Can I have Linux with that?

Apple’s Iphone, the various Google Android phones by Samsung, HTC and probably others, and Nokia’s Symbian phones are fighting on the smart phone market. As far as I know, Iphone is “closed” and you can only download those apps that Apple lets you have. Android lets you use any apps, and I assume Symbian is similar, though I’ve heard it’s old-fashioned. I don’t have real experience with any of these phones.

What’s really missing from the palette is an open source OS.

Well, there is one, Nokia’s Maemo, nowadays called MeeGo when they started co-operation with Intel. Only one phone, N900 uses it currently. I’m waiting for the next one, N9. Just look at a source example. All graphical development is done with Qt. It’s apparently not sucky since even XFLR5 managed to move into it quickly.

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I’m using Linux at home, Windows at work and a Mac every now and then, like when the Windows is acting up every day or when I’m not at home. So this writing comes from a Macbook.

I hate Windows’ instability and sucky performance, Apple’s quirks and desire to do things differently (how do I get {} brackets on this keyboard?) and Linux’ need to fiddle with configs to get things to work.

I love Windows’ hardware versatility and choice of programs, Apple’s “things just work”* approach to software and hardware and Linux’s powerfulness and openness.

As a phone, I’m using a Nokia 6310i from 2002. The battery lasts more than a week and the user interface is snappy. It has a monochrome display. Hope N9 will be ready soon. You could run Dosbox on N900. Irssi. XFLR5. Just anything. In case something goes wrong, Android will be my fallback option.

*who ever thought that waking from sleep mode should take 15 to 45 minutes,
or connecting to a wireless connection should take forever and require ten
different cross-preventing logic levels? That every week you should
download updates that would require long installing times and reboots?
That the additional desktop room should switch from the left to the right side...
Apparently, someone at Microsoft, but nobody at Apple. I don't think it's
great innovation, it's just making things not suck.

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Vesireittejä

If the city flooded – the water routes would allow escaping

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Archie

I have to admit I was skeptical at first. What can a pile of trash bricks, mud and sand do, on a barren poisoned wasteland? Or some pouches of dirt around this and other abandoned post-industrial zones in the city? Apparently, a month later, the most awesome party ever, where everybody makes their own pizza and bakes it in the centerpiece of the whole happening, Archie the dome oven. Pumpkin, Zucchini, Beetroot, Onion farmed by the city farmers. Even the honeybees had participated. A huge thanks to everyone!

Building Archie

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Loxia, Again

Curvirostra, I think, in the blog header picture. (Shot through a scope. My parents’ camera’s light baffle fits over the eyepiece almost perfectly.) It’s probably not Pytyopsittacus or Leucoptera. The latter dines in larch but these didn’t have the clear white stripes in the wings and it’s more rare anyway.

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Away Again

for a few weeks. The camera had some trouble transferring the pictures to the computer too so you didn’t see any cool stuff yet, sorry.

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Return

I’ve come back from the Baltics and Berlin. The blog title picture is from Vilnius, the viewpoint near the old fortress. I’ll write and post more photos later.

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The Laws of Physics

Regarding light gathering area and sensor noise are harsh. Well, it was cheap and it’s tiny and has a rechargeable battery. Maybe it’ll do something worthwhile. The view is from the kitchen window after 11 pm. Why do these things have 10 megapixels? I took the pic in 3 MP mode,  scaled it down in Gimp to about one and it’s still too big, most of the information is just noise. Better use that smallest picture mode so I can use that SD card for a loong time… I also edited the curves slightly to bring more forest and less white in the sky. OK, maybe I’m being a bit rough on it, that’s a huge contrast between the sky and the trees.

Nine Megapixels Noise, One Signal

Nikon Coolpix S203 it is by the way, though these are all probably made in the same factory… 😉

If someone brought to market a 3 mpix camera with twice the quantum well depth, that’d be interesting.

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Digital Camera Buying

I might buy a cheap point and shoot digicam soon, just to enable me to at least document something, especially when traveling Shooting with film is so expensive (although some do it) and also it’s hard to put the stuff on the net anyway since you have to scan and it’s tedious and I don’t have a scanner at home. I’ll probably visit central Europe soon again so I might as well buy a digital camera.

What are my requirements?

• It needs to be cheap
• I don’t need a large zoom
• I need very close focus (for digiscoping at times)
• Good low light performance
• No high megapixels
• A rechargeable battery

Things could point towards a Fuji F series, except the price, one would have to pay 170 euros for a F70… and I don’t want a zoom monster really. It seems the Fuji A130 is a sub 100 euro camera that still has F 2.8 at the wide end, which many of its competition doesn’t seem to have. Hard to see any comparisons anywhere on these cheap cameras, nevermind sample pictures. It uses regular batteries for power so probably it’d be expensive to use.

Strolling by the nearby supermarket, it had an Olympus T-100 for 99 euros and I liked that it was thin. Older Olympus has awful XD memory cards, but the T-100 has standard SD. Canon A490 which it also had at 109 and Nikon S203 (which is probably elsewhere), the big names’ cheap ones, might be nice in image quality, though the Canon seemed a bit thick. Then there’s the 99 euro Panasonic DMC-F4 too which actually seems to have F 2.8 at the wide end. Nothing means much when you don’t know the sensor size anyway.

Most of the specs listed (megapixels, number of programs) by the sellers and companies are totally meaningless to me. The pics always look bad at full resolution anyway. I’d like to see perhaps:

• lens diameter (I might elaborate in a future post)
• or then the F number and sensor size
• field of view at wide and tele
• perhaps extra features like what video res and compression, close focus range

At times all this makes me wonder if all that stuff comes from the same factory and they just put it in different shaped frames, alter the menu texts a bit, fiddle with a few tuning parameters to give different image tones and then just sell more of them that way. We already know that for example in optics, there are Japanese subcontractor factories making lenses for many brands. Opticron is a UK telescope firm that orders its scopes from Japan from the same manufacturer that makes stuff for Nikon.

Oh, and I assume all cameras work with Linux just as normal USB drives, right?

EDIT: Found some unlikely T-100 sample pictures

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Lennusadam – Tallinn’s Seaplane Hangars

I didn’t have a camera with me but I was surprised at their impressiveness. From afar, they looked like old gas storage vessels (like in Suvilahti, Helsinki), but they really were dome-shaped seaplane hangars. Luckily Flickr has at least some photo as well as Panoramio here. The museum has home pages here.

I picked the wrong day to go there as it seems all of Tallinn’s museums are closed on mondays and tuesdays (The Kumu art museum was one potential destination too), but I couldn’t really choose the day anyway at that point. I could still tour the stuff that was outside. There was a lot of construction and renovation work going on. The domes were full of scaffolding for builders. Actually that would have provided for a really good photo opportunity since it divided the volume into cubes as a great visualization of the size of the thing, together with people for scale. The top was being sandblasted and you could see the rebar from many places. This is not a cheap project and will be ready by 2011.

They are not super-huge though. No Saro Princess could fit in them. They were built in 1916 and 1917 after all! I could also see the old first independence battle’s ice breaker Suur Tõll and the Lembit submarine, as well as an array of patrol boats donated by various countries to the young Estonian defence force in the nineties.

I will write other things inspired by the trip in other posts, there was certainly a large amount of thoughts that arose and observations that were made.

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Eckerö Line

Trying it again. Might visit the sea museum in Tallinn too. http://www.meremuuseum.ee/ They also have a pre-WW2 submarine sitting in the harbor. Finland has one too, it’d be interesting to see the difference. I think it is English built. There’s also a sea mine museum, though no Finnish mines there AFAIK.

My internet is acting up so this post is crude. It works about one minute out of ten. Something probably went bad at Welho during the weekend.

Other stuff: Urjazz from Nepal is good.

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