The Author – Bart Busschots
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Feb
29
O2 – The Irish iPhone Rip-off
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 29, 2008 | 15 Comments
I posted my initial comments on the Irish iPhone introduction yesterday and the more I think about it and the more I read about it the angrier I get with O2 and the less likely I am to buy an official Irish iPhone. Judging by the iPod Touch the iPhone must be a spectacular phone but I’m not prepared to be taken to the cleaners by O2 for it. The rip-off culture here in Ireland is so well established that we often don’t even notice quite how much over the odds we pay for stuff but O2 is going too far with this one. O2 Ireland obviously don’t think they need to learn from their colleagues in the UK who already have the iPhone.
[tags]Ireland, iPhone, rip-off[/tags]
Feb
28
iPhone Comes to Ireland in March
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 28, 2008 | 8 Comments
Well, it’s official, Ireland is getting the iPhone on the 14th of March 2008 exclusively from O2. You can get all the details on this page on the O2 site. That pretty much settles it, my next cellphone will be an iPhone. However, I’m not going to be rushing to buy one on the 14th. I have a perfectly functional cellphone and until that changes I won’t be getting and iPhone. Mind you, if I was less broke I might be more inclined to go out and grab one sooner.
The prices are as I’d expected. The Dollar prices with a Euro sign instead, in other words, standard Apple prices. I’m not impressed by the available contracts though. The lack of an unlimited data plan really stands out as a shortcoming in my book. Mind you, our cell networks are rather poor once you leave the confines of Dublin city so it will probably be a non-issue for quite some time to come. One nice thing is that it’s ‘only’ an 18 month contract, longer than the average here, but shorter than the two years in America.
[tags]iPhone, Ireland, O2[/tags]
Feb
24
Photo of the Week 1 – An Evening Stroll
Filed Under Photography on February 24, 2008 | 1 Comment
Inspired by Ann Teliczan’s Michigan Sweet Spot photo blog I’ve decided to start sharing my favourite photos on a regular basis. My library of shots I consider worthy is not that big yet so this will be a weekly photo blog for now. The pictures posted will not necessarily be taken on the week they’re posted, in fact, they most probably won’t be. I’ve set up a separate category for these posts within my main blog so they will show up in the regular RSS feed but it’s also possible to subscribe to just the photo blog category.
Now lets get the show on the road! The first photo I’ve chosen to feature is one I took while on holidays in Belgium last Christmas. I’ve captioned it “an evening stroll”. Some of you may not know that I was actually born in the Village of Duffel in Belgium. Duffel is bisected by the river Nete and there is only one road bridge across the river in the village so it’s vital artery for road and pedestrian traffic. This photo shows that bridge silhouetted against a fabulous winter sunset on the evening of the 28th of December 2007.
Click for Full-Size Version (2.3MB)
For those of you interested in such things here are some of the technical details of the shot:
- Camera: Nikon D40
- Lens: Nikon DX AF-S 18-55mm (D40 kit lens)
- Exposure: 1/200 Sec
- Focal Length: 35mm
- Focal Ratio: F4.8
- ISO: 800
- Exposure Compensation: -0.67
- Camera Mode: Aperture Priority
[tags]Belgium, sunset, Duffel[/tags]
Feb
18
Aperture Priority – Get More Out of Your DSLR
Filed Under Photography on February 18, 2008 | 3 Comments
When I first got my Nikon D40 I left it on full automatic mode and basically let the camera choose everything except the zoom. I got some fantastic shots that way but I soon started to crave more control. DSLRs like the D40 give you a number of manual modes to choose from so it’s not an all-or-nothing choice where the camera either looks after everything or nothing. Instead you can choose for a half-way-house where you control the element that’s most important for you and leave some or all of the rest up to the camera. The two most common semi-automatic modes are S (shutter priority) and A (aperture priority). Since almost everything I shoot is animate and stationary I don’t have any great need for control over the shutter speed. However, for the kind of shots I do like to take I like to have control over the aperture. This is why my camera spends almost all it’s time in aperture priority (A) mode and almost all of the rest of the time in full manual mode when I do mad things like take pictures of stars.
Feb
13
Australia Apologises to the Aboriginals – More of this Kind of Thing Please
Filed Under Polemics & Politics on February 13, 2008 | 10 Comments
It actually brightened my day a bit to see that the Australian PM has apologised to the Aboriginal people for their abuse at the hands of previous governments. Here’s the money quote:
“We apologize for the laws and policies of successive parliaments and governments that have inflicted profound grief, suffering and loss on these our fellow Australians.”
I really hope we see more of this kind of thing. I really wish the British royal family and government would do the same with regard to Ireland. Particularly for the penal laws and the famine they caused by taking all the grain grown in Ireland while the Irish people starved due to the failure of potatoes. There is still a lot of resentment of the English bubbling away under the surface here in Ireland. As an immigrant I didn’t understand this at first but each time I ask why I get the same answer, that the English did terrible things here for which they have never apologised. My argument would have been that no one alive today actually did any of these terrible things. However, the institutions that did are still with us, and the leaders of those institutions need to apologise for the past sins of the institution they represent. This is particularly true in the case of the monarchy which is a hereditary system. Within an aristocratic system the great deeds of ancestors entitle you to privilage, so, if you inherit the glory you should also inherit the sins.
I very much doubt I’ll live to see the English apologise, but it would be nice.
Feb
12
OS X 10.5.2 Arrives at Last – A Worthy Update
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 12, 2008 | 7 Comments
Well wha’ d’ ya know, Apple DO listen to us when we complain. They’ve removed the excessive transparency in menus, they’ve made the translucent MenuBar optional, and they’ve added some nice options to Stacks. If, like me, you thought that having a pile of icons super-imposed upon each other was a terrible way to represent a Stack, then you’ll be happy to hear that there’s now an option to have a stack be represented by the icon for its folder. If you used to like the way Tiger let you navigate a folder in the Dock then you’ll love the newly added ‘List’ view for Stacks, it basically lets you do things the way you used to. Another nice usability improvement is that addition of a MenuBar icon for TimeMachine. This means you can it out of your Dock where it wastes way too much room IMO and just work off the MenuBar. You can now see when TimeMachine is working its magic at a glance and also easily stop an on-going backup or trigger one at any time. Needless to say there are also a myriad of bug fixes, security updates, and a few other tweaks. You can get more details in the uncharacteristically detailed release notes from Apple. 10.5.2 is like a Microsoft Service Pack, it gives the OS a really significant update.
Oh, BTW, if, like me, you were too impatient to wait on Apple to fix the stupid MenuBar transparency and applied the fix I suggested a few months ago you’ll notice that toggling the new checkbox for MenuBar transparency doesn’t work. To roll back that change just issue the following command in the Terminal and then reboot (courtesy of John Gruber on Twitter):
sudo defaults delete /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.WindowServer 'EnvironmentVariables'
[tags]Apple, OS X 10.5.2, Leopard[/tags]
Feb
9
Twittering on the Mac Revisited
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 9, 2008 | 1 Comment
It’s only been a week since I posted my first thoughts on Twittering on the Mac but already I need to make a correction and two additions. First to the correction, Twitterific is free, the website is just very confusing. You can use it for free but you get ads, and if you pay you don’t get ads. I gave Twitterific another go because I was quite hard on it last time. Turns out I was right the first time though, it’s not a particularly good client and it’s certainly not an inspirational piece of software. There are better clients out there for free.
Feb
6
My Predictions for the iPhone SDK
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Software Development on February 6, 2008 | 1 Comment
As February goes on we get closer and closer to the promised iPhone SDK. Before that happens I want to get my predictions down, just in case I’m right 🙂 For a start I expect we’ll get the announcement very late in the month, probably the week of the 28th. When that announcement comes it will not be what I think most people are expecting, a single SDK, it will be two. A very free and open API for developing Widget-like apps, and a very tightly controlled API for truly native apps. I also expect the apps to be distributed through the iTunes store, in the same way the software update for the iPod Touch was last month.
Feb
5
Why I Love MarsEdit
Filed Under Computers & Tech on February 5, 2008 | Leave a Comment
I had been planning to write a detailed review of MardEdit but since reading Sean Blank’s excellent review I don’t see the point, he’s done a better job of it than I ever could! So, instead I just want to link to his review and explain why I love Mars Edit.
For me it comes down to four things. Firstly, I want to manage my blog posts in a stand-alone app. I want to be able to command+tab from what ever I’m doing to the blog post I’m working on and I certainly don’t want to have to go searching through my sea of browser tabs and windows to find a post I’m working on. I also want to be dependent on an internet connection to work on my posts. Secondly, the reality is that a text area does not make a good text editor. Another reality is that I have never yet come across a good WYSIWYG HTML editor. MarsEdit does exactly what I want in this regard, it provides a proper text editor with syntax highlighting, spell checking, shortcut keys, and good contextual menus. Not only do I have no issue writing my own markup, I WANT to write my own markup, and the editor provided by MarsEdit is a much nicer place to do it than a text area on a web page. Finally, I like being able to manage multiple blogs from a single place.
Having said that, MarsEdit is not perfect, yet. It’s under active development and the recent 2.1 release already addressed some of the minor issues I had with 2.0. At this stage the biggest issue I have is that MarsEdit doesn’t show the hierarchical relationships between my categories, it just presents me with a flat list. Other than that the only issue I have is that I’d like to be able to control the default markup MarsEdit uses when inserting an image into a post.
All in all I really enjoy using MarsEdit to manage my blog. $29.95 well spent as far as I’m concerned.
[tags]MarsEdit, Blogging[/tags]
Feb
5
Free Astronomy Software on the Mac Revisited
Filed Under Computers & Tech, Science & Astronomy on | 6 Comments
The last time I posted on the state of play for free Astronomy software for the Mac things weren’t looking so good. At that time your best option was to build the Linux program KStars from source using Fink. A long, complicated, and rather daunting install for anyone who’s not a Unix geek. I’m happy to report that things have improved a lot since then. There’s now a choice of three apps and you don’t have to compile any from source (unless you want to).
[tags]astronomy, OS X, Stellarium, Cartes du Ciel, KStars[/tags]