You’d be forgiven for not realising the K10D even has a multi-exposure mode: of the 230-or-so pages in the manual only one is given over to multi-exposure, and the description of the feature is vague at best.
However, it was brought to my attention today that the “Auto EV Adjust” setting doesn’t work in the way…
One of the best-known books in the computer industry is The Humane Interface by Jef Raskin, which is an enlightened and timeless look at how interaction with our silicon friends can be improved. Jef died a couple of years ago but his son Aza carries on his approach to interfaces.
And this week Aza unveiled Songza,…
Word processors with automatic indexing features are cheap. Proof readers are expensive.
The references are all valid, of course – you can see the “custom renderers” entry at the bottom of that image – but it’s a wholly unclear listing. Interestingly, the simple device of capitalising the words consistently (ie capitalising the references to top-level entries)…
I’ve just come across a photo I took some time ago of a particularly badly-arranged company logo. Hopefully the unfortunate effect should be obvious from the thumbnail.
I guess the moral is — well, I don’t know. ‘Don’t be a bloody idiot,’ perhaps.
Yesterday wasn’t the first time I’d pulled up at the garage, unscrewed the filler cap and then been stopped in my tracks by the influence of the marketing department on the usability of the petrol pump.
Which type of petrol do I want?
In Britain, of course, you can’t just buy petrol. Who in their right mind…
One (actually, so far the only) thing that’s mildly exciting me today is news of the forthcoming Ricoh GR Digital II (ooh – now with a quoted price), the third Ricoh compact which will be touted as the spiritual successor to the GR1 (which I have, and love, though it’s not been used for five…
Getting to the point is something that some people have trouble doing. Techies can be particularly poor at it, as they often have the sort of mind that enjoys getting involved in the workings of the solution, sometimes forgetting the pragmatism that required it in the first place.
And so here are a couple of example…
Today I realised I’ve been reading too much about typography lately and I’m infected. I was at work, mulling over something or other, staring into space when my eye landed on a colleague’s notebook.
If the cover of the notebook upsets you as well then you’re infected too.
We went for a walk round the pond yesterday and I took the opportunity to test a lens I picked up on eBay a week or so ago (a 200mm f/3.5 Chinon). Ordinarily I’d never go out with such a long prime and nothing else, but then again, ordinarily I might not have ended up…
I doubt I’m the only person in the world who doesn’t open their browser full-screen. For one thing, it kind of makes a mockery of the whole windowing principle (flawed as it may be), but mainly it just makes most websites look stupid. If you want to see what I mean, take a look at…
By way of Tak I discovered the Colour Lovers website today, which is well worth a look.
It has a couple of great features and some aspects that are slightly baffling.
The whole idea of submitting colours and then allowing users to vote for them, comment on them and so on is completely hatstand. Aside from the…
I probably wasn’t alone in being disappointed by today’s report on The Register of SMS-enabled parking meters. The Reg has of course dismantled the idiocy of the actual system, the sole purpose of which is to call for help when attacked. According to one councillor, this is “a parking system that will encourage economic growth…
For those who don’t already know, one thing that I find irritating (although not as irritating as putting something down and then two minutes later forgetting where I put it – which invariably results in a big tantrum and a veritable tour de force of foul language – but I digress) is the existence of…
Well, this place needs a spring (autumn) clean. OK, I spent an hour last night giving it a lick of paint with a few stylesheet adjustments, but it’s always been based on the default Wordpress theme which has always seemed to contain some frankly odd features. I’m starting to need a part of the site…
I’ve had a couple of months now to become accustomed to my K10D, so it’s about time I followed through from my preview from shortly after I got it.
If I was going to sum it up in comparison to the 400D, I’d say that whilst the Canon is easier to get great images out of…
Having been looking for decent raw processing software, I thought I’d give Corel’s new release of Paint Shop Pro, Photo Pro X2, a whirl. On installing it, I was pleased to see it now has support for PEF files, but the second thing I noticed was this.
In case that’s not obvious: there is still no…
Not one to pass up a 41%-or-whatever-it-is reduction on a bike with the addition of a year’s interest free credit, this year’s Cycle2Work contract sees me kitted out with another shiny pair of wheels. This time, just as Rich says goodbye to one, I say hello (as does Mike) to a Specialized Langster.
I’d asked them…
Went to the Isle of Wight this weekend, ostensibly for the powerboating, but there was also a display by The Blades, a civilian display team comprising four ex-Red Arrows pilots in propellor-driven Extra 300s. It proved a rather more photogenic scene than the boats themselves, which needed rather more than the 200mm (300mm effective) lens…
It’s 15 years since I last went to a Prince gig, on the Diamonds and Pearls tour in 1992. I confess to being a fan back then, and whilst I’ve not bought much stuff since he ’symbolised’ himself after the Come album the following year, it’s still all good stuff.
So, it would have been daft…
I don’t know why, but my fingers smell of developer, and I’ve not touched any in about three months. I think I’m getting darkroom withdrawal symptoms.
(Sorry, this may be the least useful blog post ever, and that’s some achievement.)
As you’ve probably heard on the news, A-Level results are out today. So, time to cast an eye over mine, because as it turns out they’re quite interesting. Note that a limited set of my work can be found in one of my sets on Flickr.
The first term was all about texture, line and form….
Having received some Toy Tokens for my birthday, it’s shopping time. I need a replacement for the Pentax raw conversion software which comes with the K10D. I’m not convinced by the output quality and, equally importantly, I find it a dog to use. Given that my day job is designing user interfaces, I get infuriated…
Most of us these days use a number of applications which claim to be “smart.” Microsoft Word is probably the most obvious example: by default it corrects typos, capitalisation and formatting as you type, and does many other “smart” things which purport to make your life easier.
I am surely not the only person who deactivates…
Post-processing can be a bit of a contentious subject these days. Not only does every man and his dog have a very capable digital camera, but every man and his dog has access to very capable post-processing software. Some people say post-processing is cheating (or at least feels just like it), others not. So, is…
Well, not the lens as such, but the mount. Jon sent me this lens after I (incorrectly) said it looked like a K-mount. Whoops.
Now, it’s not a K-mount but I’m not 100% sure what it is. Seems to be some sort of Pentacon mount but I know nothing about them.
The identifying marks are: “Carl Zeiss…
When you buy a toy, particularly an electronic one, no matter how much time you spend deciding on the right one (and finding the best price, and inevitably upping your budget), as soon as you make your purchase, the one you really would have wanted will be released.
So it was with the Pentax K10D. No…
Blimey, that was a wet one.
Managed to shoot over 250 pictures (click below for more) and didn’t manage any that I was particularly pleased with.
The whole photography thing wasn’t really aided by a proliferation of umbrellas, which frankly ought to be banned from public events and shoved up the owners’ arses. Apart from the fact…
Can I just point out to any passing OS designers (because I know you’re all going to read this) that allowing applications to open windows off-screen is a really dumb thing to do.
I can’t believe I’m the only person who uses an extra screen with their laptop when at their desk, so I doubt I’m…
Now I’m quite a fan of Inbreds, but oddly enough I like mine with gears: I’ve got two 18″ geared versions (one with bouncy forks and one with rigids — the former never gets ridden due to having suspension on it, but the latter is sublime) but I’ve never really clicked with the singlespeed versions….
Over the past nine months I’ve been using Flickr to post some photos, and I find it a fascinating place, mainly for the quality of images available on it and the community aspect, but also because it’s an interesting interface example, being unobtrusive and generally pretty easy to use despite constant evolution.
I’ve also been finding…
One of Jeff Attwood’s posts has got me thinking. It starts by raising the point that whilst “keep it simple, stupid” is a good paradigm for implementing an effective interface, it doesn’t generally reflect what users ask for. Most solutions developers will be familiar with the concept of being landed with a few absurdities in…
Well, here we are with a new look for the site. Seeing as it’s been edited partly online and partly offline, and all in the wee small hours, chances are it’s not all tickety-boo, but I figured I’d go live with it anyway just to break the monotony.
I’ve added plenty of RSS feed links, and…
Just a link worth pointing out: Flickr user brevity has produced a number of images from numerous others with common tags. The results are rather impressionistic and strangely fascinating; the ‘four seasons’ image perhaps especially so. Someone else has replicated the technique, ending up with a different style of final image.
Someone has inexplicably taken the time to come up with “Favcol,” whose lack of foresight and, simply, sheer lunacy as an idea is matched only by its clumsiness as a portmanteau.
What does it do? It takes all the pictures on Flickr which are tagged with “favcol,” analyses their colour content, and works out the average…
It’s a bouncing baby Inbred. Well, it’s an Inbred. It’s got no bouncy bits and it’s bloody huge.
I think I can confidently say this is the largest bike I’ve owned – certainly in top tube length anyway. Not had a chance to ride it yet, but hopefully I can at least drag it to the…
Courtesy of Moving Target this morning comes news from the CTC that the latest round of Highway Code changes have not been worded so as to effectively force cyclists off the roads onto cycle lanes and paths where they exist – to which, a big YAY!
For anyone who doubts the sense of staying on the…
And that’s it: finished. I mounted and submitted the final piece yesterday, somewhat optimistically relying on Pritt Stick to hold the prints and indeed the frame in place. Maybe I should have added an appendix to the workbook to the effect that should the piece fall apart on removal from its plastic bag, it would…
I don’t know what to say. I’ve had my Arse pinched by a Frenchman!
You’d think that if someone was going to steal a photo, they’d keep it quiet. Sticking a link back to where you stole it from is a bit daft; although perhaps I should have checked sooner: the Wayback Machine shows that they…
I picked up a bookmark in my feed reader today, to a BBC page about people’s favourite fonts. Mine? Well, I’ve not done much print work but for web use it has to be Trebuchet. I find it by far the most elegant body text font, to the point where I’ve set up Firefox to…
Well, it nearly is. Yesterday was the second half of the “exam” (which, pragmatically, differed from the other modules only in that we had to hand in the negs, and the marks are worth double) and the last I’ll see of a darkroom for some time (booooo).
This term I’ve had little time to do much,…
I was thinking the other day, as part of my recent enthusiasm for feeds (the XML type, not the nutritional type – enthusiasm for those is hardly a recent thing) that it would be neat to take feeds and start filtering them to cherry-pick the relevant stuff. It fell into the large category of “stuff…
If you develop any web pages at all, and you don’t have it already, you really must install the WebDeveloper plugin. I’m especially enjoying the fact that you can visit any web page and edit its CSS on the fly (under the “CSS | Edit CSS” menu) – which not only means you can tinker…
Summer 2010: Flickr have now changed their photo pages and this script is no longer of use. I’ve not had time to write the code for the new version, but luckily for you someone else has, so I’m now using this script instead and I recommend you do so, too.
Want to post your Flickr pictures…
Trains are quite simple in operation. You wait at a platform, enter the train through a door, sit (if you’re lucky) on the train until it reaches your destination, and then leave the train through a door. What could be simpler? Well – for some people at least – the whole thing, it would seem.
Commuters…
A while ago I acquired a Dahon Vitesse D5 via the Halfords Cycle2Work scheme that our company joined a few months ago. I’ve been using it for a couple of weeks now, so let’s see how it’s faring.
The first thing that I pondered when I considered buying one was, ‘is it big enough?’ I’m a…
This evening I have been mostly getting into the Guinness Book of World Records…
…along with 4,381 other people armed with coconuts. Click the image for a few more (rubbish) pics.
Erratum: the final count is apparently in, with a grand total of 5,567 Patsies. Hurrah! And there’s even independent photographic evidence that I was there.
And that’s it – haven’t posted anything up here and the spring term’s finished. Well, nearly – one week to go. Just need to mount the pictures and hand in the coursework. And, er, do the coursework *cough*… hmm.
Last week was particularly ace – not only did the drying machine eat one of my best…