In fact, it leads the number 2 lens by more than double the images. That’s an overwhelming win for this lens, and despite what dpreview recently said, this lens produces some of the most pleasing images, even wide open. I imaging my results are quite a bit different than theirs since I don’t photograph resolution charts

This post is my attempt at a real world impression, not a review. Reviews photographing test charts, and other scientific measurements do nothing to show weather a lens will be considered good, or useful.

More after the jump…

Since I got the Pentax FA 50mm/1.4 it has been on my camera more than any other lens. I used it a lot when I shot film, and it was the first lens that I mounted on my K100DSuper when I got it home. On a Pentax dSLR, it has an equivelent feild of view of a 75mm lens on a 35mm film body. If I had been asked 5 years ago if I would ever use a 75mm for anything other than portraits the answer would have been no.

I use my 50mm so much it leads the number 2 lens by more than twice the exposures. That’s an overwhelming win for this lens, and despite what dpreview recently said, this lens produces some of the most pleasing images, even wide open. I imaging my results are quite a bit different than theirs since I don’t photograph resolution test charts

Despite the 50mm focal length being duplicated in three of my zoom lenses(DA*16-50/2.8, DA*50-135/2.8, DA18-55/3.8-5.6), there is something about working with a prime lens that seems to force me to think differently with my camera, the extra speed helps too!

I’ve started to organize my photos on flickr into sets based on the lens that took them, you can see more of my shots from the FA50/1.4 here

Whats your most used lens?

Using the set of Alkaline batteries included with the camera I was able to take approximately 90 shots with about 60-75% flash usage.

I also picked up two sets of 4 Energizer Lithium Ion single use batteries. I plan to keep these as the emergency set in my camera bag. I expect this set to perform close to, or exceed the anticipated number of shots in the manual. If I were to take a long trip, I would also consider picking up a set or two of CRV-3 Lithium batteries as these are supposed to yield 1000 – 1100 shots.

Since they were readily available, I picked up some Energizer 2500mAh NiHM Batteries and a charger. So far, these batteries have worked well for my needs. Typical charge time is about 8.5 hours with the supplied charger. The first two charges were yielded very few pictures, but it looks like the third charge is the sweet spot. I have four sets of the Energizer NiHM’s and all three have taken about three charges to achieve normal usage. Some sets have not been charged beyond the third charge as I am still working my way through them (There have not been too many sunny weekends where I live so far).

To sum things up, the Energizer sets appear to be working quite well. These batteries are affordable, and easily available. The average cost for a set of these batteries ranges from $14 – $20 Canadian, which is comparable to a set of single use Energizer Lithium AA’s. Time will ultimately tell how reliable these batteries are, but so far, I don’t have too much to loose. It should be noted that re-chargeable Lithium ION batteries are not recommended for use in the Pentax K100D Super, the manual claims that this is due to the voltage characteristics of these batteries. In normal use, I don’t find the limitations of NiHM AA battery technology to be a problem, so far I have not needed to break out my emergency set of single use lithium’s, and I don’t expect to any time soon.

If you have been disappointed with the Energizer, Duracell, or other readily available batteries, I would look at trying a set of Sanyo Eneloops, which are available at Costco (last time I checked). These batteries come highly recommended from many forums and photography groups around the Internet. I plan to try a set of these batteries sometime soon.

I origionally switched to Linux over 10 years ago because my modest hardware could not keep up with Windows, and I was rewarded with a reliable, stable, and responive system. Fast forward 8 years and I am now a very satisfied Ubuntu user, however, I have never been a fan of desktop enviroments such as GNOME and KDE. I normaly prefere something very light weight such as WindowMaker.However, I found a way to keep a “mostly default” Ubuntu install with a light weight desktop. I had used Xfce a couple of years ago while experimenting with Redhat 8,9 and Fedora, and I quite enjoyed it.

Xubuntu delivers a light weight desktop on Ubuntu, prefering light weight applications, and also utilizing ubuntu repositories. Ubuntu is nice, and works very well, but I just don’t like GNOME, or its heavy memory usage. I’m also cheap, and I do not like spending a lot of money on hardware. Requiring less than 192Mb of RAM, Xubuntu is now running on my main desktop, laptop, and office desktop. Its also running on my backup home workstation.

So if you are finding Ubuntu a little heavy on your machine, give Xubuntu a try! Switching from Ubuntu to Xubuntu is quick and easy, and if you do not like it, you can easily go back.

To install Xubuntu from Ubuntu type:

sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop

Enjoy, if you have any questions please leave a comment.

Some have called it the best BlackBerry ever, and I tend to agree with them. The curve is only my second BlackBerry, previously I was using a BlackBerry 8700r.

Now there was nothing wrong with my 8700r, and the only reason to upgrade to the Curve/8300 was the fact that the rest of my department was in the process of standardizing our phones.

Its going to sound corny, but the Curve is sleek, its stylish, and its very light. Did I mention that this phone is *light* its incredible. It took a couple of hours to get used to the trackball, having used the famous BlackBerry wheel for a year or so, but now I would have trouble going back to just the wheel.

[continue reading after the jump....]

Highlights of the Curve/8300

• Media Player — MP3 player sounds great, only complaint is that its a bit clunky feeling compared to an iPod, but its a minor complaint.
• 2.0 Megapixel Camera with Flash. Works great, takes great pictures for a camera phone.
  Voice activated dialing! – Works as advertised, no complaints so far.
• The OS interface changes (Menu key, trackball, escape key placement) all add up to a great user experience, its much faster to use the applications.

Whats in the box (Rogers Wireless):

• BlackBerry Curve
• BlackBerry C-S2 (same as the 8700)
• International Travel Charger
• USB Cable
• Software CD-ROM
• Quick Start Guide
• User Guide
• Stereo Headset
• Leather slip case[1]

Now, the only thing that disappointed me with the BlackBerry 8300 was that it did not come with a Belt Clip/Holster. I really liked the hard plastic one that came with my 8700. The leather case that comes with the 8300 fits in your pocket nicely, but it just doesn’t work for me personally. I recommend picking up the BlackBerry 8330 Lambskin Belt Clip Holster, its a great stylish phone case, even the SWMBO commented on it (which is rare).

Call Quality on the curve is excellent, my 8700 was excellent as well, and it was nice that the such a small smart phone can keep pace on the call quality side. Major kudo’s to RIM on this one.

The keyboard is excellent, its a bit different than the 8700, but I’ve easily adjusted to the Curve.

Build Quality is excellent, some have called it the sturdiest BlackBerry ever, I havn’t dropped mine yet, so I can’t comment on that front, I am very hard on cell phones, so if it can be easily broken, I’ll break it. I will go out on a limb and state that I do not expect to break my 8300.

Its worth noting that I did not break my 8700, it has a lot of scars, but still works well. (I’ve broken 4 Treo’s, and 5 iDen (Telus Mike) phones previous to going over to BlackBerry.

If you plan to use the camera, I strongly recommend that you get a microSD card for the phone. Once you have the microSD card installed, you will be able to download the camera phones using “USB Mass Storage” which means your phone will simply appear as a drive letter in Windows, and more importantly, no proprietary software required! (I use Linux, so this is very important!).

I highly recommend picking up the Curve if you are in the market for a BlackBerry.

If you want to install and use Thunderbird 2.0, here is your quick and dirty guide:

The first thing we need to do is download Thunderbird 2 from Mozilla, save it to somewhere you will remember, the default is your Desktop under Ubuntu. This brief how to will assume that you saved the file to your Desktop.

Open a Terminal Session (applications -> accessories -> Terminal)

cd Desktop

tar zxvf thunderbird-2.0.0.0.tar.gz

sudo mv thunderbird /opt/thunderbird2

Now we have Thunderbird installed, but we do not have an Icon to launch it, we need to add one. I like to keep icons for Firefox and Thunderbird on the top Panel, beside the system menu, these instructions will work if you choose to create a launch icon on the desktop.

1. Right click on the top launch bar, select “add to panel”
2. Click “Custom Application Launcher” on the pop up window. (If you chose to create an Icon on your desktop, right click your desktop and select “Create Launcher…”)
3. Set type to “Application”
4. Name: Thunderbird 2.0
5. Command: /opt/thunderbird2/thunderbird
6. Next, click on Icon, and scroll down until you see the Thunderbird icons, choose the “mozilla-thunderbird.xpm” icon.
7. Click “OK”

And thats it. Enjoy Thunderbird 2.0!

My A100 uses an ATI SB450 soundcard, which worked out of the box in 6.06, 6.10, and the early beta stages of 7.04. From what I can see, this problem is related to the release kernel not detecting the sound card model correctly.

After searching the Ubuntu forums, and Launchpad, I found this fix posted by Ubuntu forums member “djails“:

sudo rmmod snd-hda-intel

sudo modprobe snd-hda-intel probe_mask=8 model=auto

After running the above commands, your sound card should now work, however, these changes are not permanent, to make the above changes permanent, add the following line to the bottom of /etc/modprobe.d/alsa-base:

options snd-hda-intel probe_mask=8 model=auto

After applying these changes, all components of the Toshiba Satellite Pro A100 appear to be working, including the built in wireless card.

If you need help with your soundcard, or Satellite Pro A100, post below and I will do my best to help out.

The main reason for the update to the list appears to be the addition of HDNet to StarChoice and Shaw Cable’s lineup. (not too surprising, StarChoice is owned by Shaw). Bell has had HD for a while now, and they still appear to be the HD leader in Canada.

I’m not expecting to see many new HD channels this year, Bell is expected to focus on upgrading to MPEG-4, adding additional bandwidth for HD channels, as they try to stay ahead of the Cable, and IPTV providers.

Automatix adds an easy to use interface for installing 3rd party packages that are not maintained by Ubuntu, or the Ubuntu community, these typically consist of commercial packes such as Google Earth, Windows Media Codecs etc.

Here is the quick and dirty way to get started with Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (7.04):

1. sudo apt-get install python (if you do not already have python 2.4 installed)
2. wget http://www.getautomatix.com/apt/dists/feisty/main/binary-i386/automatix2_1.1-3.5-7.04feisty_i386.deb
3. sudo dpkg -i automatix2_1.1-3.5-7.04feisty_i386.deb
4. automatix2

Follow the directions on screen and enjoy. Please note that Ubuntu Feisty Fawn, 7.04 is currently beta.

read more | digg story

I decided to go with Ubuntu server edition for my Colocated server for many reasons, primarily of which was ease of maintence. I’ve had very little time as of late to devote to time consuming distrobutions such as Gentoo, it was fun, but it just took up too much of my time, and when it got too far out of date, it was just too much work to recover.

Some key features that really drew me to Ubuntu server edition:

• No open ports or running services by default, not even SSH!
• Single CD install, no more having to stand around and swap disks three or more times.
• Small server footprint, under 400MB.
• LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) can be installed by default.

After install, and after the machine booted, the first thing that I did was edit /etc/apt/sources.list and comment out all of the lines for the cdrom. This will allow me to install software from the online repositories, without the CD.

The first thing that I had to change, was to update VIM from VIM tiny, to regular VIM.

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get install vim

Next, we need SSH for remote access to the new server, now I can go home and complete the setup from there.

sudo apt-get install ssh openssh-server

If you’re like me, and the nano editor drives you nuts, you’ll want to do the following:

sudo update-alternatives –config editor

My favorite part of all of this is, I only get what I want. Everything is deliberate and clean, which makes management easier. I also like the fact that I don’t have to spend 10 minutes disabling and removing services I do not need or use.

If you would like to read more about Ubuntu Server Edition, I’d start with the Ubuntu Server Guide. You may also be interested in the Ubuntu Server Ruby on Rails +Apache howto. You can also visit the Ubuntu Server Edition website.

I’ve been working as a Linux Admin for the past 9 years, and Ubuntu server was a pleseant surprise. I had made the mistake of brushing off Ubuntu as a distrobution for Newbies when it was first released, but I am glad that I tried the desktop, and finally the server edition.

Ballmer:

“Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered,” Ballmer said. This “is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability.”

Microsoft is giving Novell $440 million, and Novell is giving back $40 million to pay for patents that it thinks Linux is infringing upon.

Thanks Novell! You sold out the whole Linux community, who’s work you have been busy trying to use to resuscitate your dying business. No one who has been using Linux for more than one year was surprised by your actions, but now we have caught you with your hand in the cookie jar. And we have the proof we need to tell people why they should not use SuSE Linux.

At least I do not have to rebuild any of my servers or workstations, none of them run SUSE, if they did, I would have already formatted and re-installed with a better distro a long time ago.

If you use Linux, please boycott SUSE. If you currently use SUSE, please try a free alternative such as CentOS, Ubuntu, Fedora. My personal combo is CentOS for severs, Ubuntu for Desktops.

[Thanks to BoingBoing for the Ballmer quote.]