davidrickard.net

Random stuff, randomly updated.

Archive for April, 2006

Toy!

Sunday, April 23rd, 2006

I like new toys, I admit it! I recently decided I’m going to buy myself a nice new Digital SLR camera. I’ve always been vaguely into photography – we’ve got a couple of SLR cameras, one was my grandad’s, the other my dad’s, but they are 35mm film-based, so you have to have stuff developed. I’m too used to the wonder of digital’s instant results these days to wait for film to come back. I’ve felt other cameras, like my current Olympus C-50 are great cameras, but they are all auto, point and click. You can never get particularly ‘arty’ with them, or do anything great.

Some time ago I came across the Olympus E500 and just decided I must have it, but I found it a little bit hard justifying the cost to myself. I only ever take snappy shots, and they are rare, so there didn’t seem much point. Well, I’ve now decided that I’m going to get the camera, and actually go out and about to take pictures with it. The camera has had pretty good reviews all around, and ‘customer’ reviews I’ve seen on many sites are very favourable, so it looks like a damn good option.

Olympus do the E500 in three ways – body only, body plus a 14-45mm lens, or body plus the 14-45mm, and a 40-150mm lens. I’m keen to get the latter bundle because it’s damn good value for money. The trouble is, everybody else seems to thing the same, so finding stock is pretty hard. I’m hoping that the low stock is either due to demand, or Olympus are soon to drop the price so are clearing stock.

As a result, I’ve yet to actually order the camera. I’m sitting on my hands until stock reappears, then I’ll go order it. In the mean time, I’ve ordered a book from Amazon about digital SLRs, so I can give that a read.

Posted in General, Photography | 2 Comments »

My Sharona!

Monday, April 17th, 2006

I’ve bought quite a few songs from iTunes over the last couple of years. So much so, I’m up to number 100 today. I bought a few songs today, and my hundredth song was The Knack’s My Sharona. Yes really. Stop laughing.

It’s quite a good song (IMHO) and it turns up in various random places. It was in an episode of The Simpsons I watched today, and I had iTunes open so I went and had a look. A few clicks later and I had the song. I really do love being able to do that. Back in the day, I’d have probably spent about 20 minutes trying to find a decent version on one of the many P2P networks, then waited about a week for it download. At least with iTunes, if it’s there, I can have it in a matter of seconds, and it just works. Plus, by virtue of the fact it’s in my library now, its on my iPod too. This is what the internet is really good at!

Posted in General, Music | Comments Off

Tweaks for Tweak’s Sake

Friday, April 14th, 2006

I found this on digg today. It’s a little guide to tweak windows XP so that the kernel is always running in memory, and a few other little fixes to do things with memory management.

I just read the thread about it, and I think I’m pretty dubious about it. I haven’t actually tried it, and I don’t think I want to. Some time ago, I used to fiddle with these little registry hacks and things, but they really didn’t do anything for me. Usually the best they could do was cause the PC to fall over constantly, or make other odd and random things happen. I just want to get on and use my PC. I don’t want to be resurrecting it every five minutes.

My argument against these sorts of tweaks these days is that if they actually did do something wonderful, surely they would be enabled anyway? Microsoft are constantly derided for making poorly-performing software, so their programmers and testers are going to try and do the best they can with the code to make it behave the best they can. If there’s a feature to make things run much better, and it does work, it’ll be enabled by default. Sure, there’s going to be other optimisations in there, but they are most likely to be disabled because they either don’t work at all, or cause instabilities. If these things are hidden or undocumented, they are that way for a reason. Disabling them isn’t going to do anything.

Tweaking an OS in this way is akin to overclocking the hardware. It’s a false economy, but very few people ever really understand this. These days I’m more into best practices than hacking Windows about to do something it really shouldn’t do. I suppose what galls me the most is when people apply these tweaks, then complain when their system doesn’t work properly.

Incidentally these are usually the same people who reinstall Windows every couple of weeks. Their choice I suppose, but I’ve got better things to be occupying my time with!

Posted in Computers | Comments Off

You can always tell a bank holiday

Friday, April 14th, 2006

It’s Good Friday today, and you can always tell a bank holiday. It’s raining outside, the sky is just all grey and dim, and the sun is hiding somewhere else. It just wouldn’t be right if it wasn’t like this! Something tells me Saturday and Sunday will be quite nice, then Monday (also being a Bank Holiday) will be all dull and overcast too!

Not that I’m overly bothered. Being a Bank Holiday and all, there’s nowhere to really go, so I’ll just watch TV and DVDs. Don’t need the sun for that!

Posted in General | Comments Off

Weekend – Holiday End

Saturday, April 8th, 2006

So here I am, almost at the end of my two weeks off work. I didn’t do an amazing amount – mostly I watched DVDs and stuff I’d recorded and not yet gotten around to watching. I also did my usual trick of spending plenty of time back and forth to the local dump with random bits and bobs. I’m not entirely certain where I unearth all this stuff from, but still. In a way it’s nice though, because I only go back for four days, then have four days off for Easter! Woo!

Posted in General | Comments Off

ZAP!

Monday, April 3rd, 2006

App ZapperAlthough OS X is a wonderful operating system, Apple really did mess up when it came to application management. Every time I install something I can’t help but feel that it could be spraying libraries and other gumph around the system that will prove hard to remove later.

Windows has had an uninstall system since Windows 95, but prior to that it required additional software – Cleansweep being just one such application. Luckily Mac users aren’t out in the cold, as the folks at macZOT.com have produced the wonderful AppZapper, which will find all those leftover bits and allow you to ‘zap’ them from your system.

They are also offering to drop the price by $0.05 for every blog link posted to the site, and hopefully if enough people can post and generate interest, it’ll be made free! Definately sounds a worthy cause to me!

Posted in Computers, Mac | Comments Off

A hail of hail

Saturday, April 1st, 2006

I was sitting watching something I recorded off Discovery last night, and I noticed it getting dark outside. I looked out the window and it was starting to rain quite heavily. I finished watching the programme, and got up to look outside properly. Just as I did the hardest hail storm I’ve seen for some time came crashing down all at once. It was setting off car alarms and there were bits of trees floating about in the wind. Within a couple of minutes, the pathways were covered in hail. The greenhouse in the garden had both its gutters blocked with hailstones. It really was quite amazing to watch. I tried to catch some hail, but it was coming down with such force it just bounced out of my hand. It really was quite something! Now, all of 30 minutes later, and the sky is clearing and there’s some nice sunshine. Funny old stuff, weather!

Posted in General | Comments Off