New Stuff

1. Lately I’ve not had the opportunity to get seriously geeky about camera gear, or gadgetry in general. But, I’m one step closer to getting my kit together with the purchase of this — an AF-S DX VR Zoom-Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G IF-ED (say that three times fast). Which looks like this:

2. I’ve been wanting to cut my kit down to bare essentials ever since I got back from Indonesia — I’m just sick of lugging all that stuff about. Now I’ve got a lens that will pretty much do everything except super-wideangle, which I don’t need most of the time, meaning I won’t need to change lenses much at all. So my kit now consists of:

3. …all of which fits nicely in my new LowePro Nova 3AW shoulder bag, which with the help of a couple of clips attaches itself to the front of my LowePro backpack (which will hold clothes and stuff). This combo will be great for short trips, and would probably do for a couple weeks in the tropics. On a test pack I crammed a pair of jeans, a pair of cargos, a pair of sneakers, a sweatshirt, 4 t-shirts, underwear and socks for a week, toiletries, medication, a small towel and my laptop in it. It’s a bloody black hole I tell ya.

4. So, the only thing left to buy now is a super-wideangle, and I’ve got my eye on either the Nikkor 12-24mm f4, or the Sigma 10-20mm F4.5-5.6. The Nikkor is the better of the two, but the Sigma is wider and half the price. That, and replacing my Canon Ixus 30 with an Olympus 770SW — it’s small and light, better in places where you don’t want to have a huge Nikon thief-magnet, and waterproof to 5m with no special housing — just the ticket the next time I get stuck on a raft in the middle of the sea getting pelted with rain and waves.

5. My first chance to road test the new combo will be in May, where a mate and I will be heading for the bright lights of Tokyo and making our way back on local trains. Think Sydney to Melbourne via local trains. Except more exciting.

iPhone

1. Look, I’m not going to talk too much about it, and besides wanting one bad, what else is there to say that won’t be said by the rest of the internets? But, I have to say, I wrote this in 2004:

Imagine an all aluminium iPod, around the same dimensions of the current iPod. On the outside there is the black and white display, the scroll wheel and navigation buttons, with the hinge on one side, and the release catch on the other (which magnetically retracts, a la PowerBook). Press the release catch and the iPod unfolds like a clamshell, revealing the colour touch screen on one side and a thumb board on the other. Nestled in the hinge is the stylus.

Running the PDA side of things is a mobile version of OS X, ported to run on Embedded Linux. Included is cut down versions of basic OS X productivity programs — Mail, Safari, Address Book and iCal — all of which ties in perfectly with the full calorie versions.

Bluetooth is enabled automatically when it is opened, and at the click of a button it’ll hook up with your phone and connect to the internet. mac.com you can synchronise your contacts and iCal. With iSync all your personal info would be transferred across, including all the Safari bookmarks. With a special cable into the dock connector you could plug in your digital camera and import new photos using mobile iPhoto, sort them into a new album, plug in the TV cable and show the day’s shots at a friends house. Including that short video shot with your digital camera. And in the morning it’ll make you coffee just how you like it too.

2. How ace was that? While my imagination failed with the form factor, an awful lot of functionality that I was lusting in 2004 has materialised in 2007. I wrote that around the time the project started, so maybe I was cosmically channelling an Apple engineer, or maybe the other way around; either way I don’t care, I just can’t wait to get my hands on one. If, and a big if at that, it’s ever sold in Japan.

Dipping into the past

1. Progress is a strange thing. I am quite fond of progress, believing that there are very few things that were truly better in the past than it is now. So I find it strange that I am currently typing this in the DOS version of Microsoft Word 5.5, running in a full screen DOS window, which I’ve adopted as my primary writing program on my PC laptop.

2. On my Mac I have WriteRoom, which is a great full screen text editor. On the PC I was using DarkRoom, a program offing almost the same functionality of WriteRoom. But it was not a perfect match of WriteRoom, and the few differences were jarring.

3. My first complaint with DarkRoom was how long it took to load. It almost as long as a full fledged word processor, yet it offered the functionality of Notepad. It’s nothing more than a text window, yet it required a mammoth .Net Framework download. It’s supposed to be a modern text editor, yet it had that nagging feeling of yesteryear; pressing backspace did not delete a whole block of selected text, you need to press delete.

4. Enter the DOS alternative.

5. DOS offered the sort of isolation and sparseness I was looking for when writing. All I needed was a readable font and zero distractions, and this version of Word delivers in spades — I reckon this is the best version of Word I have ever used. It’s just blue background and white text for me, having hidden everything from scroll bars to menus. I daresay I prefer this even to the Mac — the default DOS font is actually quite a pleasant thing to stare at for a while.

6. It’s not the perfect solution though. For one thing the now stock standard ctrl+c and ctrl+v keys for copying and pasting were not standard back when this version of Word came out, which takes some getting used to. And obviously Word for DOS and WinXP do not share the same clipboard, so you can’t copy and paste a link or a quote from a website, you have to edit the text in another editor. But for me the lack of visual clutter is such a boon that I am more than happy to use another editor in Windows to format and add links to my text. This is a case where it’s what you don’t get that counts — the clutter, the distractions, and the stress.

The Big Flop and the Big Durian

1. I have been rather lax the last couple of months, and I have no excuse besides laziness. So, a quick update on life matters.

2. Firstly, my long awaited trip to Kansai this month ran wildly off course and unfortunately had to be aborted mid-trip. It was disappointing, but Kansai is only a two hour train trip away, and I’ve been told November is the best time to go; as the country slips into Autumn it dresses itself in a brilliant red, a breathtaking sight. Not sure the finances will cope but a November weekend in Kyoto is a possibility.

3. Secondly, I won’t be coming back to Sydney this NYE after all. Plane tickets were just to expensive to justify the short time back home, so now I and a fellow teacher here will be going to Indonesia instead — climbing Anak Krakatoa, visiting Yogyakarta and the nearby Merapi volcano and getting under the influence for Christmas and New Years in the Big Durian. Molten rocks, millenia old Javanese temples and cheap cheap beer, oh my!

4. I’m working right now to expand my photography portfolio, and am planning on launching a web store in the near future to sell my prints. I think I’ve got some nice images now, and the cost of entry is so low there’s no reason not to try. More on that as it comes.

5. Not much else to report I’m afraid — weekend antics notwithstanding (and I ain’t talkin’ about that). All is well in the night.

My New Portfolio

1. Quick post to say my new photographic portfolio is now live. Check it out!

Hajememashite, Tachikoma desu!

tatikoma2_image.jpg

1. Oh My God! A real-life walking talking model of the four-legged tanks from the Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex series? I want one soooo bad! Unfortunately, it’s not for sale; so the video will be the closest thing or now.

WWDC ‘06

1. I don’t write much about Apple anymore, but with an event like WWDC and the new toys Apple has released, how could I resist?

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WriteRoom / Dark Room

1. I never realised how much visual clutter there was on my desktop, and how much it affected my writing, until now: thanks to a great bit of software called WriteRoom (OS X only, Windows users can try Dark Room, which does pretty much the same thing. I use it on my VAIO.) Such a simple idea — remove everything that could cause distraction, leave only the most important things behind. In this case, it’s just you and the words. Nothing else. It’s brilliant! It basically turns your computer into a typewriter, albeit one which lets you edit as well as type. You have a blank background with nothing but type. You choose the colour, the font, the size of the font and the length of a line. That’s it. The rest is up to you.

2. What’s even better is that WriteRoom also lets you install scripts and plugins that extend it’s features. I have scripts that, with the appropriate keyboard command (which you can choose), will do a word count, or send it to my email client. The company keeps a section of the forum for users to submit their own scripts, so other users can use and abuse as they see fit. And, best of all, the program is freeware.

3. This is what I love most about using a Mac. It’s not just the shiny hardware and pretty software from Apple, but the great user and developer community. I’m sure there are great programs for Windows as well, but they’re really hard to find. Most programs I find useful on Windows has a user interface that doesn’t just look like an afterthought, but rather a no-thought. But Mac developers seem to care about what their software looks like as well as how it functions. I like that. Aesthetics matter an awful lot in UI design — people work better in nice looking places.

4. Anyway, rant over, have a look for yourself — I’ll bet you’ll dig it as much as I do.

Intel on a different kind of front line

1. An unintended consequence of building a design centre in an area of the world for which stability is a very fluid concept, Intel now has more than just AMD gunning after them. Intel’s Haifa design centre is within range of Hezbollah strikes, the most recent of which led to 8 Israeli deaths and 17 wounded at the local train depot. From the MacWorld article:

Responding to the Home Front Command’s orders, essential employees are working inside protected areas at Intel’s development center while others work from bomb shelters near their home. “The protective shelters in Haifa are equipped with wireless connections and all Intel employees have laptops, so that hasn’t affected work,� Bahar said.

2. How crazy would it be if you were the person responsible for planning and running a campus in a part of the world that carries such high risks? What would that meeting have been like? This might sound a little off-topic, but while many people complain about the high salaries senior business executives are paid (and they’re probably right about a lot of them), I’d want to get paid an awful lot to shoulder that sort of responsibility.

3. I wonder what working from a bomb shelter would be like?

170,000 Reasons

1. I guess Japan was always gonna be trouble for me, with my weakness for gadgets and the superlative-inducingly high density of gadget-per-square-metre that is contemporary Japan, one should not be so shocked to hear that I dropped a fat stack of the Yens on a new gadget.

2. This time, it the new Sony VAIO UX50, a proper full function PC that just so happens to be the size of an old cassette Walkman and weighs just half a kilo. It packs a punch as well, with built in Bluetooth, 802.11a/b/g, ethernet, two cameras, fingerprint scanner, backlit keyboard (which totally blows, but it’s better than not having one at all), built in MemoryStick and CF slot, 4in widescreen touchscreen display, and docking station. It’s powered by an Intel Core solo U1300, has 512mb of RAM and 30Gb hard drive. Not that exciting, but did I mention that it weighed a shade over half a kilo?

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