And it's so like leica

So last week, I finally decided I needed a photo camera. I've never ever in my life owned a photo camera before, so this is a bigger decision than you'd might think. Yes, I've had mobile phones with camera's, three up 'till now, and I've even used them to make pictures, but never a real photo camera. So, what changed my mind? In short, it was a link from daringfireball.net to this page, a wonderful love story of a guy with a Leica M9, written by Thorsten Overgaard. It's described there as a mix between a DSLR and a point and shoot camera, with the goodies of both.

Leica's are hard to find around here. And it turns out that the M9 is horribly expensive. It can cost up to €6000, but in his love letter he mentioned a cheaper alternative, the Leica D-lux. So after reading the whole article, I took the plunge and decided I needed a Leica D-lux 5 for €699. However, because it would become my first camera, I needed to hold it in my hands before buying it. As it turned out, this was a good call.

Upon arriving in the photo store, the seller told me that, yes they have a Leica D-lux 5, but did I know that for €220 less I could be the owner of exactly the same camera but with a Panasonic label instead of the iconic red Leica label? He had both in stock, and demonstrated them both to me. Upon a few external design differences, they were practically the same.

So now I'm the proud owner of a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX5


And it's so like leica...

Zaaf

Reduce Mac Pricing?

In a recent article, ars technica suggests that Apple should reduce the prices of their products in order to gain market share. In my non-statistically sound experience of buying two high-end Apple-branded laptops I can definitely state that macs have become a lot cheaper.
My first ever Macintosh computer was an Apple Titanium Powerbook G4 667MHz with 30GBytes of hard drive and 512MBytes of RAM, which I bought for € 3229 (excluding 19% sales tax) on March 30th, 2002. I recently bought a MacBook Pro 2.5GHz core 2 duo with 250GBytes of hard drive and 4GBytes of RAM for € 1995 (excluding 19% sales tax). My TiBook had only half of its maximum RAM where the MacBook Pro has its full RAM allotment. So over the course of six and a half years, the high end Apple Macintosh laptop has become 38% cheaper.

I wouldn't mind if Apple dropped their prices even more, but I'm not complaining about their current prices.

Zaaf

No iPhone for me

Lately, I've been looking more and more seriously at the iPhone. T-Mobile started carrying it on the 11th of July and its subscription fees are not so horrendous as to make it improbable for me to even consider it. Switching to the iPhone would make me pay roughly twice as much on a monthly basis as my current T-Mobile subscription, which is steep, but then again, I plan to use the data access a lot more with the iPhone than compared with my current phone.

However, a short trip to the T-Mobile store confirmed that I have to wait until my subscription ends before I'm allowed to pay T-Mobile more money on a monthly basis. And since my subscription ends somewhere in 2010 this means no iPhone for me. The bright side of this is of course that all the current 3G-issues plaguing the iPhone will be solved, presumably to be replaced by new issues for new features.

So no iPhone for me (for now),

Zaaf

Mac is Back

Last week, I bought a new MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, there were some issues with the keyboard and the multi touch trackpad. When typing heavily, sometimes the keyboard and trackpad would stop working. A bluetooth mouse however still worked and a reboot cleared the issue. The console.log file displayed things like:
Aug 4 14:18:21 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDebug: data length is 0 in enqueueData
Aug 4 14:22:37 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDriver::_deviceGetReport: DeviceRequest (interface 0, reportID 0x0) returned error 0xe00002ed
Aug 4 14:22:37 zaafBook kernel[0]: AppleUSBMultitouchDebug: _deviceGetReport returned an error in configureDataMode

After having had to reboot six times in two days because of this, I got tired of it and went back to the shop. Here they declared it DOA (Dead On Arrival) and could I please provide the box it came in? Unfortunately, the box had fallen victim to our belated spring cleaning activities and was already lost to mankind. This meant they had to replace the topcase, which took them until yesterday to fix.

I've been playing with my MacBook Pro for a few hours and I've not yet seen the issues I was plagued with. So I'm happy to see that my newest Mac is Back,

Zaaf

Spring cleaning time

Everyone of us probably has that big box of cables and assorted electronic gear that's been gathering dust over the past years. In my case there were two boxes, plus some cables lying in the proximity of the boxes and the computer. Today I took the opportunity to go through all of my cables and stuff and decide what to throw away. For fun's sake I made a list:

1. Apple Powerbook G4 667MHz with power adapter, spare power cord and two spare batteries;
2. IOmega Zip Drive with parallel interface, including parallel cable and power adapter;
3. 40GByte iPod 3G, with the black and white interface and a broken hard drive;
4. Palm m505 with usb cradle and power adapter;
5. Belkin USB 2.0 riser card that was used in my PowerMac;
6. Sony battery charger for the 20th anniversary walkman;
7. 10/100 Mb Ethernet card;
8. ATA 100 raid card;
9. 3 parallel ATA 66 cables;
10. Creative Soundblaster microphone from 1995;
11. Broken Sony earbuds;
12. Sennheiser earbuds;
13. Sweex 128MB MP3 player with earbuds;
14. RF-plug male;
15. Palm 16MB SD Card;
16. Compaq two button ps/2 ball mouse;
17. Trust mouse to go with their touch pad;
18. Logitech 3 button ps/2 ball mouse;
19. Logitech 2 button ps/2 ball mouse;
20. Logitech scroll wheel usb optical mouse;
21. small 2 button usb optical mouse;
22. Parallel Cable;
23. RS 232C to Parallel adapter;
24. RF TV splitter;
25. 6.8GB Maxtor HDD;
26. USB charge stand;
27. 3 uk-style power cords, one with a 3A fuse;
28. 2 grounded power cords;
29. USB WIFI access point;
30. DV-in enabler for Sony handycams;
31. Bose holding etui for their horrible in-earbuds;
32. USB enclosure for hard drives, including 30 GB HDD and power adapter;
33. USB enclosure for hard drives, including 80 GB HDD and power adapter;
34. Two HDD enclosures with mounting brackets for swapping hard drives in a PC-Tower, including a 8GB and a 20GB hard drive
35. four-way USB hub with power adapter;
36. 15 meter of telephone wire;
37. telephone wire with ethernet-style plug and wall socket plug;
38. USB to PS/2 adapter;
39. 42 3 1/4" diskettes;
40. Wall mounting bracket for original "ufo" Airport;
41. Din 4-pin to Din 4-pin cable;

That's the lot. And when we go through other boxes and shelves, I'm sure that we'll find a lot more obsolete hardware. Still it feels weird to do the spring cleaning in the summer holidays.

Zaaf

Turned a new leaf

Yesterday, after finally receiving a nice bonus from my previous employer, I went to my local Apple dealer and got myself a shiny new machine. After my PowerBook died on me, I tried to use my iPod Touch as the web browser for the living room. However, due to some limitations of both the hardware and some web sites, I decided to treat myself to a new MacBook Pro.
And after receiving my final paycheck from my previous employer, I went ahead and bought the 2.5 GHz, 4GB Ram MacBook Pro, together with a time capsule for my backups and a new wireless mouse. I now can browse the web again while watching a movie.

This is so much more enjoyable than sitting in the attic with my Mac Pro and missing the ins and outs of the series my wife follows on TV.

Zaaf

New eye on the world

Just in time for the summer holidays, I bought a new, small and lightweight 1080p HD widescreen Sony video camera. It's a nice looking thing that records only to sony memory sticks. It's name is the Sony HDR TG3E. Now that's what I call a sexy name! I wish more companies would uses letter / number combinations for their product names. It just rolls of your tongue so easily doesn't it? HDR TG3E. It's great! It's so unlike those boring Apple names like "iPhone" and "MacBook". No, Sony gets it!

Anyway, this camera is so small, that they omitted the view finder, which makes it rather awkward to use in sunny spots. The other thing they did with it is move most of the controls to the touchscreen. And Sony is so confident that it's easy to use, that they don't even provide a booklet on how to get started. This lack of buttons and view finder makes it a very attractive looking camera, which of course, they had to undo a bit by plastering all kinds of stickers on them to advertise it greatness.

The good things about this camera are:

• It's very light and small, meaning that it easily fits in the pocket of your coat. However, since I bought it for the summer holidays, this is a moot point because I don't wear coats in summer.
• Because there is no view finder, you need the screen to film. Sony made it so, that the camera starts the moment you flip open the screen, thus saving another button.
• The fact that it uses memory sticks instead of tape means that it starts very fast. It even has an automatic stand-by mode that makes it even faster to stop and re-start filming.
• The memory card also gets rid of the fear that you tape over a previous scene.
• The zooming button is slowed down considerably compared to my previous camera, making it almost impossible to zoom too fast in a shot.
• Getting rid of the tape means that transferring your video from the camera can be done at much higher speeds, without the possibility of frames that are dropped. With a tape, there is always the possibility that the computer is too busy with other things to be able to capture al frames. With a memory card, this is no longer an issue because it has direct access.

Of course there are also some bad things about it:

• The battery has a small capacity. You can only shoot up to 40 minutes of video with it.
• The battery is placed inside the camera, making it look nice, but disallowing you to attach a bigger capacity battery.
• The Wide-angle on the lens is not very wide. Making some shots hard to capture. I've ran into this more times than I would like.

But overall, I'm quite pleased with this new camera. If you want, you can find some films at YouTube.

Zaaf

Turn to a new leaf in a new book

As I wrote before, my PowerBook decided to die. I did indeed manage to salvage my data by booting into FireWire Target mode after holding down the ‘T’ on startup. This allowed me to copy over my complete ~/. directory.
The harddisk seemed to be alright as /sbin/fsck -fy did not find any issues. Next step I took was zeroing out the harddisk drive and cleanly install Tiger on it. The format stage went fine, the install stage however ended half-way through in an official kernel panic. So something somewhere must be fried. And presumably it's on the logic board.

All in all this means I'm in the market for a new laptop. It is time to close the Book of Power for the last time and turn over a new leaf in a new book. Most likely it will be the Book of Mac. I had my eye cast towards the MacBook Air, but its lack of target FireWire mode made me reconsider this, especially after this recent mishap. So it's time to draw up my requirements for a new MacBook. And in my head they're already skewed towards the 15" MacBook Pro. In fact I already configured one in the Online Apple Store but I decided to wait until I can justify it for myself.

Time will tell,

Zaaf

Running out of Power (book)

Last night, my trusty PowerBook decided to kernel panic on me. And now every app I open results in a segmentation fault. This is not so good. It seems that after only 6.3 years it's already running out of power. Maybe I can resurrect it by installing Tiger afresh onto it. And maybe I can salvage my ~/Library by booting it in Target Firewire mode and connecting it to my Mac Pro, but that's not very likely. If only Apple showed new MacBook Pros during the Stevenote at WWDC. It would make the decision much easier.

On the other hand I get a Lenovo Vistaster laptop from my work to use everywhere, so maybe I can use that at home for surfing on the couch.

We'll see,

Zaaf

Now watch

Finally my 2007 bonus arrived. Last Christmas, I saw a nice watch at the local jeweler store. It's an Issey Miyake produced watch by the designer TO. And immediately I was captured by the stark simplicity of the design. I promised myself to buy it when my bonus arrived, so last Wednesday, I left work early to stop by the jeweler and now I'm the proud owner of this wonderful new watch.



Watch and see,

Zaaf

3x4 makes 16

I just found out that my beloved Mac Pro had been swapping. This is not to be tolerated, so I went to the shop and treated my Mac Pro, and myself of course, to three packets of four gigabyte of ram. These packets contain two DIMMs of two gigabytes each. So now, together with the four gigabytes already installed, I've got a grand total of 16 GB of ram. And I'm still amazed at how easy it is to install it. Open up the side, pull out the two memory boards, insert the DIMMS and put the two boards back again. And because the memory riser boards are laying in front of you when you do this, there is now awkward positioning of hands and or readjustments of cables needed to perform this. Very convenient.

Zaaf

Hit me on my iPod!

Last Friday I bought myself an 32GB iPod Touch. My main plan is to use it as a calendar application which also can play video and audio. It's a great little gadget for almost everything and the more I use it, the more Iike it. Even the keyboard is not as bad as I was made to believe by keyboard junkies. case in point is this blog post which is typed entirely on the onscreen keyboard of the iPod. The only thing that I don't like is the iPod app. First off all it feels like a klunky app. And it doesn't shuffle albums. And it can only play songs in album order when the are started from an album. Even the order of playlists is changed to alphabetical. And lyrics are shown centred regardless of the formatting in iTunes. And podcast shownotes are not shown at all. And it is stupid that I have to unlock, select the audio app, select the "now playing" button and press "pause" before a song is paused. But apart from that, I really like it.

So for me the iPod Touch is a success except for the iPod part,

Zaaf

Bored

Who wouldn't be bored with such a car.

Yesterday, I took the family to the Muiderslot in Muiden and on the parking lot I noticed this car.

Looks like a very boring car indeed,

Zaaf

Washing Hands

Last year Sun, maker of dish washing soap tablets, introduced a soluble wrapper around their tablets. The idea behind this is that you don't need to wash your hands after you've tried to open the wrapper and placed the tablet in the dishwasher. This seems like a nice innovation, because who likes to wash their hands needlessly?

However, what happens in a normal dishwasher filling scenario is that you have a stack of dirty plates and cutlery and put them in the machine. This will get your hands dirty, at least that's what happens to me. Then, because you do not want to soil the cardboard container of the tablets, you wash and dry your hands. Now, unless you've found a way to dry your hands completely, there is bound to be some moisture left on your hands. This is where Sun's research is faulty, because the tablet wrapper immediately begins to dissolve, leaving you with a mucky feeling on you're hands. This results in an extra hand washing, so the intended effect of the special wrappers is undone by the fact that it's special.

This is a useless innovation,

Zaaf

Infuriating good headphones.

No, this is not another rant on my Windows eXPerience. This time I'll share you my thoughts on the iPod ear buds that came with the iPod 5.5G and what I did about them.

I've been an iPod user since March 2002. My first iPod had a 5GB hard-drive and a physical scroll-wheel. Sometimes when I feel nostalgic I long for the feel of control that was communicated by that wheel. This one I replaced because I had way more music on my PowerBook than would fit on my iPod. My second iPod I bought in August 2004. It was the 40GB that preceded the iPod Photo. I replaced that one in September 2006 because the hard-drive broke down. In its turn I got a 5.5G 80GB black iPod.

All my iPod-using time I've been using the standard issue ear buds that came with the iPods. I even managed to keep hold of that piece of foam to put over the speaker end that goes into your ear. I never got a knot in my cable and I never had ear phone wires break down on me. And before the iPod I had a variety of Discmen and Walkmen, whose standard issue ear buds or phones I used without problems over the past twenty-odd years.

And then, without warning, in the winter of 2007, the ear buds of my new iPod 5.5G failed me. There was a bad connection in one of the wires. So off I went to my local store to get me a nice new pair. Somehow the sales-guy convinced me to spend &eur; 100,- on a set of ear buds that I could not even test. I got the Bose In-Ear Headphones, and the first thing I did when I turned them on was to go to the equalizer settings and reach for the bass reducer setting. I've since then turned off all equalizer settings and now I enjoy my .mp3's in a clarity and nuance that I never could have imagined. This is way better an improvement than to encode all your CD's at twice the bitrate. There is so much detail exposed to me that was previously not presented to me with the default iPod head phones that the difference is almost unbelievably big. I've since then tried the Sennheiser CX300 but for me they didn't even come close to the music I get from my Bose headphones.

However, these headphones from Bose are also very awkward, infuriatingly so. First of all, the cord is very stiff, almost impossibly stiff when compared to the Sennheiser, Sony and Apple headphones I've used in the past. But more importantly, the in ear part of the ear bud is a silicon tip which separates much to easily from the ear bud. They get dislodge in the most awkward places, and they tend to blend-in with their surroundings much to well. And because I can't order a spare set, I have to search very well to be able to get my music in high quality with my Bose ear buds. I've lost them on the street while cycling, lost them under my desk three times at work, lost them in the car, lost them on the street while walking, lost them at the beach, lost them at home several times, lost them to the vacuum cleaner, and the list goes on and on. There is not a week going by where I do not have to search for my ear bud tips. And if the sound wasn't as good as it is I would have switched head phones a long time ago. In fact, the main reason for me to buy the Sennheiser CX300's was because of the dislodging issue.

So, until I stumble upon a good pair of headphones, I'll just search and listen to my good but infuriating headphones,

Zaaf

MacBook Air, is it here to stay?

The MacBook Air by Apple is a nice piece of engineering. In the Macworld 2008 Keynote, Steve Jobs went into detail on what was needed to make it so thin. Leave out an optical drive, flatten the battery, use an iPod hard-drive and shrink the connector-board of the cpu. This last bit concerns me a bit. The CEO and Chairman of Intel, Paul Otellini came on stage telling that it was a big headache for them to make it so small, that it took them over half a year, but that they're pleased with the outcome. If it took them so long to make it, will they put in that same effort when the MacBook Air is due for a cpu upgrade? Or, given the worse than expected results of Intel in 2007, will Intel forgo on the needed R&D?

My prediction is that the MacBook Air will receive fewer cpu upgrades than the other Apple computers. And that it will be taken out of production within two years.

Zaaf

Let's a go!

Just arrived. Mario gokart

It's childplay

The nintendo ds is so easy to use that even four-year olds can win at Mario cart.

Work setup

This is what I look at for roughly 36 hours a week. It's a good thing I have to tidy my desk every night before I leave, because otherwise I would be swamped in papers.

Oh, and I need a bigger monitor. The left one is used to access a developer environment which runs our production environment (don't ask). The right one is for office and e-mail. Applications on the right can span to the left. But those on the left cannot spill-over to the right. And as always with software, there is so much anger and hate going round. To minimize this, I dutifully follow http://we.hates.software and Worse Than Failure.

Zaaf

My old phone

I just received a new camera phone. It allows of to post straight to my blog. So here is a picture of my old phone, taken with my new one. 

The only thing I wanted from T-Mobile was to lower my monthly subscription fee to €5,-. But no, they had to sent me the Sony Ericsson K800i for free, including a bluetooth headset. Well who am I to say no to that.

Zaaf