January 24th, 2010
I’ve been using Panasonic GF1 camera for almost a month now.
What I like about this camera:
- compact size,
- slim and speedy 20mm lens,
- long video files (up to 30″ for the European market),
- lens are interchangable;
- quick autofocus (compared to other contrast-type autofocusing systems);
- face recognition (speeds up autofocusing in video mode),
- a responsive high-resolution display.
What’s not so pleasant:
- noise (it’s higher than in a three-year old Canon 400D),
- shutter lag (half a second after having autofocused),
- camera body is slippery,
- some menu controls are inconvenient (e.g. when deleting multiple photos, one can easily deselect photos instead of deleting them or moving on with selection);
- digital viewfinder has a very low-res display: for 180 € you get 0.4 Mpx, something like 640×480, not even 800×600 px;
- no in-body accelerometer, that means that you’ll have to rotate your photos by 90° manually if you use lens with no stabilization.
January 11th, 2010
Having bought VX Nano mouse I didn’t want to use a CD to install Logitech software. It took a while to find out that Mac software is called ‘Control Center’, Windows driver is called ‘Set Point’.
December 13th, 2009
Rackspace Cloud Files CDN will redownload your file from the US storage every time you put something new after the question mark:
- http://[container].cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/object,
- http://[container].cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/object?something,
- http://[container].cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/object?something-new.
You’ll end up having a low download speed for those URLs even though they point to one file.
So, the front side of Rackspace CDN thinks these are different objects. And the source Rackspace server sees no difference between the URLs.
This behaviour is a traffic waste.
December 11th, 2009
There’s an official iPhone application to manage your Rackspace Cloud account. As of today, it’s not very useful. I’d like to mention some functions which the app v. 1.1 currently lacks.
- You can neither stop nor destroy Cloud Servers.
- No price list for server instances.
- No usage stats.
- For Cloud Files there is no option to view a public URL of a file or to see a CDN container identity. You can do it only with an ‘Email Link to File’ option.
- No ‘refresh’ button in ‘Servers’ menu, which means you can’t quickly see when a server was created. And, strangely, even after reopening of the app, you will see your new server only in a couple of minutes. There is no such lap in Rackspace Cloud management panel.
What this app allows you to do is basically create new server instances. But ongoing development promises that the app will be more flexible.
August 13th, 2009
Push Notifications for Google Talk accounts in BeejiveIM are available for one hour since Beejive was quit.
But you can change this timeout in the iPhone Preferences for Beejive.
May 11th, 2009
I’m not a chess amateur. Never was fond of chess. Having read in ‘Daring Fireball’ about ‘Deep Green’ chess, I didn’t rush into buying the app.
Read the rest of this entry »
April 30th, 2009
With all the extentions, Radiant CSM promises to take quite a time to configure the way I want. Instead of changing plugins how I think they should work, pushing them to GitHub, awaiting for each plugin author’s response, I switched to WordPress.