Got a Nikon D40x as a present. It came with the kit zoom lense an 18-55 zoom which is equivalent to 35-105. The camera is 10mpixels but has raw format which will have better image quality at the expense of larger size.
With the built in flash, it is certainly much more unwieldy than the nikon LS18, but has many more capabilities. Higher resolution, better focusing, can take continuous shots, more control over things such as shutter speed, f stop, etc. It should allow me to take pictures of food more easily.
A few things that I will probably have to get for it, a camera bag, memory card and maybe a dedicated flash. A 1gig card only holds about 70 raw+jpeg pics, so I will have to get a much larger capacity one, maybe a 4 gig card. a 1 gig card will hold like 400-500 pics from the LS18.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
Iphone a bust?
Was looking into the SDK for the iphone. The tools that they provide and the documentation does not allow for a keyboard service, which is what I need to implement. All documentation describes creating an application which will normally take up a full screen.
In addition there is normally only 1 application running. The iphone os will terminate and start another one as needed (if a call comes in etc) . There are some demons but none of the documentation describes it, and looking at the iphone os, it appears it's much more fragile (memory management for instance).
Since the iphone os is based on mac os, it should be possible to hack at it, using info from mac development. If I have a jailbroken iphone (or even iphone simulator) I might be able to figure out how to do it.
It is possible since iaccess, a Chinese virtual keyboard app exists and appears to work on the iphone as a service level application.
I may have to look toward a proof-of-concept on the android platform, as I know that will support virtual keyboards/input method framework soon (1h 2009) as opposed to Apple which has not commented on the topic. Also since Android is java based, it's should be much easier to develop. Iphone apps use objective C which is an derived from C, or something like that.
In addition there is normally only 1 application running. The iphone os will terminate and start another one as needed (if a call comes in etc) . There are some demons but none of the documentation describes it, and looking at the iphone os, it appears it's much more fragile (memory management for instance).
Since the iphone os is based on mac os, it should be possible to hack at it, using info from mac development. If I have a jailbroken iphone (or even iphone simulator) I might be able to figure out how to do it.
It is possible since iaccess, a Chinese virtual keyboard app exists and appears to work on the iphone as a service level application.
I may have to look toward a proof-of-concept on the android platform, as I know that will support virtual keyboards/input method framework soon (1h 2009) as opposed to Apple which has not commented on the topic. Also since Android is java based, it's should be much easier to develop. Iphone apps use objective C which is an derived from C, or something like that.
Saturday, January 24, 2009
10.5.6 up and runing
Got the hackintosh 10.5.6 running. Wasn't easy had a plethora of issues from the Waiting for root device 0 to cannot find the boot.plist file.
In the end it was resolved by installing ALL the ATA chipset drivers, a particular Nforce lan driver and the kxconfig (for sound) driver. That took 6 hours of trial and error.
Hopefully now the iphone development stuff will work correctly as well as fontforge.
In the end it was resolved by installing ALL the ATA chipset drivers, a particular Nforce lan driver and the kxconfig (for sound) driver. That took 6 hours of trial and error.
Hopefully now the iphone development stuff will work correctly as well as fontforge.
Saturday, January 17, 2009
Music and graphics on the mac...
Finally got mac to recognize the video card and install the drivers for it as well as the sound. Had to download a program that wrote to the boot file i believe and setup the device id for the display card. I used EFI EZ String.
For the soundblaster, I got lucky, some russians have been working on soundblaster drivers for windows and decided to port over for macs and the sound works just fine.
Actually mac os works great now, no hangs or anything like that yet. Seems super stable too.
For the soundblaster, I got lucky, some russians have been working on soundblaster drivers for windows and decided to port over for macs and the sound works just fine.
Actually mac os works great now, no hangs or anything like that yet. Seems super stable too.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Nikon LS18
I finally got a camera, the Nikon LS18. Reasonable camera that has most of the features that I was looking for, such as macro, flash-fill or second curtain flash, sdhc support.
There's two big pluses going for it, it uses AA batteries which is pretty easy to get a hold of, and supports sdhc the high capacity standard. (On a side note I found out that they have come out with a spec for terrabyte size cards!)
The major drawbacks is that this camera uses a plastic body, and the download software is slower. It seems that it must go through all the card contents before it can show it to you, which works unlike the canon software. Since I like keeping old foto's on the camera's card, this can be a problem.
There is a slight bumpup in resolution (8m instead of 7m) from my old Canon SD550. Also there isn't much in the way of manual modes (apeture or shuttle priority). The face detection system didn't work that great (doesn't detect faces on photo's which other cameras can, but I can't be sure that's that big a problem), and unlike other systems, seems to only find one face.
As a cheap camera that can take pictures though, so far it fits the bill.
There's two big pluses going for it, it uses AA batteries which is pretty easy to get a hold of, and supports sdhc the high capacity standard. (On a side note I found out that they have come out with a spec for terrabyte size cards!)
The major drawbacks is that this camera uses a plastic body, and the download software is slower. It seems that it must go through all the card contents before it can show it to you, which works unlike the canon software. Since I like keeping old foto's on the camera's card, this can be a problem.
There is a slight bumpup in resolution (8m instead of 7m) from my old Canon SD550. Also there isn't much in the way of manual modes (apeture or shuttle priority). The face detection system didn't work that great (doesn't detect faces on photo's which other cameras can, but I can't be sure that's that big a problem), and unlike other systems, seems to only find one face.
As a cheap camera that can take pictures though, so far it fits the bill.
Mac on PC systems
I have been trying to get mac os 10 to run on the pc, and have been successful, though not using a straight leopard distribution from Apple.
It seems that apple has code in certain programs that checks for intel chips and makes sure that the system is indeed an apple system or it'll commit suicide.
Fortunately there is a movement (called hackintosh among others) that has worked on the kernel and other parts so it can work on non-apple systems (oh the heresy). Drawin, the kernel much to Apple's credit is open-sourced, though higher level technologies such as cocoa, quicktime, carbon, and quartz (things pertaining to the user interface, application services etc) have not.
As such, much like linux there are several different 'distributions' that contains drivers, kernels etc that support different versions of the os from 10.5.2 all to way to 10.5.5, and I think 10.5.6 is soon to be here.
The purpose of all this though was to do iphone development, for which the sdk is only available on the mac-os.
To this end, it has been somewhat successful. I have been able to get 10.5.4 to load, while 10.5.5 but there are issues when I try to compile code. If I get serious about the iphone development, I'll have to see about getting a real mac.
It seems that apple has code in certain programs that checks for intel chips and makes sure that the system is indeed an apple system or it'll commit suicide.
Fortunately there is a movement (called hackintosh among others) that has worked on the kernel and other parts so it can work on non-apple systems (oh the heresy). Drawin, the kernel much to Apple's credit is open-sourced, though higher level technologies such as cocoa, quicktime, carbon, and quartz (things pertaining to the user interface, application services etc) have not.
As such, much like linux there are several different 'distributions' that contains drivers, kernels etc that support different versions of the os from 10.5.2 all to way to 10.5.5, and I think 10.5.6 is soon to be here.
The purpose of all this though was to do iphone development, for which the sdk is only available on the mac-os.
To this end, it has been somewhat successful. I have been able to get 10.5.4 to load, while 10.5.5 but there are issues when I try to compile code. If I get serious about the iphone development, I'll have to see about getting a real mac.
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