dpk’s weblog

Over the weekend I picked up a Kodak EasyShare Z612. It was $379.99 at Best Buy, but I’d check other places first ($56 restocking fee) It’s a 6.1 megapixel camera with a lithium-ion battery, 12x optical zoom, optical image stabilization, and it can be operated in a “fully” manual mode. That is, you can set the f-stop, ISO, shutter speed, etc — about as manual as a non-SLR digital camera will get. You can direct it to take multiple shots (2 per second) of a scene, and it will store the first or last 8 shots (depending on the mode). This may be a feature all cameras have nowadays, but it also stores all of the shot meta-information in the EXIF fields of the jpeg. (I’m using this information to re-learn, in a practical fashion, how to use f-stops and etc.) It’s a pretty feature rich camera, IMO.

Continue reading ‘Kodak EasyShare Z612, Best Buy’ »

I picked up a SanDisk SD card for my camera, and it was packed in that hard plastic packaging you see on electronics and other products — many items at Costco use it. It’s hard to cut, it’s hard to tear. It’s basically completely anti-consumer(anti-user). It turns out, it’s so hard to cut that the handle on my scissors actually broke under the pressure that was required to cut through it. SanDisk: You owe me a pair of Fiskars, dammit.

Added 2006.06.02 I forgot about this: Hard plastic packaging is made by the devil!

The spam filter employed by gmail, which I’ve commented on before, has significantly improved. It lets the occasional spam through to my inbox, but it is sending far fewer legitimate messages to my spam box, including emails from sites I’ve only just begun communicating with (ie: sites not already in my “white list”). Now if they could address the non-optional Sender: headers they send, it would basically be perfect.

Everyone seems to be talking about this “game” — “Brain Age” for the Nintendo DS. It’s interesting, I guess. It tests your brain age by doing a Stroop test (mine is 59), and then offers you a few other time tests, all of which you can get through in a handful of minutes. It loads up more tests as you go — I just got the game so I don’t know the pattern yet.

I’m having to re-learn how to write the number 8. It keeps reading it as a 6 or a 0, heh. My failure rate on a couple of the tests are higher than they ought to be because of my sloppy 8′s. In Sudoku, if you write the wrong number and quickly click “Zoom out” (“confirm” basically), it counts as an error, which means a 20 *minute* penalty. My usual Sudoku times are around 8-9mins (on easy-ish puzzles I’m sure), so that’s pretty significant.

Aside from my 8 issue, I think this is neat software. It’s nice in that you don’t have to dedicate any significant amount of time to it. You can even take breaks from it if you need to, although the shortness of the tests makes that less necessary, heh. Compare that to games like “New Super Mario Bros” where you can’t save until you beat certain levels or perform some one-time-only (per area, anyway) coin expenditures.

I’m a week late for Native Plant Appreciation Week (404 now for some inexplicable reason), but I am hoping I can still participate, with my minor contribution:

Left to right, that is generic bark (boring), Physocarpus Opulifolius – Gold’s Common, and Ribes Sanguineum Alba – White Flowering Currant. I’m going to plant these in the front yard, around the start of the downward slope that is such a bitch to mow. I hope to eventually replace the entire slope with tiers of plants that require infrequent maintenance, instead of this hell-that-is-grass. Heh.

Edit: May 14: