’s a little trickier.

At the moment at least, I’m using it as a glorified IRC client with fancy formatting, and “paste-where-you-like” functionality. As long as all parties are present on a wave, and nobody stomps on anyone else, it can be even more fun than IRC, purely because of the removal of the linear input structure mandated by IRC. The same applies to any Instant Message services, because they present information to the user in a continuous stream of lines. Google Wave does that bit better than any of the other messaging services I’ve used, including jabber. But I’m still trying to use it as a series of lines to communicate. And I’m not entirely sure that that’s what GoogleWave is good at. The fact that a conversation is just there, is great. Nobody has to worry about archiving it any more. Of course, if Google Wave goes teats-up, then we may need to restart using somewhere else as a server. It’s definitely a server-client architecture, and probably requires a good understanding of the infrastructure of the server before you let your users loose on it.

Other posited uses of it have been:

• Live meeting notes
  While a meeting is happening, you can have a large number of meeting participants also taking notes, all on the same page. This requires some discipline, to make sure that you don’t have a catfight. Certain people need to take charge of specific areas and not step outside those boundaries, at least not without good reason. Other people probably could cruise through, correcting any obvious mistakes that don’t get picked up in the first five minutes or so.
• Wiki, or live F.A.Q.
  GoogleWave doesn’t have quite the same formatting abilities as a matchbox, but you can at least use highlight, bold, italic, strikethrough, underline, and choose font, size and colour. Paragraphs come for free, so does paragraph formatting. Images come through as links, or occasionally pasted as inline images with a border to them. All other files seem to be relegated to attachment status. Most of the time, these are all the formatting items you need in a wiki, at least. F.A.Qs aren’t much better.
• Document collaboration
  If a more complicated document is required, somebody can set up the structure of the document, somebody else can concentrate on the subject matter, and somebody else can get the formatting (yes, that’s separate from structure) of the content correct. Takes a bit of work, but nothing that others aren’t used to already.
• Show Off Page
  Needless to say, there are those of us who just like to browse the gadgets. Gadgets are gobs of code that provide anything from simple functionality a step up from lists of sets to fullblown applications embedded into the middle of a wave. They provide anything from simple twitter feeds, to maps from GoogleMaps, to included youtube videos, to … well, you can pretty much come up with anything you like. But, you need to get your code correct. If you don’t, well, it’s recorded for all eternity afterwards. If this worries you, then stick to what others have written. As long as it’s well written, and doesn’t stomp all over other content, then it’s acceptable to put small amounts of gadgets into a wave. Some of them don’t play pretty with other wave content though.
• And …
  Well, the sky’s the limit… or at least the coding quality of the Google Services upon which GoogleWave is based.

That’s a really short summary, and doesn’t provide anything like a full summary. At the time that GoogleWave was announced to the world, there was a video released (a long 82 minute video) that described many of the features present in GoogleWave at that time. Since that time, there have probably been advances in the stability of the underlying code, as well as other people making gadgets. On top of all this, of course, is the content in the very large number of waves present when you enter with:public  into the search box. People are obviously confident enough to take their content public, and not hide it away in a bunker somewhere. Of course, most of these are low-bandwidth, but there are probably a few examples of really good content. And with that I take my leave and wave goodbye.

See ya.

Trading on down

What? More books?

Oh yeah, but these are some classics. Not in the true sense of the word of course, I have enough Dickens and Dumas for the moment. But these will do. As you can see from the pic (yes, I know it's not a very good one), I got some Bond, James Bond. While I was at it, I also picked up the last James Clavell book I didn't already have in my collection. I've yet to gain what isn't in this list (Moonraker, Diamonds are forever, and a few others) but these are in okay condition, considering that they're all printed in the 1960s. I note that some of them aren't written by Ian Fleming, but rather by John Gardner. I haven't read any Bond books written by this author yet, so I'd like to know how the debonair spy is handled.

The Clavell is also in reasonable condition—it's also been looked after. They were all a pretty good price too, only $15.00, and that's including the cost of getting them here. Nine books, for that price, less than $1.67 per book. Should keep me happy, once I start (again) the Clavell series from the beginning with Shogun, and go all the way through to the last book, Whirlwind. Only this time, I'll finish each book before I go on to the next one.

Waving goodbye

Google Wave allows embedding of waves now. The only problem being that if a user that comes to the website to view this blogpost isn't logged into Google Wave, then they don't see any content within that box at the bottom of the post. Seems strange, but never mind. I've been having enough fun just trying to get my head around all that Google Wave can potentially be—watch this space for more details. I may even paste the static content from one of my waves here, that way everyone can at least view it, whether they're a 'waver or not. I just won't allow modifications from non-wavers.

And that's a wrap from me.