Suckered in as usual by an attractive price point, and because I’ve been toying with the idea of getting a new digital camera for ages, I’ve bought meself a Kodak Easyshare Z740. Pretty much the whole reason for the purchase is the 10x zoom, and even though a lack of image stabilisation is going to make it a heck of a job getting the most out of that zoom, this is my first step along a road that should lead me towards an SLR and much fanciness thereafter. And all for just over one hundred quid, which is not bad for the camera plus a case, and a memory card (512MB), although I seem to be lacking some things from the original box, but what the hey, I’m sure I can get by.

So what does 5 megapixels and a longish zoom get you these days? It gets you crisp photos of swans, that’s what. In fact, here’s one now:

Very crisp and detailed, I hope you’ll agree.

It also gets you pictures of pumpkins (depending on the time of year, naturally).

And pub signs

Sometimes the pub seems further away, though: mostly when you don’t use the zoom:

It also gets you a very helpful range of pre-set configurations for taking photos on the beach, indoor photos, landscape photos, portraits, and even fireworks, although it will probably now be a while before I use that setting. Here’s a photo taken using the backlight setting, which is supposed to help you out if for some reason you’ve decided to put the subject between you and something very bright. Like an autumn afternoon’s sun, for instance:

Apart from some slowness when the camera writes to the memory card, and the lack of stabilisation, there’s not much I’d change based on my experience so far. It does seem to suck battery juice pretty rapidly, but then I am operating from cheapo rechargeable Ni-mh and Ni-Cd batteries, so I don’t expect them to last a lifetime. Being able to carry spare batteries is definitely an improvement on my canon Ixus, which would leave me powerless after about 100 pictures.

dpreview also liked the camera, and since they’ve already done a perfectly good job of reviewing it, I’d rather link to their review, than write my own, just yet:

dpreview.com review of Kodak Easyshare Z740

November 14th, 2006, posted by Neil in Tech! · 2 Comments

After spending ages wondering why my google ads weren’t showing on this site, I finally had my duh moment, and realised adblock was filtering them out. Luckily, only a day later I have found the solution.

Apparently all those @@ things at the bottom of the filter list (Go to Tools -> AdBlock -> Preferences and scroll down) are the whitelist bits that un-filter-out things.

If you ad:

@@*.googlesyndication.com

to the list, all will be well again, and you can once again see what ads Google has mysteriously chosen to place on your site. Apparently, readers of this blog might be interested in feminine hygiene bins…

A showy and grateful monday morning tip of the hat goes to this site for providing the answer:

cStar Sys

October 2nd, 2006, posted by Administrator in General and Tech! · 2 Comments

Ryanair has announced that they hope to get regulatory approval for a highly odious scheme to allow passengers who can’t bear to be out of contact from their loved ones / pointy haired boss while at cruising altitude the luxury / millstone of being able to use mobile phones and other communications devices on planes. Which is just a-grade fantastic. At least wondering how best to punish various mobile owners as their novelty ringtones and suffocatingly meaningless conversations compete with the background noise might take my mind off the general lack of elbow or leg room, or the fact that my table drops to a 45 degree angle every time the bloke in front of me heavily shoves himself into the back of his seat, or even on longer flights that I have to lie on the cabin floor to be able to get a decent view of my own personal screen in the back of that seat in front should said bloke ever have the timerity to lean his seat back ever so slightly.

Read more…

August 31st, 2006, posted by Neil in Tech! and Vague rants · No comments

I’ll say nothing, but provide you all with a link to an interesting new site that launched earlier today:

This is the ad

I think it can fly, but you never know with the interweb, it has to be said.

August 9th, 2006, posted by Neil in Tech! and Brilliant · 1 Comment

So the support centre / general-purpose technology anecdote goes. Bit-tech reported yesterday that around half of all the electrical goods that the great unwashed populace return to shops are, in fact, not in the slightest bit faulty; people, it turns out, just can’t work out how to use their gizmos, and after about 20 minutes, if the device doesn’t do what they want, it’s assumed to be broken, and back the store said user trots, perfect working order device in hand, for a refund.

I’m a little surprised that people battle on for as long as 20 minutes, and frankly, if most people, or even a decent percentage of people (I’d say 50% is well above ‘decent’ in this context) can’t work a device out in 20 minutes, then if we’re talking about mainstream electronics for a mass-market, then actually the device is faulty. It might be working as designed, or at least it would if the user could ever get it into some state approximating to working, but if you’ve bought, say, a new mobile phone, or a DVD player, or a fantastic new labour saving kitchen device and it doesn’t work right out of the box, or with minimal tinkering once you’ve plugged it in, then surely the design could have done with more work. If your target audience is, ooh, I don’t know, let’s call them ‘people’, and ‘people’, it turns out, can’t operate your gadget, your gadget is probably cr*p, and you deserve to have a warehouse-full returned quick-sharp.

Follow the link to read the rest of the (brief) article, and some variedly informed responses in their forum:

50% of ‘faulty’ products baffle users

But be warned, the article contains scenes of a very cute nature.

March 7th, 2006, posted by Neil in Tech! and Vague rants · No comments

A big hat tip today for The Urban Giraffe.

I’ve been running phpdev since I started using Wordpress on my website, and for the most part its provided me with a quick and dirty local version of Wordpress, but today, when I started working on a new theme for a new site, I managed to make an utter balls-up of my phpdev install. In the process, I completely jiggered my local Wordpress install and couldn’t untangle the mess I’d made.

A quick google search later, I found UrbanGiraffe » Installing WordPress on your own Windows computer, which has helped me solve almost all my problems.

Now I’m running WAMP5 on my local machine, and I have a couple of virtual servers running on my machine: one for this site, and one for the work in progress on the new site. WAMP5 does run PHP5, whereas my web-host is on some flavour of PHP4, but since 5 is the future, any problems that causes should be outweighed by future gains.

All is well with the world

February 8th, 2006, posted by Neil in Tech! and Useful · 2 Comments