Peter's Blog

Been experimenting with the focusing of my new Canon Powershot S1 IS. I am working out how get good autofocus. I have discovered the following:

• The autofocus struggles at maximum (10x) optical zoom. It locks on better at lesser zooms.
• It is also worse when close to the subject (< 1m) which may be below the min autofocus distance.
• Autofocus triggers in ernest when the shutter is pressed halfway down.
• There is a white square box within the viewfinder that turns green when the autofocus locks and yellow when it gives up.
• I have seen it turn green when the picture was blatantly out of focus.
• It is possible to focus by finding a high-contrast edge a similar distance away to whatever I am trying to photo, locking on it by half-pressing the shutter, moving to my subject and fully pressing the shutter.

I am not so worried about the focusing as I was in my last post. It is not so totally automatic that you never have to think about it.

More notes:

• It was not unknown for my old Nikon Coolpix 2500 pictures to be out of focus.
• Forcing the Canon to 400 ASA it is possible to take acceptably grainy photos indoors with no flash. The resulting pictures are nicer as the lighting is more natural.
• The batteries go flat in about 2 hours. Will buy an alternate set of 4xAA NiMH's for it, maybe two sets.

Sorted my mum out with a 17" LCD monitor with built-in TV tuner:

• Nice solid built.
• It has SCART, TV Aerial, SVideo, PC (15 pin D-type) and Stereo audio inputs (from PC to speakers).
• 1280x1024 pixel best resolution, at other resolutions the fonts look odd as columns of pixels get chopped out.
• Picture is very bright, characters look kind of thin and spindly as I had to set large fonts for mum's eyesight. Wasn't bowled over by the picture.
• TV works fine, auto-tuned itself in ok. Tee'd into a loop aerial on old portable TV it had a noisy picture but good sound. With a decent aerial feed I think it would be a very good bedroom TV.
• Comes with remote control (with batteries).
• There is a button on the remote and front panel to step between the various inputs (PC, TV, SVideo, EXT3) and it takes a while to switch from TV to PC, as you have to step through three or four other blue screens and it takes a couple of seconds for the picture to appear at each step. This was a bit annoying.
• Has teletext for nostalgia victims.
• I realise that I am typing this on my notebook with a 1400x1050 resolution 15" TFT display. I would say it was a slightly better picture, letters look crisp and smoothly detailed.

I think in conclusion that if I was buying myself a Monitor/TV I would look around to see what else was available before buying myself one of these Samsungs. It's OK but not breathtaking.

..to change the year in your copyright notice?

Happy new year.

The pagerank for bisiand.me.uk has gone up to 4 and www.bisiand.me.uk has gone up to 3. They have changed order since this post. Dunno why, I still seem to have the same number of backlinks.

A couple of days ago a friend emailed me to tell me that he couldn't post a comment on my site as it refused the captcha characters. I hadn't had any comments for a week or two but I just put it down to apathy. I had tested it out in IE without logging in and it worked fine. Maybe the email link in my footer is not obvious enough, nobody else told me it was broken. I'll move the email link to the right.

When I looked into it I got it to break and I found that it was due to some strage effect where the captcha characters stored in the session information were not correctly synchronised with the captcha graphic. I fixed this by changing the code back to adding the timestamp to the captcha graphic file name. This has two effects:

• it forces a different catcha to each validation: if you keep posting during one session then you have to enter different captchas each time. I had tried to avoid this.
• because the captcha graphic file name changes on each page load it makes sure that the browser downloads an up-to-date graphic file. Otherwise the browser will decide to use an old cached version of the graphic.

I guess it must be working now as I got a comment this morning.

I read yesterday about a simplified captcha system, basically a turing test. Just ask the poster what my name is. Easy enough to implement but if I put it in a module the question and answer ought to be configurable and our comment spamming friend may just build up a database of sites and answers.

John Carmack uses a similar simple approach to spam email, he asks senders to put the letters JC in the subject line and filter on that. Much nicer than asking people to edit email addresses.

I've decided I don't want to use the Canon PC software if I can avoid it. Both the camera and Jasc Paintshop Photo Album support WIA, a windows thing to handle scanners and cameras. When the Canon software was installed it made itself the default handler when the camera connected. I found that this could be changed as follows:

• connect camera to computer via USB
• Go to conrol panel/Scanners and Cameras. Open Scanners and Cameras itself by double-clicking on it, don't open the camera.
• right click on the camera in the Scanners and Cameras list and select 'Properties' (Note: the camera will not be listed if it is not connected).
• select the 'Events' tab and configure the 'Camera Connected' event to launch Paintshop Photo Album (or whatever you want to download)
• press ok.

Unfortunately this seems to bypass whatever it is that automatically rotates portrait mode photo's to the correct orientation, when copied to the pc they are on their sides. The Canon Powershot S1 IS does have an orientation sensor and all photo's are displayed the right way up on the viewfinder and when the camera is connected to a TV. I think I'm happy to deal with the chore of rotatng photos than use the Canon software.

I am starting to rely on Paintshop Photo Album to organise my 750M of photos. It handles them easily and it uses real directories on the PC, it does not try to hide nasty technicalities like the file system from me.

Got around to trying Skype today for some VOIP fun and games. The main problem for me to set this up was the poor sound quality on my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop. Using windows sound recorder with a plugin external microphone the recordings were distorted and pretty poor quality. I did some searching but I could find no fixes for this. Eventually I tried downloading new drivers for the SigmaTel C-Major Audio hardware from the Dell site. This fixed the problem.

I tried dialling my home phone but I could not get through because my home phone is set up to refuse calls from phones that withhold caller ID (to stop telesales) and Skype obviously has no caller ID to give.

Ringing wife's mobile I was able to amaze her and check Skype out simultaneously. It works. It's as good as using the phone and for ringing my mum in the evenings it works out cheaper than the landline. The rate to mobiles looks pretty steep, about 30p for a 30 second call.

I didn't need to fiddle with the DI624's firewall settings to get this working. For the record, I am on a 750k down/128k up broadband connection.

Now to ponder more about bluetooth headset.

pros:

• can make phone calls with hands free

cons:

• horrible pose factor makes it embarrassing to buy

Summary: Skype is cool.

According to StatCounter I am now getting more visitors from the UK than the US: 39 vs 25 out of the last 100.

I noticed today that when I go to google.com I am automatically redirected to www.google.co.uk. Could it be that this is happening to a large number of UK googlers and I am thereby appearing higher up in their search results? I also have a record high number of visitors overall today, a day when most people have gone back to work after the holiday.

Then again, I am getting lots of hits for digital cameras and N T H e l l.

This article really hits the nail on the head. It is true that there is a big learning curve in migrating to .NET but the advantages are minimal. In effect .NET is just a cleaned up version of the windows API.

It is also good to see that Microsoft have realised that COM was a mistake.

Checking out my referrer logs and all the referrer spam I followed a few of the urls and it seems like a lot of them have been pulled by their hosting service: they all come up with the same page saying that the site has been pulled for abuse

If referrer spam bugs you as much as it does me then this is a useful site.