GPS Running and a trip to New Zealand

26 Oct 2005

I haven’t been running much lately, because… I’m lazy. And there are exams on. And I’d much rather procrastinate passively. Or something. I don’t know, I don’t really have any good excuses.

There is, however, something that would probably make me want to run more. This ridiculously cool GPS training device! It’s like… hey… you’re a geek. And you want to run. With gimmicks that are arguably useful. Buy me, buy me!

Somehow, though, at $US330ish plus shipping, I don’t think it’s going to happen. The solution? Start jogging with a backpack and take a car GPS unit (already have one)!

Yeah, not terribly likely, either. Ah well. Hopefully The Trip to New Zealand coming up (have I mentioned that online yet? Geez… maybe not… how bad) will serve to kinda remedy the whole lack-of-exercise situation and create a habit for when I get back. If I haven’t mentioned that on this site before (I don’t remember doing that, I don’t think I have), then… consider this notice. I’m going to NZ from Saturday the 12^th of November until Monday the 5^th of December. Tori leaves to go to England on November 10, so that’ll be distraction enough after finishing the exams and just before packing… and hopefully NZ will be enough of a distraction for me to not realise she’s on the other side of the planet for a while (and vice versa, I imagine…)

I’m planning on taking lots of photos, but haven’t decided which camera to take yet. Or, more accurately, how many I will take. I’m definitely planning on taking my Pentax SP500 w/ 28-70mm lens, but don’t know whether my little Pentax qualifies. I can see it either getting broken or full very quickly. Contemplating getting a harddrive-based reader thingo (something like this HD-DM40 from Anyware, about $215 from a retailer), but quite uncertain. It’s just more stuff to carry in a backpack that’s already going to be substantially full.

Plus, as I’ve told some people before, I like film grain. It looks nice. Far nicer than digital compression artifacts or the sensor crapping out in low light conditions. One of Hayley’s photos on year12.joahua.com demonstrates this nicely, because it’s not a good photo, but it’s very nice and characterful… mostly, I think, because it was shot on film not digital.

So, I can live with my own inability to use a camera perfectly meaning I get a handful of blurry shots, and it costing a little more to get photos developed/make mistakes. The question is, should I have a secondary camera for quick photos that I can check the quality of immediately, just in case? I could probably drop my SP500 in water and it’d survive after a [probably quite expensive] service… I can’t say the same thing for the digital. Funnily enough, the tiny digital would ultimately take up nearly as much space as the chunky SLR, because it would mean I’d be carrying a charger for its batteries, a hard drive, and a charger for the hard drive, as well as the camera itself. I could just not use the hard drive and try to find a net cafe, but that’s something I’d rather not rely on. I could also buy another SD card or two before we leave… which is a distinct possibility, given how cheap those things are getting (I saw a 256MB card for under $30 yesterday, and wasn’t even looking. 512MB cards can be had for under $50). Problematically, they’re absolutely tiny and I can just see myself losing one.

Suggestions, anyone?

F-Spot

26 Oct 2005

F-Spot is a photo management/cataloguing thing from the Gnome project that looks cool. Another reason to love Gnome! Note particularly the cool timeline thing in the screenshot on their site. I don’t know if I’ll start using it yet, but it looks cool. Assuming I don’t eventually wind up on iPhoto, this is probably going to become a mainstay of my day-to-day computing life if development on it continues (and I don’t see why it wouldn’t).

Obligatory geek aside: Look, it’s written in C# and uses Mono! (yeah, I realise I’m linking to my own comment. Not just a vanity trip, it is actually relevant!)

Record companies suck

25 Oct 2005

In today’s news, iTMS Australia launches without Sony, presumably because they’re greedy, uncompromising bastards. I’d like to be sued for defamation on that comment (because, you know, they’d get awarded such massive damages for a blog this size), because then at least the real reason would come out, either way. I’m inclined to think they’re far more evil than Apple, but perhaps that’s just PR spin. Having said that, here’s evidence to the contrary from an AppleTalk Australia interview with CD Baby founder, Derek Sivers:

Keep in mind : Apple is not screwing musicians. Labels are screwing musicians. Apple pays 70 cents per 99-cent download. If the artist has signed their music over to a label, they don’t own their music anymore. The label does. So Apple pays the label 70 cents per song, and the label pays the artist… what… a penny? Two? Nothing at all? But when an artist is NOT signed to a label, when they’re going through CD Baby for example, we only keep a 9% cut and pay 91% of all income directly to the artists every week. Our accounting is wide open so they can see every dollar every day, and it all goes to the artist every week, without fail, for over 7 years now.

Also, I’ve just discovered that iTunes users, even on Windows, can rip CDs with supposed “Copy Control” technology without even having to resort to the typical Shift key “hack” (heh, and, in the US, pressing Shift at that point in time is entirely illegal. Remove those copyright circumvention devices from your keyboards, America!!) to prevent the loading of supposed restricting technologies. I guess this means iTunes is now illegal under the DMCA, too?

For the record, the CD in question was Placebo’s 2003 “Sleeping with Ghosts” album, published by Virgin. At least they didn’t have the audacity to use the standard CD logo on it (because these copy-control things are outside of Red Book spec).

Dynamically rejected

25 Oct 2005

<xxemailprotectedxx@optusnet.com.au>: host mail.optusnet.com.au[211.29.132.250] said: 554<br /> 5.7.1 Rejected 60.225.72.235 is a dynamic IP (in reply to RCPT TO command)

I need a static IP =(

WWW SQL Designer

24 Oct 2005

WWW SQL Designer

Far out. This thing is incredible. Database design with AJAX… there’s a demo on the site, and you can download the app. Must play with. Incredible. Reduced to incomplete sentences by its awesomeness.