Saturday, April 05, 2014

The smallest full-frame camera

It is a bit strange to me that Sony has yet to get any real competition to their Super-Compact full frame camera RX1 (kewl vid), or their quality pocket camera RX100 with a really big sensor for the camera size. Will they really keep this amazing market to themselves? When nobody step up to the challenge?

Thursday, April 03, 2014

A block on me getting your comments to fix

I've been alerted that something is blocking the emails which I usually get when somebody comment on my blog.
I will try to fix this.

In the meantime, if recently you've put in a comment which you thought I would reply to and I didn't, you can go to eolake.com and use the email address at the bottom. Thank you. - Eolake

Doing it is patriotic

[No comments on my April Fool's piece about the Hacker State? Does this mean it was a flop or too successful?]

Many countries have a problem with low birth rates. It's a real crisis in Japan for example, they'll basically die out in a few generations if things don't change.
I had not heard it is also a problem in my native Denmark. But it is. One birth per 100 people, that's catastrophic if you want to maintain a population and want it to be mostly native.
Maybe it's tied to Satisfaction. If people are generally satisfied, why shake things up?

The big Danish travel agency Spies has made a daring commercial which gives a prize to a winner amongst those who can prove in the future that their child was conceived on one of their Spies travels!

(I can't figure out how to embed a Youboob video when posting from my iPad. Neither the yt app nor their web site gives the code. Any ideas?)

Tuesday, April 01, 2014

Denmark to become the first "hacker nation"

Danmark og Europa. Regeringens oplæg til dialog, article (in Danish)

[Please notice this is an April fools article.)

The government of Denmark has decided upon an unusual, not to say virtually untried, way out of the global financial crisis: Freedom of speech. Which might be read: "freedom from copyright".

"Our neighbor Sweden got into hot water by hosting the very controversial PiratBay web site", says Danish Prime Minister Mogens Glistrup. "But they did not go in prepared, they had not done their homework, and they did not have our motivation, determination, and frankly, our desperation."

The Internet has long been seen as potential salvation for all kinds of desires and behavior which are in legal grey areas, some of them quite dark grey. The problem is that while there is a lot of money to be gained in these grey areas, there are also a lot of money to be protected by black-washing the same grey areas.

"We plan to roll this out over a five-year period," says

Glistrup. "We are looking into kinds of pornography which is illegal in many countries, such as zoophelia." (It is worth noting that Denmark was the First Nation to legalize pornography in 1969, and other nations followed suit when rape stats dropped as a result. Denmark even exported zoophelia porn in the seventies, "which wasn't bad at all," according to Glistrup, "and production values could of course easily be much better today.) "We are considering 100% anonymous file hosting, even protected from international and our own law enforcement".

We are investigating hosting sites which are generally banned contrary to freedom of speech, such as "hate speech" sites and information about how to make weapons, drugs, and explosives. But we are probably starting with the easy one: making it legal to link to, though not host, copyright-protected materials. Our stance will be "free and found is legal", or "finder's keepers" as our nay-sayers call it," Glistrup said with a self-depreciating laugh, adding that special taxation will "naturally" be the price for being hosted in this new haven of Net freedom.

We wish Denmark luck in this endeavor. While it is clear that short-term harm may come from it, such as innocents dying in bombings or children learning the facts of life before the parents are ready to teach them, the long-term advantages are enormous, no less than the freedom of mind and knowledge, and this may eventually lead to spiritual greatness and who knows, perhaps even a galactic empire for mankind.

1st April, 2014

Non-standards

I really like the smaller camera companies, Fuji, Olympus, Pentax, Sony. They often make some fabulous products which the "Canikon" hegemony has no interest in.
But: they are often clueless when it comes to using standard tech. Like a camera where you can't change the battery, you have to plug in the whole thing with a special apparatus to charge it.

Or this one: There's a firmware update now to Olympus E-M1. And it turns out that instead of giving you a file you put on the camera's memory card, you have to install a special app on your computer, then connect the camera to the computer, and the update will happen over the Net...

Great. I find out how to access the USB port on the camera, you have to lift out the tiltable screen first... of course. Only now it turns out: none of my USB cables fit in the durn camera!
It is already bad enough that there are four different male plugs for USB, but this...
I google around a bit, and find somebody selling a USB cable for Olympus. It looks a bit different. Then it dawns on me, I still have the box the camera came in. I look in that box. No cable. Aha, there's a section of the cardboard origami trick which is so subtle as to be almost invisible, and there's the cable.
Indeed, it fits. Olympus has made and demands use of their own special USB plug, lord knows why.

And then it turns out that the installer or the camera won't recognize the USB connection, so I can't install anyway. I'll bet anything that if they'd just given us a file to put on the memory card, there'd have been no issue.

Normally I love technology, but sometimes I have sympathy for those who long for a simpler life.