Author: David

Categories
Photography

Playing with the new D60

I’ve been threatening to buy myself a better camera for ages, and finally did so last week. Since my brother wasn’t using it very much, he offered to sell me his Nikon D60 with two lenses and a bunch of other paraphernalia. I knew it was in good nick, and the price was much better than retail, so I gratefully accepted.

Being back at work, I haven’t had a lot of chance to play around, but I have uploaded a few choice shots.

I’m definitely enjoying the control that having a DSLR gives. I already had a basic understanding of the technical aspects of photography, but it was good to refresh that knowledge. My brother also links regularly to Ken Rockwell‘s site, which is a really good read. He reviews a lot of technology with an eye for cutting through marketing bullshit, but also talks about good composition, technique, and artistry as being the most crucial to making photographs instead of snapshots.

Anyway, look through what I’ve made so far and let me know what you think. I’ll try to take some photos every day so that I understand the camera better.

Categories
Movies and TV Reviews

Dark Knight: Why so excited?

I finally got round to watching The Dark Knight and had a moderately good time. I think that it was a pretty good package overall: a fun time, good continuity with Batman Begins, good acting, and a script with good themes and dialogue.

To address the question that everybody apparently has to answer, yes Heath Ledger was good as the Joker. But I do believe he could have done the role without putting himself into a headspace that would require antidepressants and sleeping pills. And it certainly wasn’t worthy of an Oscar. My two cents, anyway. I’m probably a heretic now.

From here on, there are potential spoilers, so click through…

Continue reading “Dark Knight: Why so excited?”
Categories
Tech Video Games

Yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!

In my daily stumblings around the net, I discovered this little gem of an article. It purports to be a rational and researched examination of PC game piracy, DRM, and general hysteria surrounding the whole topic.

It provides an interestingly cool-headed counter to some other bloggers I could mention.

One thing about Shamus Young’s stance on DRM that bothers me is that he assumes that the consumer owns the game when they purchase it. Now, I don’t like it, but the actual way things work (and he should know this, being a professional programmer) is that end-users purchase a license to use the software, not the software itself. There are very few (if any) commercial software products that transfer ownership of the software (either in source, or in binary format) upon purchase. Just because you paid money for it, doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want.

And it’s never been that way. Looking back as far as I’ve been buying software, I can remember seeing license agreements in packages that were quite explicit about that. And it’s understandable: how else can the creator of the code enforce their ownership?

DRM is pretty evil, but I am (at least temporarily) swayed by the arguments in the article that piracy causes the escalation in protection of software, and that the only determinant of piracy is the popularity of the software. There is a vocal minority that might claim DRM causes piracy, but the numbers certainly seem against it.

I also liked the acknowledgement that no copyright protection system is fool-proof, but if it can prevent day-one piracy in order to help developers and publishers recoup their expenses, then that’s a good thing. Developers and publishers with cash in their pockets can continue to make games.

Don’t get me wrong. Poorly-implemented DRM (a la Bioshock) can make life a living hell, but the only way for us to reduce it is to put pressure on people who won’t put any money into a game developer’s pocket at all.

Categories
Reviews Tech

Dodging bullets with Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy ClonerLike many users, I make mistakes when working with my computer. Some of them are easy to recover from (the Undo command is made more powerful every day). Some are not, like when you’re trying to clean up hard drive space with the Unix ‘find’ command. Let’s just say that you should always use the ‘-print0’ flag when trying to run ‘find’ results through ‘rm’.

Anyway, due to some major carelessness, I managed to delete a large chunk of my iTunes music library. Not good, particularly when I’m not even sure how I got some of those rare mp3s in the first place. Fortunately, I am a regular user of Carbon Copy Cloner by Bombich Software.

This nifty bit of Mac donationware keeps me alive with a bootable backup of my entire harddrive on an external USB drive. One of the main selling points of CCC is that it preserves metadata. This is very important because a lot of software (including the operating system) need this metadata in order to function correctly. It can also do backup schedules, incremental backups, and a host of other nifty options.

For those of you not currently backing up your software, I highly recommend the practice. For those of you who are looking for a good backup product for the Mac, I recommend Carbon Copy Cloner. It’s donationware, and regularly maintained.

Categories
Video Games

Going old-school

I had an epiphany about gaming yesterday. I was stuck at work, being paid a lot to do very little (the holiday period is good like that), and after we had exhausted showing off our meagre guitar talents (yes, that bored), somebody suggested a little Quake 3 action over the LAN.

After a little scrambling to figure out the best way to do this with three Linux boxen and two Windows machines, we stumbled upon OpenArena, which is a great cross-platform implementation of Q3. We were soon partying like it was 2000 again.

Anyway, the realisation I came to as I railed somebody from one of my favourite camping spots for the 10th time was that I hadn’t had as much FPS fun in ages. Sure, graphics and story and other things might have improved, but I seriously have had less fun combined with all three Halos, Gears of War and Doom 3 than I have across Quake 1, Quake 3, and Half-Life (and mods), Unreal (and its earlier sequels).

By no means am I near the top of the bunch. I mean, sure I can run rings around a newbie, but I was never dedicated enough to garner some of those advanced skills that come so natural to some players so as to appear somewhat godlike. But it’s still a lot more fun. The gameplay is free-flowing, over-the-top and a lot more funny than the depressing realism, grittiness, and grey palettes that seem to be infesting the genre at the moment.

I might be accused of indulging in a little nostalgia, but I don’t think so. I played for a good 3 hours before being forced to take a call, and would have kept going. It’s not that I’m an old fogey refusing to play the latest and greatest. I’ve tried a few, and they’re just not as fun.

What about you guys – do you stay on the bleeding edge, or prefer to hang on to the old classics?

I might go see if I can find my old Starcraft CD.