I’m currently looking for some faster glass for my set of Pentax dSLR cameras. I already have a 43mm ltd 1:1.9 (auto focus) and an old Ricoh 50mm 1:1.7 (manual focus). What I would like is a 1:1.4 or faster. I’ll use this blog to get an idea of the marked. I’ll focus on fast glass and fairly cheap glass. It needs to be as short as possible – 50mm is okay. I may sell the 43mm towards this lens…
Continue reading
I love my Pentax K10D. Very worthy replacement for my *ist DS.
As everything else, these days, it does have issues. I’ll try to keep up to date with them in this post, so that new owners for the K10D can be made aware of them and hopefully find help in here.
I’ll mainly list the issues that are firmware related (and there for fixable), but I’ve included a couple of issues that are, probably, not fixable by firmware, or even something you really want fixed. Things like the Jpeg Edge issue is not really something that should be fixed, it’s just about knowing that you need to switch from Natural to Bright mode if you want sharper jpegs.
This blog has a thread at DPReview.com – where I’m trying to get help to make the list complete.
Please try to keep further discussion about specific issues to the linked threads. This blog is not really a good platform for discussions (a real forum is a lot better for stuff like that).
Update Jan. 20th 2007: There’s a version 1.1 firmware to be found. It seems to be the real deal. It changes this. From what people have reported on dpreview and my own experience it fixes what’s the change document says and nothing else. I’ll move all the issues that a fixed my 1.1 to a separate section..
Update Mar. 6th. 2007: There’s a version 1.11 firmware. Only a couple of minor issue fixed.
By sort of a freak accident I got a chance to buy one of these cameras today. I’ve had a Pentax *ist DS for a about a year and half. It’s been a great camera and there’s really nothing wrong with it. That doesn’t mean that it could be better.
The main selling points of the K10D is the 10Mp censor, Share Reduction and weather sealing. I want it for the 10mp and the SR.
Unfortunately I’m baby-sitting tonight, so it’s limited how much I can play with it. But I’ve been through the menus, clicked and turned all the knobs.
My first impression is that it’s quite heavy compared to the DS. And that it autofocues very, very fast, and that’s in a dimly lit apartment. Oh, and that I have to order a bigger memory card in a hurry, as the 16mb DNG files (the PEF files are 13Mb not much better, and unsupported by my raw software).
Autofocus: Even my Sigma 70-200 1:2.8 APO DG locks focus in my dimly lighted living room at 200mm and f/2.8. I’ll have to see how it does with the x2 teleconverter tomorrow. Something the DS had problem with in low light.
ISO Noise: Yes, it’s there and it’s quite visible at 1600iso. I’m not sure that it’s actually worse than the DS, but I’ll have to do tests to find out. The thing with it is that it seems more ordered and therefor more eye catching.
I develop software for a living. That means that I’ve to ensure that said software work with Windows Vista, so when it got accessible I secured a copy, got it installed and started to move my development environment over to Vista. At first I was rather nervous, because the only report I could find about Borland Delphi 7 (no, the newer versions wasn’t supposed to be any better), was that it didn’t run in Vista.
Continue reading
I’ve just finished this book (in it’s audio version – something to do in the car). I can’t remember if I’ve read it before, but I do remember seeing the movie. If I’ve read it it was before seeing the movie. Anyway. All I could remember from the movie was the Rats, Big Brother and the prisoner who crosses his arms.
My first thought about this book, is that it’s as scary as it’s relevant. Which is very scary and very relevant, if you should be in doubt. Now, books has a tendency to get a life of their own in other books and other media. 1984 is one of these books – in most cases it just boiled down to a mention of Big Brother, probably in connection to something about privacy and surveillance. You’ll hear people say things like “we are living in a Big Brother society” when the talk comes around the the ever present video camera. But, what strikes me the most about this is that the surveillance part of 1984 is the least of it. The least scary part.
Coming back for a couple of days in Rome and a full memory card in my Pentax DS *ist camera, the first thing I do is, of cause, to copy the files to my computer and look though them .
Except that I got an error half way through the copy process.
This has happened before, but a re-insertion of the memory card (in my card reader) solved that problem and I didn’t think more about it. But now it happened again, with still about 46 images not copied of the card. Firstly I try the windows dick checker (right click on the drive->properties->tools), xcopy, xxcopy and Pc Inspector Smart Recovery which I’ve used for this before. Non of this worked. I’ve used the Inspector for this before and it worked really well, but this was with jpeg files and this is Pentax Raw files (.pef). Didn’t find anything.
So I try:
So TransPict wouldn’t respond, so I decided to reboot my computer. But I forgot to remove the memory card while doing this, and windows actually picked up on the fact that there was a problem with this drive. And fixed it!.
There where two bad blocks on the sd-card, and window fixed this as good as it could. There are errors in the two images in question, but they are just to images and I can live without them a lot easier than without the last 46 images (the last day).
I guess that I was lucky. There are probably more image media recovery program out there to try, but I’ll save that for next time. If that card had been in a whose way, the disk-fix by windows might have ended in a disaster, with a worse result than if some program (that actaully know and understand the image file format) had tried to rescue my images.
But it would have been even if I had take the words of TransPict at face value and just give up….
(as to why it was only 46 images – this wasn’t a photo vacation, it was family time)
As a long time google fan it pains me to say this… but of the big three google.com seems to return the worst results for my sites.
Search for “link:http://blog.tc.dk”:
Google: 6 results, 5 of them from blog.tc.dk itself
Live.com: 6 results, 2 of them from blog.tc.dk itself (plus a “view more from this site” option).
Yahoo.com: 13 results, 2 of them from blog.tc.dk it self.
Search for link:http://barbue.dk
Google: one page (from an ODP mirror page)
Live.com: 36 results (largely relevant!)
Yahoo.com: Several hundred, but most of them seems to be ODP links
Search for link:gallery.tc.dk
Google: Nothing
Live.com: 6 results (including one from blog.tc.dk)
Yahoo.com: 9 results (including two from gallery.tc.dk)
Overall it seems that Yahoo.com has the best index, but it also returned more irrelevant results. Google just seem to suck.
I’ll try some more searches later…
Please read part 1 first.
Securing the beast
Now I’m getting close to wanting to move the box to a server room. That means that it’ll be directly connected to the internet, with no router and no nating. It will be attacked. A lot. If there’s any obvious hole in it’s defences, it will get owned.
I’m not a security expert, but I do know that there’s no such thing as absolut security. You just secure the box as well as possible, with the resources you are willing to use. It’s a compromise between usability, resources and security.
I see security as a triangle between, keeping the machine up to date, making sure that the installed programs are setup as secure as possible and keeping an eye on the box for strange behaviour (did somebody get through).
When you look at the security page at debian.org, all it tells you is to keep the packages up to date. I’ll start by looking at that.
This is my own personal notes on how I set up my new server box. It started out as my notes on how to turn a debian 3.1 Sarge installation into a LAMP box. At the moment it’s a rather detailed dummy’s and/or beginners step-by-step guide to making a LAMP box.
Preface
More on what LAMP is at wikepedia
Now Sarge 3.1 is a bit old at the this time, and a new version is just around the corner, but then I’ll learn how to upgrade a debian box when that happens.
I’ll try and be as detailed as possible. I really hate those how-to’s that go “they you press Y,, then N, and then… [do something that might as well be magic, unless you are a guru]”. I’ll try and link to the place where I picked up a bit of knowledge or the idea for doing something.
I’m not a linux wizard. I’ve been running a FreeBSD for a long time, as my webserver, but I can barely keep that alive and malware free. I’ll be trying to set up this box, so that it keep it self up to date and as secure as possible.
Now be aware that this is not the most clever, fast or secure way of doing this – this is just the way that I did it using the bit information that I could find on how to do what I wanted. Some of the stuff that I do is redundant and is redone later. Sometimes several times.
If somebody feels like added comments that tells how things can be done faster, better, more secure I’ll appriciate it and probably incorporate it into the doc.
(feel free to make comments on gramma and spelling – I’ll fix it and then delete your comment. I do appriciate it, it’s just kind of off-topic for the blog)
I never go far without my Pentax *ist DS camera. I take a lot of pictures.
Normally when I move pictures from my camera to my computer and do the first raw sorting, it’s a fairly manual process, involving things like the windows explorer (copy), a small file renaming tool (to rename to the exif date/time), IrfanView (browsing) and The Gimp (for crop and levelling).
I want to try and automate this process a bit, make it work better with raw files and add delta edition (the original picture is left untouched, changes applied is saved to a seperate file).
Continue reading