Archive for May, 2009

Making photography more wallet-friendly

Friday, May 29th, 2009

I’ve recently been getting into photography, thanks to my girlfriend, Willow, and a couple of mutual friends of ours. At the moment, I’m shooting with a film camera, and as you can probably imagine, this isn’t the most cost-effective of approaches. As such, I’ve been looking into how to make it cheaper for me to enjoy this hobby (especially as I’m a student with limited funds).

Obviously, the cheapest option in the long-term would be to buy a DSLR (Digital SLR) camera, however, I want to carry on shooting with a film camera for the time being (although I do have plans to buy a DSLR towards the end of the summer). Due to this, I’ve been focusing on how to make it as cheap as possible to do film photography. I have been taking my film to Jessops to get them processed, printed, and scanned, but the quality of the scans were, at best, mediocre. Jessops also used cold developer when developing my roll of Ilford HP5, which resulted in unacceptably high levels of grain. They also scan colour images with a green/blue cast to them, which in some cases, can completely ruin a good photo. A friend on IRC has recommended (on numerous occasions) that I use Peak Imaging for photo processing, then to scan the photos myself at home. Peak Imaging offers a discount when many rolls of film are sent in to be developed at once. The main expenditure in this plan would be forking out for a film scanner: a decent model would set me back about £200-odd. But after so many rolls of film, it would start paying for itself: after doing the maths, it would take approximately 20 rolls of film until the scanner started paying for itself (assuming mid/high-resolution scans). In addition, having your own film scanner allows you to scan only particular frames from the negatives – or particular slides – and at higher resolutions.

So, although I do plan to get a DSLR, it seems to be well worth buying a flim scanner, especially as I plan to continue using film throughout my experiments with photography. The £200 expenditure quickly pays for itself, and allows me to worry much less about how much I’m spending whilst taking photos. I’ll also start buying film in bulk once I’ve identified my favourites, and store them in fridges so that they don’t go out of date so fast: every little helps…

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Posted in Photography | 1 Comment »

Is IM dying out?

Thursday, May 28th, 2009

It seems to me that with the (relatively) new microblogging technologies such as Twitter and Identi.ca, and the increasing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, the use of IM technologies such as MSN, AIM and Jabber is decreasing.

Although I have an account on most of the IM services, I’ve found myself being online less and less, and it doesn’t have such an important place in my mind. I’m not sure whether this is because many of my close friends have started using IRC, or because I’ve started to keep up with old friends more on Facebook, or because I’m keeping track of what aquaintences are up to using Twitter, but my use of Jabber and MSN is slowly decreasing, even though I have over 200-odd contacts. Having said this, I do find myself using Facebook Chat more and more often, even though I hate its guts. Why? Simply because various close friends and family members find it easier and simpler to use, and more accessible than any of the other technologies available at the moment. Don’t forget that we’re talking about (relatively) tech-illiterate folk here.

It might be due to Facebook Chat becoming more “mainstream” and easier to use. Or the fact that people don’t seem to equate their GMail account with IM functuality (i.e. GTalk). Or the amount of nonsense encountered on MSN. But as far as I can tell, the use of specialised IM technologies is decreasing on a regular basis, and the use of microblogging and social networking sites is increasing extremely quickly.

Many people are talking about the death of social networking sites such as Facebook due to microblogging technologies, however I refuse to believe that this is the case. But I do think that the use of IM technologies for communication between friends and family members is going down the drain. I cannot, however, speak for the use (or lack thereof) of IM technologies in the workplace – I know that within the sysadmin team(s) or programming team(s) in industries, IM is a great tool for communication, on the other hand, many companies are still using IRC and have private IRC servers for communcation within the workplace.

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Posted in IM, Microblogging, Social networking | 3 Comments »

Retiring, unless otherwise requested.

Sunday, May 3rd, 2009

My recently-sent email to the -core and -dev mailing lists:


Hi,

I've enjoyed my time with Gentoo, mostly... But these days I've just got
too demotivated to work on it. I might have stayed if Ken69267 posted me
some Lifesavers, but he didn't. :(

On a more serious note, the problem seems to be the complete lack of
management in the required places, Gentoo is fast becoming (or more
likely, already is) an anarchic organisation, where it's becoming
nigh-on impossible to keep track of things.

I see a number of issues with Gentoo these days. The lack of a proper
leadership body. Lack of people working together in unison. The tree
needs to be sorted out: we have >16000 packages, and 200-250 developers,
not all of which are ebuild developers) - We're still using CVS, we do
*not* have the manpower to keep all the packages updated properly using
a centralised VCS. If these issues were fixed, I don't know/care how
they do get fixed, but if they were, I might consider coming back.

If you *really* want me to stay/not retire, and attempt to help fix
these issues, then I guess I can do so if enough people request that of
me. But I will do so purely in a "managerial" position, and will do no
ebuild or other such development.

I'll still hang around in various channels and so on and so forth.

Whatever happens, I do apparently maintain a few misc packages, most of
which are low maintenance. Various herds will now need a new lead
(apologies guys), so that will have to be arranged as well. You will
also need to find another slacker to replace me ;)

If there isn't a mass revolt against my retirement, so long, and thanks
for all the fish! Otherwise... We'll see.

Thanks,
welp

Posted in Gentoo, Linux, Xfce | 10 Comments »