Peter's Blog

Some more tips for the k750i camera-phone:

• In camera mode, press * to turn the light on and off
• Also in camera mode, press 7 to turn 'night mode' on and off. 'Night mode' seems to slow the 'shutter speed', giving less digital noise on indoor pictures at the expense of blurriness if the subject is moving.
• The joystick can be used to switch from still camera to video mode
• When filming videos, don't be tempted to hold the phone in 'portrait' mode unless you have some way of rotating the videos when you play them (maybe put your tv on it's side).

I had 190 pictures to import into a Drupal based system. I had been avoiding using the image module as it is hard wired to upload one image at a time, give it a title and description etc and the whole thing would take hours.

I had been using Gallery2 till now because of the bulk picture import. Gallery2 is very sophisticated, has many features and is still beta software. I ran an update on my debian server and this managed to break Gallery2: any attempt to access the gallery gave a meaningless error and referred me to the gallery home page. Since the installation is quite complex, a mix of virtual directories, symbolic links and any number of other tricks to hide itself I couldn't be bothered to try to fix it. It is still beta so I'm not surprised it broke and it may well break again. Also it says in the blurb that it had not been through a security review and that did bother me.

I hadn't been impressed with any other gallery software I found so I decided to return to Drupal and the image module, if only because it is an integrated solution. Searching the drupal site, I came across the image_import module which allows what I wanted: bulk import of a directory full of pictures. I only had to install the image_import.module file, it seems I already have the 'walkah' version of the image module that is one of the requirements. I have only installed standard modules so the walkah one may be vanilla drupal 4.6 image module (it does say walkah at the top of the file).

It works as it said on the box, it imported all my files in minutes. It gave titles and descriptions based on the file names, e.g. DSC_123123.jpg but I don't really care about that. It has a nice 'trial run' feature that tests to see if the import is likely to work by checking file existence, permissions etc. It also has a timer facility to stop it from breaking any apache/php security rules that prevent long-running processes. My system limits a php run to 30 seconds so I had to set this time limit to 20 seconds and import my files in two or three chunks. This was not a big problem, the form settings were still filled in I just had to keep pressing the go button.

Two final problems, both with the image module:

• it would be nice to have 'prev' and 'next' links to walk through the pictures. Can this be rigged with the book module?
• drupal tries to theme the original images, although they are way too big to fit in the theme and look broken. It really only needs a link to the original jpg file. It is not important to me to show the title and description on the full image, it is mainly there for downloading. I can hack this one in myself.

Picasa can import pictures from cameras. It can hook into the windows XP WIA stuff (see here). In fact, as well as my Canon Powershot S1 it can also handle the K750i phone. There is only one problem I found with the way it imports: I could not see how to get it to delete the pictures from the camera once it had imported them. This is actually a bit of a pain as I have to delete them either through the camera (Canon) or file manager/salamander (K750i). Paintshop Photo Album has a nice checkbox for me to tick during the import process. Also PSPA automatically dumps the files in a directory named after the import date. Picasa prompts you for a name. I'm happy to file them by import date and organise them with labels.

Speaking of Paintshop Photo Album, they have bought out a new version but are charging for the upgrade. I don't think I'll bother to upgrade it, I'll wait paitently for picasa to evolve.

The more I use the K750i Phone/camera/mp3 player the more I like it. Some tips:

• when viewing photo's you can press the 'horizontal' button to view the pictures with the camera on it's side. This is good because the screen is taller than it is wide so you get a better view of landscape pictures.
• when in horizontal viewing mode you can use the + and - 'volume' keys to zoom in and out of the picture. You can also use the 1 and 3 keys to zoom. Not sure why it cannot zoom in the default view mode. With pictures taken at highest resolution it is a bit sluggish in responding to changes in zoom size, 2 seconds or so, similar to the sluggishness when stepping to a different picture.
• when you take a photo it is displayed so you can admire it. If you want to take another photo, press the photo trigger button again and it goes back into viewfinder mode.
• rather than fiddle with the four way cursor thing, you can press the number keys to go straight where you want. I think this is standard nokia behaviour of yore but the cursor thing on the k750i is rather fiddly.

My favourite Photo Album software, Picasa now supports my favourite online printing service, Photobox. This means I can upload from Picasa directly to Photobox where I currently have 400M of storage available. Every time I order more prints I get 50M more storage.

I would happily abandon Jasc Paintshop Photo Album but it still provides two useful functions for me:

• it is the default application for importing images from my camera. Maybe picasa can do this, I haven't tried, another job for my todo list.
• PSPA supports drag and drop of pictures to other applications like a file manager. This way I can use it with the flickr uploader. With picasa you cannot drag and drop outside the application, a flaw in my opinion. As picasa is owned by google and flickr is owned by yahoo I cannot see flickr support in picasa coming any time soon.

I use the photobox storage as a backup for personal photos and flickr to show off pictures of my daughter.

With my mum's new camera we got a photodock in an attempt to make it dead easy for her to copy photos to her computer.

Bullet point review:

• photodock conforms to 'pictbridge' standard which appears to support multiple camera and dock makers.
• the camera drops onto the top of the dock. It plugs in but with zero resistance.
• the photodock includes a printer that can print 6x4 inch pictures of good quality. When you put the camera in the dock it's screen comes on and you just pick a picture to print using the left and right arrow buttons and then press another button to print it.
• the paper and ink cartridges cost about £28 for 80 prints (I think it was) which is expensive: 35p a print. I can get them printed online for 7p each.
• the dock makes it very easy to copy pictures to a pc. Install the kodak software, plug in usb and it is a simple matter of putting the camera in the dock, the Kodak software fires up and copys the pictures. The kodak software is ok in a dumbed-down kind of way.
• the dock comes with rechargable batteries for the camera and will charge it. They were Ni-mh, which are not as good as lithium ion (memory effects and rapid ageing).

Conclusion: the dock is ok, it makes things easy if you find plugging USB cable too fiddly but the printer is an expensive way to print.

My Mother bought herself a Kodak CX7525 Digital Camera. It seems decent enough, it's 5 megapixel and the picture quality looks very good, no noticable digital noise like the Kodak CX7220 that I bought my mother-in-law for christmas. Other than the resolution and the noise it is very similar to the CX7220.

Potted review:

• smallish screen
• few controls, simple to use
• good picture quality
• flash seems powerful, maybe too powerful, pictures look a bit overexposed.
• AA batteries, always good.
• takes videos etc

It is a very easy camera to use, ideal for mum's.

Sony Ericsson K750i has come so here is a potted review:

• Nice, small, light. A tad wider and thicker than my old nokia 6610i but it's no brick.
• Big screen, maybe twice the size of the nokia.
• Camera is ok, not great. Here is a picture of my settee:
  
  This is at 'normal' compression rather than 'fine' and to my eye it's not as good as my Canon Powershot S1 which blows it away in most respects apart from small size. The picture it takes are fairly wide angle, I'd have trouble fitting the whole settee in the frame of my S1. You need to be pretty close to what you are taking photo's of or be prepared to use the digital zoom at the expense of resolution. The camera is still better than the one in the Nokia 6610i which can only be described as crap.
• MP3 player is, well, an mp3 player. Good quality, even through speaker it makes a decent sound.
• It plays mp3 ring tones. I've already set it up as I planned long go. Despite what the manual says there is no restriction on mp3 ringtones, it Just Worked.
• USB cable is cool: the memory stick in the camera appears as a USB disk, you just copy files backwards and forwards. Didn't need any special software. I can use Salamander I think it can charge from the USB cable, it doesn't say in the manual but the battery icon gains the charging lightning strike which may be a clue.
• I haven't played bluetooth yet, I suppose it works but I'd rather use the USB cable. I'm not a big fan of bluetooth, the Windows bluetooth stacks all seem overly complicated. I have to plug in a bluetooth dongle to use bluetooth, might as well plug a USB cable in and get something 20x faster and more reliable. Can still use phone with wife's jabra headset.
• Looking through the tools I found something called 'light'. Wondered what it did and it turned on two bright white LED's intended as a replacement for flash. It's not going to floodlight a room but it could be useful in a nocturnal crisis.
• It is heavily branded with vodafone. Press the wrong thing in the menu and you're into Vodafone Live and running up your GPRS bills.
• The radio is ok, even through the speaker. It's auto-search could only find two stations but others were around. It is supposed to have RDS but it wasn't showing me any station names.
• It can take video's but I haven't tried that yet. It has got video editing software built in (!).
• Haven't tried email client yet. It cannot be any worse than the Nokia 6600 I tried at work which had no option to download headers only.
• It has a voice recorder, voice activated dialling, voice activated answer, you can swear at it and it says sorry.
• Under the bluetooth stuff I haven't installed is something to remotely control your powerpoint presentations from the phone.
• Have I forgotten anything? Oh yes, you can make phone calls with it.

What I think I will miss most from Nokia:

• cannot set a time for profiles to end: will have to remember to manually switch from silent to normal when I finish work (especially with umbungo ringtone).
• every nokia seems to work with every nokia charger. Very useful when you leave your charger at home, wherever you go people have nokias. But then again, if I can charge through the USB cable I am fairly well served wherever there is a pc.

Conclusion: nice phone.

My Canon Powershot S1 IS has a panoramic picture mode that allows you to take a series of photos and then use a piece of software on PC to glue them together. I had my first go with it today and I am really impressed.

This is a picture from my mum's balcony, taken round a 180 degree sweep:

The camera has a special mode to support this: when taking the photos you see half the previous photo in the viewfinder which makes it easier to take the next photo. The PC software does all the stitching automatically, no manual tweeking or aligning things to the nearest pixel. You can see half a car and a bent line in the road and that's useful to bear in mind when deciding what to photo.

For the first time ever I had to send a personal FAX so I had to think about how to go about it.

I had a form to print, sign and Fax off to 123-Reg. I can print, sign and scan the form back in using my Canon CanoScan Lide 20 Scanner so that was not a problem. I had a large graphic file to send.

I'd decommisioned my fax/modem when I went broadband and I didn't want to fiddle around setting it up again. I looked around the internet for faxing services but these seem to be mainly commercial or email < - > Fax gateways, no services for one off graphic Faxing.

Then I realised that my Dell Inspiron 500m laptop has a built in modem. I searched the internet for fax software then, on a hunch, looked to see if Windows XP itself supports it and it does.

These are the steps to install it:

• Go into Control Panel/Add or Remove Programs
• Click on 'Add or Remove Windows Components'
• Click on 'Fax Services' and 'Next'.
• Go into Control Panel/Printers and Faxes
• Add a new Fax. This will take you through a Wizard where you put in your name, address etc.

The Fax device now acts like a printer: I opened my scanned form in Paint Shop Pro and just printed it to the Fax device. This triggerred another wizard that took the Fax number and allowed me to set up a cover sheet. Then it sent the Fax. Easy.

Lets hope someone is working at 123-reg on a Saturday and will read it.

Subscribed to flickr, todays 5 minute wonder. Added new block on the right with random baby picture.

I tried to subscribe to Flickr yesterday but they were having severe problems, I got a fatal error when I tried to subscribe and they seemed to be having bad loading problems. They seem to be victims of their success. If flickr delays my page loads then the photo goes.

I take photos every day with the Canon Powershot S1 IS, I've learnt how to get it to autofocus most of the time and the new Uniross 2000mA/h batteries have been in it a week now without a recharge, no problems there, well worth £8.

Still taking plenty of photo's with new camera. At first I was concerned about battery life but the batterys seem to have settled down to lasting a good day and 30-40 photo's, predominantly flash with lots of attempts to autofocus.

I was looking through a catalogue for some new NiMH AA rechargable batteries for it and suddenly became aware of the fact that these come in various capacities: the ones I had been using are 1300mA/hours but they can be anything up to 2300mA/hours. I went out and bought a set of 2000mA/hours for £8 and am looking forward to 50% longer battery life. This demonstrates one of the coolest features of the camera: it uses batteries you can buy anywhere.

Regarding the autofocus, I think my problem is that I want to use 10x zoom all the time to take pictures of my daughter where her face fills the frame. The problem is that at 10x zoom the camera seems to be reluctant to focus to less than 1m: even selecting manual focus, it won't let me set the focus any closer unless I reduce the zoom a bit. Taking photo's like this the pictures look ok on the camera with it's tiny LCD but when copied to pc they are embarrasingly out of focus.

When the pictures are in focus they are very nice:

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.

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.

New camera came today Bullet points:

• the reviews I read mentioned poor autofocus in low light conditions. This is worse than I expected, low light seems to mean indoor, it's about 50-50 whether the autofocus will mess up and give you a blurry picture. All is not lost as the camera does have manual focusing but it would be nice not to need it so much. This is the main problem with the camera.
• flash is very powerful: lights the room, yet catches skin tones and does not make subject look pale
• Zoom does not really magnify, it's not like a telescope zoom even if it is 10x optical.
• came with batteries which lasted about two hours playtime. May be because I was running it with both the LCD and Electronic Viewfinder running at the same time, showing the same picture.
• lots of buttons dotted around means a lot can be done without using menus: e.g. manual focus button under 2nd finger left hand. Quicker to set things up than my old Nikon.
• supplied software for pc is unimpressive assortment of utilities. Dialogs display with gross text positioning errors, you select an option from a menu and things appear to freeze while an application slowly launches another application, the utility I found to download pictures does not seem to let you pick which you want to download or here to put them.
• can change shutter sounds etc to silly birds tweets, boing noises and the like.
• nice pictures (when they are in focus):
  

Verdict: I am happy with it so far.

Wanted to copy some photo's from the internal memory of my mother-in-law's Kodak CX7220 camera to my pc so I thought I'd install the software that came with the camera. The setup program has the damn cheek to insist I set my pc to small fonts. Hey yeah, your software is so desirable I'll suffer eyestrain just to use it.

Fortunately the camera can copy pictures from internal memory to SD card so I can transfer them that way and avoid installing more rubbish on my pc.

Rule 1 of software UI design: don't force user to change resolution or font size. They have probably already set them up how they like them, why should they change to make your life easier?

Ordered Canon Powershot S1 IS. Why:

• good reviews including this personal one
• 10x optical zoom + 3x digital + useful image stabilisation (38-380mm telephoto)
• uses compact flash so no need for new cards + readers
• uses AA batteries so no need for proprietary ones (rare and expensive)
• real viewfinder (view through lens like an SLR, not just a plastic window)
• can swivel lcd for self portraits, holding overhead etc.
• takes movies as AVI files

Bought from Amazon to save £70 wrt high street price.

Waiting for post

Downloaded user manual pdf from Canon US web site. UK web site wants to charge for manual.

Want new digital camera. Tried a Canon Digital Ixus 40 in the shop, here are bullet point impressions:

• Very small
• Nice big LCD on the back, very crisp picture
• Nice build quality
• It has 3x optical zoom, some more digital zoom (and digital zoom may be worthwhile on a 4M pixel camera) but from what I saw in the shop the zoom took the picture from wide angle to normal, it didn't go into telephoto territory. My Nikon Coolpix 2500 has useful zoom, if limited wideangle.

I'm tempted by the Fuji S5500, a larger format camera with 10x optical zoom. Thoughts:

• far too big for pocket
• complements my old Nikon better, I can keep that for snapping and portability and use this for real photos.
• 4xAA batteries so won't have to worry about battery life while out and about
• flash has got to be more powerful than coolpix (3m range) and being further from lens won't be so poor for red-eye (PaintShop Pro 9 and PaintShop Album and different red-eye removal tools that are quite effective but it would be nice to avoid it in the first place).
• takes videos at 30fps
• uses weird fuji/olympus XD Flash format which my TwinMOS 8 in 1 card reader cannot handle. Do they do a 9 in 1?
• could buy cheap from hong kong via ebay if I was a more trusting person.

Background, taking lots of baby photo's and not happy with results from Nikon. It's flash is weak.

Bought my mother in law a Kodak EasyShare CX7220 digital camera for christmas. It was reduced by £50 because it is an oldish 2M pixel model coming to the end of it's life. I found it interesting to compare it with my 2 year old Nikon Coolpix 2500 which is also 2M pixel. Here is a bullet point review:

Kodak pros:

• Kodak easier to use: I didn't need manual
• Starts up quickly and ready to fire compared to Nikon which takes annoyingly long (damn baby stops smiling by time it's booted).
• Kodak uses AA batteries and can take NiMH's. Compare to Nokon with proprietary (aka expensive) NiMH which goes flat 1/2 way through a day out.
• Kodak has a cool orientation sensor: take photo in portrait orientation and it displays it and outputs it as 1200x1600, instead of 1600x1200 landscape which saves a rotation operation when copied to computer.
• Kodak takes videos with sound.
• As you switch modes the screen explains what the mode is for

Nikon pros:

• Side-by-side comparison of the same scene (baby, what else) the Nikon picture looks a lot better. The kodak picture seems noisy: on the Nikon baby's skin is smooth while on the Kodaks the skin seems pixellated, even though both photos are 1200x1600. To me it was hands down to the Nikon. (I won't post the pictures as they are big files and I'm not sure anyone cares enough to download them).
• The Nikon had better pictures and the jpeg it generated was 1.44Mb compared to 1.92 Mb for the Kodak. Maybe the camera finds all that pixel noise harder to compress? As well as making the pictures look worse, it increases the file size by 33% (i.e. your memory card holds 3/4 the photos of the Nikon).

Conclusion: Kodak is easy to use and Mum-in-law is delighted with it. I'm not sure I'd buy a Kodak.

I bought a copy of Jasc Paint Shop Photo Album online. It's a decent enought program and using Paint Shop Pro has made me a fan of their software. I have tried Picasa for organising my photo's and it is free and very flashy looking but I found it to be too restrictive, it's like a lot of google stuff in assuming you are a moron and that configuration options will confuse you. It hides grubby details like where on the disk it has put your pictures because you are too dim to understand the concept of files and directories.

Things I like about it:

• Adjust Wizard: shows you your photo and previews of what it will look like after various enhancements. Go through, accepting the previews you like.
• Easy to use Redeye correction. The Paint-Shop Pro redeye is very powerful but fiddly: you have to figure out the exact colour of someone's eyes, size of pupil, stuff like that. I use an old Nikon Coolpix 3000 camera which often produces redeye.
• Organises and nags you into making backups. Not a bad thing for irreplacable family photo's.
• Can quickly find photo's, rotate portraits etc, and quickly drop into PSP if a photo needs advanced editing.

However, after purchasing, attempting to get my licence key gives me the following error:

Internet Connection Failure

The product you are attempting to run is unable to connect to the Internet to
obtain a license key. You may not be able to run this program fully until a
connection is made.

Please check that you are connected to the Internet. If you have a connection
already, please check that your firewall settings will allow this software
program access to our servers.

Error code: -1

I've been trying this for three days now. I sent a message their customer service two days ago and have had no response. I tried turning off the Windows firewall but this made no difference and their online FAQ does not mention any specific ports that should not be blocked. The key retrieval thing asks for a password that I entered when I bought the software. I'm pretty sure I'm putting the right password in but their system does not give the option of emailing me a reminder.

Most registration systems I have used email you a key that you enter into the software. It looks like Jasc are using some outfit called Digital River for their software licensing and a system that downloads the key for you. It would save you a small amount of hastle except it is broken. I've had hastles at work with Pro/E CAD software licensing (Macromedia Lice) and when trying to add reliable dongle support to software.

Open Source software has another subtle advantage: a flaky copy protection scheme won't break it.

Blogging has a less subtle advantage: you can vent about something to hundreds of millions of potential customers. My Iotech diatribe got a response from their web master who was doing some market research using google.

Bought 12 Belkin palm screen covers. Don't like them, screen looks cloudy, worse than tired old one. Greyness may be air bubbles that will settle down, I'll persist with it for now.

Also bought a Canon CanoScan Lide 20 Scanner to immortalise old family photos. It does 600x1200 scans and does a pretty good job for £40. I enlarged a baby photo of my wife from postcard to A4 and it looks pretty good. Tried the OCR software out ofcuriosity and that was reasonable. Not sure I have a use for it.