Pentax X90

Pentax X90.

A 26X zoom!! O mai gawd. When will the insanity stop? Will we end up with a 500 megapixel camera with a sensor like a pinky nail, and a 150X zoom lens plus 50X digital zoom?
Look, it's pretty useless, OK. Just ask reader and fellow blogger Ray. He has tried a couple of these super-zoom cameras, and all we hear is questions about why the pictures look like they're taken through a dirty plastic bag. (Update: I exaggerate... in good light and at short zoom levels, there are no problems.)
For good picture quality you need a biggish sensor, a short zoom at best, and no digital zoom at all. And you don't need anymore than 10 megapixels for prints and five for the web.

Update:
(I didn't even remember that Ray has the predecessor.) Ray says:

Here's a picture of my Pentax X70 on its Optex T25 tripod, in front of your web page on the monitor.
That Pentax X90 you show in the blog looks very similar to this X70, and probably is, except for a bit more of optical zoom. The right lighting has a big effect on zoomed pictures, I think... If the light's good, the results are much better - not so much noise in the images. I've noticed that for shots after dark, of lights or objects in the sky, there's a lot of noise in them. Shots in bright daylight come out much better. But I guess that's true of any camera, really...

That is true, only it's true in inverse ratio to the size of the sensor. These kinds of cameras look like they might have a rather big sensor, but it's really very small (less than ten milimeters to a side), which makes it not great for weak light. A camera like the big Canon 5DII, on the other hand, has a great big sensor (24x36mm), and you can hand-hold night-time pictures with it if you do it right (the right lens etc).
The downside is cost and size, especially for long zoom lenses, which will get  huge.

Testing blogging app

I could only find, to my surprise, a single app (with the simple name of BlogPress) which is aimed at blogging to Blogger from the iPad. So that's what I'm testing.
It seems pretty basic. You can add photos, but you can't format text in any way, and I think it's rather more fun when you can make bold and italics, change text size, indicate quotes with text color, and such. Though admittedly none of it is essential.

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Mobile blogging via Eolake's 'pad.

mywritingnook

mywritingnook, tweets for the writing app of that name. Good tips for indie writers. (I guess that's a pseudonym for "writers who are not all that successful yet"      :-)

What's included (dictaphone)

I keep getting amazed by how much is included in iOS devices (or, I'm sure, many other similar devices). For example I only noticed today that my iPhone 4 includes a dictaphone ("Voice Notes"). It's better quality than the Olympus digital one I paid good money for a few years ago, it's easier to use, has way higher capacity, and it can email voice notes to myself so I have them on my mac too (or to others of course).

I mean, this is seriously useful stuff, but in amongst everything that this little device can do, it's just thrown in as a extra you may not even notice.  Jeepers.

Big wallpaper photos

I found this great page for wallpaper photos, up to 1600 x 2560 (Apple Cinema Display) size.

If you know other sites with good photos or art in such size, please share.

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I just wish it weren't so common for photos on the web to be over-saturated and over-sharpened. I might even go for some more BW ones...
Like this one, very nice indeed:

Update: KabelYaache said:
Just in case you have ever taken a tripod and a camera out at night to do some shots, you might notice that the saturation of the lighted areas is increased. As well as the contrast.
But, it's easier to sit pretty writing about things, than actually doing them, n'est pas?

Eolake said:
I was not talking about those pics I had selected, but rather about those I hadn't.
And it's not all of them, just some. Like these:

iRetrofone goes steampunk

iRetrofone goes steampunk, post.

The handsets are connected to the iPhone. The lower one is resin, the top one is cast in copper! 

I think I may like the design of the black one better, actually.

Two And A Half Men

I am watching a recent episode of 2 1/2 Men. I learned a few things:

1. The kid is now so big, next season will be called 3.2 Men. 
2. You can say "ass" on TV, but not "whore" or "bastard". That puzzles me a bit. 
3. The real estate agent's fee for a 60M dollar home is 2 million! That puzzles me a lot. 

Why do teen boys (including myself back then) think that hair hanging almost over the eyes is cool?

I'm not sure if the words were bleeped (actually silenced) from the US or the UK.

Why do people not bypass real estate agents? Their fees are usually nuts, and it doesn't seem to me they do a lot to earn them.

Update: Jan said:
I've sold two houses, both times without an agent. It was no fun, but allowed me to avoid the extortionate fees.
If you plan to do it yourself, I suggest you get price estimates from several professionals who know the local market well. You can ask a bit more, but it will help you keep your feet on the ground (my original asking price for the first house was way too high, which made me lose a lot of time and some interesting buyers)
It also helps to take great photos and to fix it up a little bit (some paint can do wonders) to make it look more appealing.

Supergirl

Supergirl as Superman's cousin was killed off in the "Crisis on Infinite Earths" storyline by DC in the eighties. Since then there clearly was hot-young-supergirl shaped hole in the readers' mind, for she appeared in various forms over the years, including an android. But now she's back to being Kryptonian and Superman's cousin. But it does not seem she has the Linda Lee Danvers secret identity of old days. A pity. On the other hand, she's not averse to showing her tight midriff, a definite plus. 

In the well-regarded Justice League Unlimited animated series, her top is white, which I think is a bold idea (breaking with Superman's colors), and looks good on her.

Powergirl and Supergirl.

How computers think, part 112

I wrote a mail which I did not send immediately, because I was still uploading something which was linked to in the mail.

When it came to send the mail, I opened it from Apple Mail's "drafts" folder, and... it just sat there, empty, thinking and thinking and thinking, trying to recreate the content of the mail.

I did something else, giving it time, and it finally succeeded after several minutes! It turned out that I was opening a temporarily created version of the email where I had mistakenly copied/pasted the name of a folder on my computer instead of a web link, and Mail, unlike my old email app, does not interpret this as simple a bit of text, it understands it as me copy/pasting the actual folder into the mail... And in this case it was a 600MB folder with thousands of files, all of which it apparently, bravely, was getting itself reading to email to my poor correspondent!

If I have to send a list of files to somebody, I have to first copy/paste the list into a text editor, which converts it into just text, and then copy/paste this list, otherwise I end up mailing the files instead of the list!

I guess it's useful once you know about it and get used to it. Though I still think simple drag/drop is the easiest way to add an attachment.

The Mactini

[Thanks to Pascal]

Wow, finally a proper manual!



I wonder if it can be used for CAD/CAM?

Cheap classical collections

[Thanks to Andy]

Sadly and typically only available to US customers, here are ultra-cheap MP3 collections of classical music.

For Europe/UK, here's a similar offer. (Still highly economical, and I have just bought several of them. A remarkable and sudden expansion of my collection!)

All the world's a stage

"The American: businesslike, unwilling to be distracted.
      The Canadian: self-absorbed and disconnected from  reality.
              The Italian and the French: ”LOOK AT THAT BUTT”