BPI inside

Tag: Personal

  • New toy finally arrived… again…

    Ok, I admit that it took way longer than one week until my F31 arrived two days ago. The seller had to take it to the Fuji service one more time because apparently there was still something wrong with it and in the end they had to clean up the whole inside, removing humidity and dust. I have no clue how these managed their way into the case but it did definitely not happen while I had the cam. And then there were some issues about taking the additional costs and shipping etc. but in the end I paid additional 40Eur and the package was sent into my direction.

    Until now the thing works correctly and without any flaws and I hope it stays this way for a long time…

    PS.: Just one drawback, the guy which sold me the cam silently changed the contained xD memory card from H type (high speed) to M type (normal), but I’m tired of fighting and since the H-type card was never announced or described on the eBay offering, I’ll let this case rest.

  • Stressing week

    As some of the people around me may have noticed, the last week was composed of work and events which lifted my stress level to previously unknown heights.

    In a short summary and with no particular order:

    • talked with a tiler about the tiling of my bathroom and toilet
    • the first lessons in Russian were held and it’s even more difficult than I thought, particularly the handwriting
      • got lots of homework, but I didn’t manage to work on it…
    • come-back-together with my sweetheart, altough we aren’t living together again
    • dozends of hours learning maths for the upcoming exam in two days
      • increasingly frustrating because the papers the teacher provided are full of errors and are missing the exact calculations
    • preparing a move-out from home to take year or two on my own because of various reasons
      1. looking through various offered appartments, negotiations with landlords
      2. fight with parents, especially the female part, over this
      3. decided to cancel the move-out for now (but still an option for me personally)
    • trying to fit all of the above into a 24h/7d week, quite a bit of struggling to do so

    Whew… Currently I have the feeling that I’m really running near the edge of my capabilities. Not crossing the line yet but not far from there either…

    Ah, yes, and the cam is still not here but at Fuji support as the seller let me know.

  • Cam disappointment…

    Well, I had some time to play with my cam now and the results are… disappointment… After about one day, the display showed "Focus error" and the lens did not slide back into the cam after turning it off.

    Of course, the seller on eBay insists, that it was working when he sent it to me.

    Now I hope that the Fuji Support can help me somehow, even if it costs some more. Unless it keeps within the 100EUR range, it’s still in the price range where it’s available elsewhere on eBay.

    Dammit…

  • Extraterrestrial search shutdown

    After many years of being a brave supporter of SETI@home and in the more recent time BOINC I’ve decided now to stop accepting new workpackages on all of my instances and let the current ones finish. After that I’ll uninstall all my instances of BOINC.

    I’m a bit sorry for that but I’ve decided to do so because my instances were running on my work-computers and in the recent time the drawbacks like memory- and cpu-usage as well as the increased fan-noise because of cpu-heat began to overweight what I counted as my personal contribution to scientific research. Instead I count this removal now as another contribution to environment-awarenes by reducing the wear on my equipment and minimizing the power-consumption.

    Farewell Seti, it has been a long journey since about 1998 when we met…

  • Welcome my new toy…

    My recently acquired F31fd arrived today. I’m already super curious on what pictures I’ll be able to shoot and will try it out thoroughly. We’ll see, how it will work out…

  • Memories…

    Some memories are fated to fade, some are fated to stay for a lifetime. As one can not choose which memories will be which type, the only thing left to me is to hope that those from last weekend are the latter ones…

  • Waiting for the cam…

    Last Sunday the time was right. Stumbling over a cheap offer, I quickly arranged the acquisition of my favorite Point&Shoot digital camera, the Fujifilm F31fd. I had to act quickly because when I saw the offering, it was quite cheap and possible to instant-buy, so it was to expect that this auction wouldn’t last very long. I want to thank the girlfriend of my bro’ for assisting me with the eBay-handling of the whole transactions.

    The rapid decision was done by the calculation, that if the unexpected event happens and the F100fd has better image quality and features than the pre-reviews currently available suggest, I still can sell the cam on eBay again and with a high chance will get back more money than I had to pay for it. The wonders of market economics, buy low sell high 🙂

    I guess that it will arrive somewhere around the beginning of next week, sadly I missed carnival with some quite nice opportunities for great shots.

  • Looking for a digital camera

    For a few days now I’ve been actively looking for a digital camera. More specifically I’ve put my attention onto the Fujifilm FinePix F31fd. But it’s not so easy to get my hands on this cam since it’s a discontinued model which was introduced 2005 or 2006 and has now reached its end of production. Which is a pitty, because from almost all of the reviews I’ve been digging through and sample images I’ve compared, the F31fd leaves the arena as winner. It produces better images than many of today’s high MP-cameras and has excellent picture-quality even in low light situations. (Example Review)

    I’m trying to get it from eBay, but the bids there easily reach far over 300EUR.

    Not that cheap for a 6,3MP camera it might seem, but given today’s megapixel-craziness people are fooled into thinking that more pixels mean better pictures. To the contrary, more megapixels on smaller sensors mean that they have to be more sensitive to catch enough light for image recognition. But this also raises the noise which then again has to be fought by the camera logic, effectively using some sort of blurring which again lowers the final resolution of the image.

    If you’d like to know more about the megapixel-hype and what’s the reality behind it, head over to 6mpixel.org for the technical reasons.

    In the meantime, I’ll keeping an eye on eBay…

    Update 2008-01-24: Just about today, Fujifilm has anounced some more cameras I’m keeping an eye on, these really look promising and don’t cost too much. Damn, now I have to wait and choose wisely:

  • Dwarf Fortress – a new tempting time-waster?

    Recently I read an article in the german webzine Telepolis about a quite unusual game, Dwarf Fortress. At first I thought, well yeah another of this small games which would be able to entertain me for an hour or two but after reading the article and digging through the games website and wiki it really seems to turn out as a huge enjoyment.

    In fact, this game doesn’t have fancy graphics or an easy user interface, quite the contrary. You have to cope with a, at first at least, disturbing ASCII-graphics-interface and an unintuitive menu system. But these hurdles are soon forgotten when one gets into the extremely deep environment where one cannot directly control the dwarfs but rather tell them what to do. If they then really follow your orders depends on the current state of the dwarf as well as his mood and running orders. The complex interactions between the many elements of this yet-to-leave-alpha-status game seem like the individuality of a hundred Tamagotchis thrown together and distilled.

    I’m not completely able to express my curiousness about this game so I’d rather like to point you to this small introduction and the followup posts on that in the archives of that page. You have to read the posts from bottom to top, sorry ’bout that. Also have a look at the Dwarf Fortress Wiki for more info.

    Update: Also, I imagine if someone unfamiliar is watching someone other playing DF it must look like as if the player is looking at the Matrix itself. I really have to take care, that I wait with digging deeper into Dwarf Fortress until my exams are over this weekend.

  • Odds

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