Windy Hilltops » geek

I have a new camera

Mike McGavin — Sat, 21 Jun 2008 08:17:16 +0000

I have a new camera! It’s a Canon Powershot A720 IS, which is actually very similar to my old Canon Powershot A710 IS. Notable differences between the two are that it takes photos at a slightly higher resolution, it’s reportedly several grams lighter, and it has less water inside.

Canon makes great cameras, in my opinion, both compact and SLR (although I’m more of a compact user myself). I bought my original Powershot camera in late 2006 after a lot of shopping around in the compact camera market, looking for something I could conveniently take tramping and which wouldn’t require me to spend much time setting up photos. The closest contenders at the time were a couple of the Panasonic Lumix cameras, but after looking at some of the sample photos they were producing, I wasn’t convinced that the Panasonic cameras were doing as good-a-job. It was something about the colours between pixels which looked a bit strange and out of coordination when the photos were blown up.

This particular Canon camera doesn’t make any special claims to being shockproof or waterproof, which are often advisable for outdoor use. Until now, though, I’ve still found it to be fairly durable as long as I take basic precautions such as always using the wrist-strap (which has saved it several times), and packing it away properly before river crossings. That’s even taking into account that don’t tend to go to obsessive lengths to look after my things when I’m using them. eg. I still take my camera out in the rain because as far as I’m concerned, that’s what it’s for. It’s not ultra-light for a compact camera but is still reasonably light at ~200 grams + batteries, it has a good lens, it has a better-than-average optical zoom (6x) and incorporates an image stabaliser which helps a lot when you’re in a rush, it makes intelligent decisions for things I decide not to set up manually, although the manual option is usually there, and it takes both HD-SD cards and AA batteries. I liked it so much for the way I wanted to use a camera that when the old one broke, I went out and bought another one as identical as I could find.

The A710 died some time between Saturday night and Sunday morning on the recent trip to Mt Richmond Forest Park. It didn’t completely stop working but the digital display gave up, and particular formations showing on the display implied that water had probably gotten inside. So I went on through the trip taking photos through the viewfinder as best I could, but there are certain non-immediate things with a digital camera that you need the display for, such as for formatting the card and changing settings. The A710 might still dry out one day, but I’d still rather have a camera that’s not at risk of failing at a bad time. If it dries out, I’ll have two good cameras.

I’ve yet to take the A720 tramping, although the first occasion will probably be next weekend, somewhere in the Rimutakas.

kubuntu and libdvdcss2

Mike McGavin — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:30:07 +0000

This is a little confusing. I opted to install Kubuntu Feisty on my new Sony Vaio. Until now I’ve mostly been a Debian user, but I’ve wanted to try Ubuntu or Kubuntu for some time now, since it has such a great reputation. So far the only problems I’ve had after installation have been that the system won’t come back up after Suspend, and that DVDs haven’t wanted to play properly.

Specifically for the DVD problem, I’ve been convinced that it’s a problem with libdvdcss2, or something closely related to it. I installed the latest version available (1.2.9) from Medibuntu and had all kinds of problems. For example, Ogle would write console messages such as “WARNING[ogle_mpeg_ps]: Found a scrambled PES packet! (1)”.

Kaffeine would pop up dialog messages such as “The source seems encrypted, and can’t be read. Your DVD is probably crypted.” At the same time, I’d be able to use kaffeine’s right-click context menu to jump directly to specific bits of the DVD, even though using the DVD’s own menus to navigate would often cause the session to die. To me, this implies that it’s not something specifically to do with decrypting the disc encoding.

Strangely though, I seem to have been able to fix it by downgrading libdvdcss2 to version 1.2.5. I tried this after reading the Ubuntu Playing DVDs instructions for Ubuntu Edgy (now out of date), which suggest running “sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh” from the libdvdread3 package. This script essentially downloads and installs version 1.2.5-1 of libdvdcss, and suddenly everything’s working. I tried re-installing 1.2.9 over the top of 1.2.5, but that breaks it again.

Anyway, I’ve placed a Hold flag on version 1.2.5 in my repository, to make sure it doesn’t get updated accidentally. I’ll be interested to find out one day if this is a libdvdcss2 bug, or if it’s something else that I’ve broken.

I have a new toy

Mike McGavin — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 21:00:00 +0000

I have a new toy (a Sony VAIO VGNSZ433NB), although the guy at the Sony shop in Wellington didn’t help much. I’d narrowed it down to three choices from Sony’s website, based on specifications. Not many places near the south end of the CBD seem to stock Sony laptops, and I thought I might actually be able to get a look at them. It turned out that my third choice was down to a display model, and the guy claimed that the first two models had been discontinued. He then tried to tell me that I’d be much better off getting its replacement (which wasn’t actually a replacement so much as the next model up), which cost an extra thousand dollars. When I mentioned I was planning to blow away Windows completely, he started practically trying to talk me out of it, and attempted to convince me how great Vista. (He reckoned there would be all sorts of driver problems, which I didn’t believe.)

I then walked over to Noel Leeming, which didn’t have it but said they could get it on special order. Either way, it wasn’t available for me to actually play with. In the end I ordered it off Ascent late on Tuesday night, it arrived on Wednesday, and I’m really happy with it. I blew away Windows last night and installed Kububtu Linux. There are a few issues with the Suspend function, which so far I’m optimistic about, but otherwise it’s been working great. I’m now an owner of a Notebook produced by Sony, which incidentally is also one of the most evil media companies in the world. Yay for me.

Off to the Tararuas this weekend.

My Dell is choking

Mike McGavin — Sun, 02 Sep 2007 08:36:42 +0000

As of this evening, my old Dell Inspiron 5150 has started choking. It’s randomly rebooting, or putting itself into a half-asleep state, within a few minutes of switching on. This is a little sad, but in the back of my mind it’s quite exciting. It’s the first laptop I ever bought (in 2003), and there are plenty of things I’d do differently next time around. (I’d avoid Dell for one thing.) If it really is dying, it could be a convenient excuse to buy a new laptop.

Meanwhile, I have to try and figure out if there’s any important data on it that I’ll need to try and get off.