“what we need now is coffee” – Google Search

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“what we need now is coffee” – Google Search

It’s in the middle of the night and we are getting ready to go to the hospital to have our second son delivered. I have the phrase “what we need now is coffee – lots of coffee!” stuck in my head. Strangely the first part of that sentence is only found two places in the web. Both copies of “fear and loathing in Las Vegas” by  Hunter S. Thompson. But that wasn’t what I was thinking of, so I guess that not everything can be found on the net. Not sure where it comes from, but I thinking Lucky Luke…

Adobe LightRoom 1.0 First Impressions

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I’ve been using the LR beta for quite a while. This is my first impressions of the final release, version 1.0. I’ll walk through the most interesting (to me) features and try to include any insights that I may have. Enjoy.

Get it from: Amazon.com or Amazon.co.uk

Available for both Mac OS and Windows (XP/Vista).

30 day trial is available from Adobe, so you can download from Adobe and run at once, while you wait for the CD and printed manual to arrive.

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Ubuntu Linux ready for the Desktop? NOT!

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To balance my recent Vista exploits, I decided to try out the latest Ubuntu Linux. I downloaded version 6.10 and burned a CD. The Ubuntu cd is a “live-cd” which means that you can boot on the CD and run the operating system without installing anything or changing your current installation. Here’s what happened:
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Fast Pentax Glass

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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…
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Pentax K10D – Known Issues

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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.

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Pentax K10D

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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.

My First MS Vista Experience

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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.
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Orwells 1984 – are we there yet?

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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.

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Image recovery

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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:

  • DiskInternal Flash Recovery:  Finds nine images, but can’t display them, and thinks they are jpeg. Probably found bit and pieces of the internal jpeg preview in some of the files. Does claim Raw support but doesn’t mention Pentax, so… I guess they don’t over sell.
  • PC Inspector Smart Recovery: Doesn’t claim to support Pentax, and didn’t find anything.
  • CardRecovery: This claims Pentax PEF support, but didn’t find anything at all.
  • TransPict Recovery Pro: This program also claim to support Pentax Raw files, but doesn’t say which Pentax cameras. It did find all the files but couldn’t display any of them and claimed that they where probably incomplete. Locked up hard, halfway through.

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)