Archive for the ‘Consumerism’ Category
January 24th, 2010
I’ve been using Panasonic GF1 camera for almost a month now.
What I like about this camera:
- compact size,
- slim and speedy 20mm lens,
- long video files (up to 30″ for the European market),
- lens are interchangable;
- quick autofocus (compared to other contrast-type autofocusing systems);
- face recognition (speeds up autofocusing in video mode),
- a responsive high-resolution display.
What’s not so pleasant:
- noise (it’s higher than in a three-year old Canon 400D),
- shutter lag (half a second after having autofocused),
- camera body is slippery,
- some menu controls are inconvenient (e.g. when deleting multiple photos, one can easily deselect photos instead of deleting them or moving on with selection);
- digital viewfinder has a very low-res display: for 180 € you get 0.4 Mpx, something like 640×480, not even 800×600 px;
- no in-body accelerometer, that means that you’ll have to rotate your photos by 90° manually if you use lens with no stabilization.
Tags: camcorder, camera, GF1, Panasonic, photo, video
Posted in Consumerism | No Comments »
January 11th, 2010
Having bought VX Nano mouse I didn’t want to use a CD to install Logitech software. It took a while to find out that Mac software is called ‘Control Center’, Windows driver is called ‘Set Point’.
Tags: Logitech, mice
Posted in Consumerism, Technological | No Comments »
December 13th, 2009
Rackspace Cloud Files CDN will redownload your file from the US storage every time you put something new after the question mark:
- http://[container].cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/object,
- http://[container].cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/object?something,
- http://[container].cdn.cloudfiles.rackspacecloud.com/object?something-new.
You’ll end up having a low download speed for those URLs even though they point to one file.
So, the front side of Rackspace CDN thinks these are different objects. And the source Rackspace server sees no difference between the URLs.
This behaviour is a traffic waste.
Tags: CDN, rackspace
Posted in Consumerism | No Comments »
December 11th, 2009
There’s an official iPhone application to manage your Rackspace Cloud account. As of today, it’s not very useful. I’d like to mention some functions which the app v. 1.1 currently lacks.
- You can neither stop nor destroy Cloud Servers.
- No price list for server instances.
- No usage stats.
- For Cloud Files there is no option to view a public URL of a file or to see a CDN container identity. You can do it only with an ‘Email Link to File’ option.
- No ‘refresh’ button in ‘Servers’ menu, which means you can’t quickly see when a server was created. And, strangely, even after reopening of the app, you will see your new server only in a couple of minutes. There is no such lap in Rackspace Cloud management panel.
What this app allows you to do is basically create new server instances. But ongoing development promises that the app will be more flexible.
Tags: CDN, rackspace, VPS
Posted in Consumerism | No Comments »
April 30th, 2009
Today I bought Tweetie app for iPhone, for $2.99. I still prefer TwitterFon over Tweetie after having played with a new app for some time.
- TwitterFon highlights new messages and places a badge when updates arrive.
- Smaller font of TwitterFon allows to read more.
- TF displays dates in a easily readable form (e.g. ’5 min ago’).
Though, TwitterFon isn’t quite as good as Tweetie sometimes:
- Worse link management: it’s hart to tap on a small blue circle.
- Manages the only account.
- Can’t find users by name, so it’s hard to follow new users.
- Doesn’t have an option to make a web link to your current geolocation.
Tags: apps, iPhone, Tweetie, Twitter, twitterfon
Posted in Consumerism, iPhone | No Comments »