Archive for June, 2009

Explaining my planned move to a Mac.

Wednesday, June 24th, 2009

As most of you probably know, about 2 months ago, I retired from Gentoo. I have been using Fedora as my “distribution of choice” on my laptop since that time, and I have been very impressed with it on the whole.

However, there have been a number of niggles which have been putting me off using Linux for a laptop. It’s highly likely that less “advanced” users wouldn’t experience the same issues I’ve been having, but none the less. I’ll outline the issues I’ve been having, then expand upon each of them in turn.

  • Photo management software (F-Spot) is not particularly feature-rich, is slow and relatively buggy
  • Need to fiddle around with things to get, for example, VPN connections working
  • Hibernate/suspend doesn’t work
  • Not much in the way of “set and forget” backup solutions

Although F-Spot does what it needs to do (mostly), it is extremely basic, and doesn’t offer solutions such as colour curve adjustment, converting images to black and white, scaling images, cropping images, and so on (unless I’ve missed something). It also doesn’t allow you to organise your photos quite as well as other photo management software, such as Aperture and Lightroom. I discovered a bug in my installation, which left both the F-Spot developers and me scratching our heads: attempting to export photos to Flickr crashes F-Spot if I launch it from Gnome’s menu. If I launch it from the terminal, I have no such issues… The options haven’t changed, and I can’t work out any way to pipe the error messages from when I launch it from Gnome’s menu to a file…

I use the VPN functionality quite a bit these days to connect to the University’s VPN whilst not on the University network. Although I have managed to get the VPN working thanks to one of my friends, I had to fiddle around with adding and modifying keys in the GConf editor, which I really should not have had to do. It might be possible to do it all through NetworkManager’s interface (I know that some of the options were available in the “Advanced Settings” dialog), but it was still a nuisance to sort it all out (and it was also undocumented. DO NOT WANT.)

Hibernate and suspend do not work on my ThinkPad T61. I’d suspect that this has something to do with using discreet nVidia graphics, but I would still like such features to work out of the box. I’ve had this laptop since Feb ‘08, and I’ve *still* not managed to get it working. With the MacBook Pros, you can just close it and wander off: everything just works.

Linux doesn’t really have a “set and forget” backup system such as Time Machine. With Time Machine, you set it up to backup to $external_harddisk, and it does it all for you. You just plug your MacBook in, and it automatically starts backing up in the background. You don’t have to think about it at all until you need it, at which point, you just fly back in time through their shiny interface, and you’re sorted. It really is quite nice.

I guess that I’m just “shifting” my expectations somewhat now that I’ve been at university for a year. At the beginning of the year, I was happy to fiddle around with things to get them to work. I was happy to make tarballs and scp or rsync them to remote locations to back things up. I was using Gentoo, and happy to sit through long compiles and reinstalls. Now, though, I just want things to work. I don’t want to have to fiddle around with obscure settings to make it work. I don’t want to have to sit through long compiles. I guess I want to be able to use my computer for what I want to use it for, without being side-tracked along half a dozen different mini-projects to be able to complete my main goal.

On top of that, Macs are shiny. I think that the Apple LED Cinema Display which has been designed specifically to go with the MacBook Pro is amazing, and just perfect for what I want. It allows me to compromise on the display resolution on the MacBook Pro itself (the MacBook Pro has a 13″ screen which operates at 1280×800. I’m a huge fan of portability, so I want to get the smallest model I can.), as I can just plug it in to instantly upgrade my resolution.

I think I shall probably write a number of blog posts about the software which I currently use and compare it to what I plan to use. Doing so should help me confirm the “upgrade route” I’m going to take, and how I’m going to manage my files and hobbies.

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Olympus E-P1 and my next computer.

Friday, June 19th, 2009

The Olympus E-P1 looks absolutely stunning. It’s highly likely that I’ll be buying one of those come September.

The E-P1 does away with the mirror box of D-SLRs, whilst retaining a large Micro Four Thirds sized sensor, which results in a camera which isn’t really an SLR, but produces high quality images akin to those typical of D-SLRs. It seems to be an ideal camera for street photography – the silver model isn’t overly obtrusive, and coupled with the 17mm lens and optical viewfinder (fitted onto the hot-shoe), makes for a compact camera capable of taking high-quality images whilst still being small enough to not be highly noticeable. It is quite expensive, at £749.99 for the kit including the 17mm lens and optical viewfinder, but I feel that it is well worth it, and there won’t be many (if any) running costs involved – no film to develop and scan. As well as this, Olympus will be producing an adaptor which will allow me to use my OM lenses from my OM-2n on the E-P1, which is a great benefit. I will be waiting until reviews are available on the camera before making a final decision, but I’m almost certain that it is the camera for me.

I have also been looking into the 13″ MacBook Pro, and believe that come September, I will have enough money to purchase a model. I’m willing to accept the lower resolution of the 13″ model due to the extra portability offered, especially as I am also planning to purchase the 24″ Apple Cinema Display to go with it, which runs at 1920×1200. An expensive investment, but well worth it I feel. The MacBook Pro comes with an SDHC card-reader, which will be extremely useful when coupled with the aforementioned Olympus E-P1, which also uses SDHC cards – that’s one less cable for me to worry about! It is highly likely that I will purchase Aperture with the MacBook, and use that for photo management. I’ve looked into Lightroom as well, but it seems from reviews that Aperture is more suited to my needs. Furthermore, Macs provide an ideal environment for doing development work in, especially as they are Unix-based, and thus have a half-decent shell available to users. I’ll most likely be using Eclipse for Java programming, and I’ll possibly be doing some Qt development on Macs as well, but we shall see.

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Posted in Apple, Photography | No Comments »

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 and colour profiles

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

After upgrading to Fedora 11 (and thus upgrading Firefox to 3.5 Beta 4), I noticed that Firefox was not correctly identifying some of the ICC colour profiles and thus was rendering some of the images incorrectly.

According to this wiki page, it should be a simple matter of going to about:config and changing the value of gfx.color_management.mode to 1, which enables full colour management (default is 2, which enables colour management only on properly tagged images). This, however, does not seem to work…

After looking into the issue, it seems that there’s a bug with the way in which Firefox identifies the colour profiles, resulting in some incorrectly rendered images. Although the bug has been fixed in the trunk release (i.e. the nightly/hourly builds will have the bug-fix), the “proper” versioned releases will not.

From what I can work out, the bug-fix won’t be pushed into the main release until the last minute, and will most likely be put in the 3.5.1 release (or possibly even the 3.6 release!), so if correct colour profiles are important to you, you’re either going to want to start using the hourly/nightly builds or downgrade back to an earlier version of Firefox which doesn’t have the bug.

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Posted in Linux | 3 Comments »

One camera, one year

Friday, June 12th, 2009

As I wrote in my last blog post, I’m currently looking into getting a film rangefinder such as the Bessa R3a. Obviously, such cameras don’t come cheap, and I’ve been looking into ways to make it worth my while (and money!). I uncovered (somehow, whilst browsing around) [this project].

Now, I know the article is rather explicit in saying that one should use a Leica, but I quite frankly don’t have the money to buy one, and believe that a camera such as the Bessa R3M (similar to the R3a, but with no auto-exposure) would be an ideal camera to complete the project with. As the writer quite rightly points out in his [next article], Leica cameras hold their value extremely well, and you could quite easily re-sell the camera for what a price very close to what you bought it for. As I mentioned earlier, there’s no way I’d be able to fork out for a £2500 camera unless I got like two full-time jobs or something silly along those lines, so I think a £300-400 Bessa will have to do.

It is advised in the original article that one should shoot as many rolls of film per week as possible. This is a pretty large expenditure, but I imagine that I would purchase a box of 10 rolls of whichever film I decide to use per month. This would probably amount to around £35 a month for the raw film, and approximately another £35 a month for processing costs. The article recommends getting 1-6 “work-prints” per film – I would not get prints of these photos, but instead upload them to Flickr, so I would effectively be uploading between 10 and 60 photos a month. Every month, I would pick out the two most interesting photos (as calculated by Flickr) from what I had uploaded that month, and get prints made of them.

The monthly cost would come to around £85 a month, with an initial outlay of around £800 for a camera and lens, and £200-250 for a film scanner.

(Oh, and in case you’re wondering, I would most likely get a 50mm lens. Or possibly a 40mm lens. Not 100% sure on that one.)

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Film vs. Digital

Thursday, June 4th, 2009

For my birthday, both my parents have agreed to contribute a sum of money towards a camera for me. At first, I had my heart set on a DSLR, but now I’m not so sure…

Let me explain. I’m as much of a computer geek as you can expect the average Comp Sci student to be, perhaps more so. I love my digital toys (or hate, depending on the situation). But for some (perhaps insane?) reason, I still prefer film to digital. My primary camera at the time of writing is an Olympus OM-2n, and it performs perfectly. Since starting out with the whole photography business, I’ve gained an interest in street photography. It’s great fun (although a teensy bit scary at times), and I love just randomly snapping pictures of interesting-looking people. I’ve been using my OM-2n primarily with the Zuiko 135mm f/3.5 lens I have for it, and I’ve generally been having great fun with it. However, I would much prefer to get closer to the subjects and get better shots that way, rather than shooting from a distance. For that method of photography, a rangefinder point and shoot camera is much more preferable and discreet compared to an SLR. Prime examples of rangefinder cameras that the average person may well know of include the Leica range of cameras.

Now, Leica cameras are a tad expensive (coming in at around.. £2,500 for the body only!), so I’ve been looking around at cheaper alternatives. The one which seems to most suit my needs is the Voitländer Bessa R3a. It’s a fraction of the price of the Leica (a “mere” £350), and seems to offer most of the capabilities of the Leica M7. It also uses the Leica M-mount for lenses, so if I ever did earn enough money to upgrade to a Leica (possibly a Leica M8 or M8.2 sometime in the distant future), any lenses I bought would for the Bessa R3a still work on the newer camera.

The Bessa R3a also has a 1:1 viewfinder, meaning that I’d be able to shoot with both eyes open (which would probably be kinda weird at first, but I’m sure I could get used to it). It uses aperture-priority for its “auto” mode, which is the same as my OM-2n. It has the ability to display two shutter speeds in the viewfinder: the shutter speed which you have selected as the user, and the shutter speed which the camera recommends. It produces outstanding results on film, with a resolution of 125lp/mm (line pair/mm). The only “downside” is that it cannot be used without batteries. I guess I can just make sure I keep spares with me at all times.

In my last blog post, I wrote about the advantages of getting film processed in bulk, buying film in bulk, and the use of film scanners to reduce the costs of photography. I believe that if I practice what I preach, I would be still be able to feed myself, whilst continuing to shoot film. (But only just…). Depending on what I decide I prefer to do in the long run, I would most likely invest in a double-digit or single-digit Canon DSLR or a Leica M8 of some sort. But this would all be in at least a couple of years, so I’m not going to think about that too much.

Now, this blog post may well be a tad pre-emptive: I’m not going to buy any new camera until I’m off my crutches. This will allow me to experiment much more thoroughly with street photography with my OM-2n and two legs. I’ll be able to get closer to my subjects, and keep moving whilst taking photos (which I cannot do at the moment). I want to be able to spend a good month or so shooting with my OM-2n on two legs before purchasing a new camera, so I’d be on the market around about late August or early September. We shall see what happens.

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Posted in Photography | 4 Comments »