Just got a new phone courtesy of work, a Nokia N73, but with no memory card, so I decided to invest in a decent-sized mini SD card for it. MyMemory.com are doing their own brand 133x 2GB cards for £17.99 + P&P, which seemed like a good deal. I know their claims about speed are extremely optimistic (I've got a 133x MyMemory CF card, which is noticably slower than my 120x Transflash cards), but speed isn't a major concern in this case.
Well, the card arrived promptly, and worked when I put it in the phone, but when I formatted it (I like memory cards to be formatted in the device they are to be used by), it wouldn't format. I managed to get it formatted on my old Minolta camera (which takes SD cards), and used it over the weekend with no problems. However, today when I tried to copy a large amount of data to it, it was being really slow, and then started causing IO errors. Clearly not a good sign. I can't format it on the phone (still) or under Win XP, so it's going back to MyMemory for a refund. And next time I'm going to buy a decent brand.
Meanwhile, the Nisis graphics tablet has been a touch tempermental again. Although it was apparently working fine, when I tried it in anger with Photoshop, the cursor stopped responding to the pen input after a minute or so or use. I think that following a reboot of my PC and a few harsh words, it seems OK now. Annoyingly, for another £20 or so, I could have bought the cheapest Wacom tablet, which I'm fairly confident would have been a lot less trouble.
The moral of these tales? You get what you pay for. I should know this - I stopped buying cheap outdoor/walking stuff and cheap tools a long time ago for exactly the same reason!
Well, the card arrived promptly, and worked when I put it in the phone, but when I formatted it (I like memory cards to be formatted in the device they are to be used by), it wouldn't format. I managed to get it formatted on my old Minolta camera (which takes SD cards), and used it over the weekend with no problems. However, today when I tried to copy a large amount of data to it, it was being really slow, and then started causing IO errors. Clearly not a good sign. I can't format it on the phone (still) or under Win XP, so it's going back to MyMemory for a refund. And next time I'm going to buy a decent brand.
Meanwhile, the Nisis graphics tablet has been a touch tempermental again. Although it was apparently working fine, when I tried it in anger with Photoshop, the cursor stopped responding to the pen input after a minute or so or use. I think that following a reboot of my PC and a few harsh words, it seems OK now. Annoyingly, for another £20 or so, I could have bought the cheapest Wacom tablet, which I'm fairly confident would have been a lot less trouble.
The moral of these tales? You get what you pay for. I should know this - I stopped buying cheap outdoor/walking stuff and cheap tools a long time ago for exactly the same reason!
13/11: Mega Machu Picchu
Someone at work just passed me this link to a 1500 MegaPixel image of Machu Picchu. There's some technical detail to how the photo was put together (camera, lens, software), but some more detail would have been nice (mostly what sort of tripod mount was used - ie a proper panorama mount, or just a standard head?). Anyway, a very impressive picture - worth lugging the 10kg of camera gear up the Inca Trail for!
Had a quick trawl through the weblogs toady, and once again noticed that the "Bookmarking icons for MSIE 5.0" show up in the broken links section, as usual. Anyway, I finally got round to doing something about it, so you'll probably notice an icon appearing in the address bar of your browser. It might change sometime (when I can be bothered to do something properly), but for now this was generated courtesy of http://www.chami.com/html-kit/services/favicon/.
04/11: Back from Safari
Jambo!
We've just spent 11 days in Kenya, and arrived home yesterday. I'm just checking through my photos, and I've got just over 2100 pictures to sort through!
Having had a bit of a think about what I'm doing with this site, I'm going to put together a few reviews of equipment I bought or borowed for the trip, and also some thoughts on the different places we stayed whilst in Kenya - so watch this space!
In the mean time, until I find time to properly sort out all the pictures (which could be months...) here's one for starters:
We've just spent 11 days in Kenya, and arrived home yesterday. I'm just checking through my photos, and I've got just over 2100 pictures to sort through!
Having had a bit of a think about what I'm doing with this site, I'm going to put together a few reviews of equipment I bought or borowed for the trip, and also some thoughts on the different places we stayed whilst in Kenya - so watch this space!
In the mean time, until I find time to properly sort out all the pictures (which could be months...) here's one for starters:
