The prank that wasn’t

Posted: 25th January 2010 by Jacky Yong in Photography, Silly me
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Okay, owning the 40D after the 350D was the worst kept secret among my friends. But what you didn’t know was that there was actually a plan to pull a prank on you guys!

In May last year I have made the decision to sell off my trusty old 350D. Lots of people were surprised, many even made the prediction that I will buy another DSLR in no time. Initially that was the plan. And initially there was a plan to go to Bangkok in August 2009. With an impending holiday like that, it would make sense to get myself another camera as soon as possible.

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Car Order Eater

Posted: 20th January 2010 by Jacky Yong in Silly me
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I am going to write about a machine that eats the order out of a car…….

 

 

 

…….. or about a funny japanese translation that went haywire:

Car order eater

I'm so hungry, I could eat a car ....... order

Bought this thing from Daiso, inside IOI Mall Puchong. It’s only RM5, but the main reason I bought it is because of the misinterpretation. 😀

What I got my wife for Christmas

Posted: 15th January 2010 by Jacky Yong in Photography, Silly me
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This, a digital camera, worth almost RM1,500 a pop! In reality I owe her this since her birthday last year, so it’s well overdue actually! 😛

This is the camera, the new Canon Powershot S90.

 

 

Canon Powershot S90

Canon Powershot S90

Remember when I mentioned that I wanted to buy a PnS? I wasn’t kidding!

Why did I choose this camera? Well there is a lot of reasons actually. For one thing, I must confess, that I am a huge Canon fanboy. And another thing, being a techie that I am, I know for sure that I am getting top quality pictures with this baby. On papers the camera boasts some incredible numbers:

  • 10 megapixel sensors (and not just any sensors. It’s the sensor used in its much larger brother the G11. The size of the sensor is the biggest among point-and-shooters among its class, which should translate to lower noise)
  • 28 mm – 105 mm equivalent IS (image stabilized) lens
  • Fast f2.0 – 4.9 aperture. (Faster than my EF-S 17-55 f2.8 IS at 28 mm!)
  • RAW shooting! (Yay~!)
  • 3.0 inch LCD screen, 461,000 pixels. Not exactly the high resolution screen found in newer DSLR’s, but good enough.

The rest of the advertised features (dual-noise removal, DIGIC IV smile detection, scene detection etc) are merely marketing gimmicks.

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Calvin Klein is looking for a new underwear model…..

Posted: 11th January 2010 by Jacky Yong in Silly me
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….. and I gladly accepted the offer! =D

 

CK's new male model

Hairy fella ain't he?

Picture taken by wifey today, more than 2 weeks after my last shave. I get a lot of weird looks and comments from people, as if they are saying that a chinese guy should not keep a long beard like that. Rather stereotypical aren’t they? *sigh* looks like I will have to shave my face lar today before I go to work tomorrow. I hate shaving, especially when you need to do it everyday! 🙁

 

New Sandisk making its debut

Posted: 8th January 2010 by Jacky Yong in Photography
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I have been keeping a very close eye on the Sandisk compact flash cards and its price fluctuations. Reason being I am seriously considering getting myself a new card for my camera. My current 2 x 2 GB cards are insufficient for my workflow. I take mostly RAW files, especially when I am on a holiday. Near the end of November I watched with earnest as the prices of the Sandisk CF Extreme III 8GB, the card that I was aiming for, plummeted to about RM200 per piece, the lowest I have seen in months. I thought that the time was right to purchase it.

Boy was I glad that I was wrong! The Extreme III 8GB vanished completely from stores by mid-December! I thought that it was just a temporary stock clearance, and that I would be seeing it again a few weeks later. I waited and waited, but the Extreme III never appeared again. Panic came over me, what if the card really has been discontinued? Does that mean that I will have to buy the more expensive but unnecessarily bigger cards, or the slower cards?

After more excruciating weeks of waiting, I decided to test the market and I asked a few sellers. They told me that the Extreme III 8 GB are really not in production any more, and that I should buy the cheaper Ultra 8GB. Then I noticed something that wasn’t there before, the Ultra cards are now rated at 30 MB/s!! WTF??

Upon further searching, I realized that the entire line of the Sandisk CF cards has been revamped! The changes include changes in names and rated speed. The changes can be summarized with the following:

  • Ultra II 15 MB/s (100x) → Ultra 30 MB/s (200x)
  • Extreme III 30 MB/s (200x) → Extreme 60 MB/s (400x) (UDMA)
  • Extreme IV 45 MB/s (300x) (UDMA) → Extreme Pro 90 MB/s (600x) (UDMA 6)

As you can see, this is a clear double increase in speed to quench the insatiable thirst for more speed in today’s super fast and high resolution cameras. Add to the fact that cameras nowadays are equipped with HD video! The icing on the cake is even sweeter; the price stays at or around the same as the old price!

Does this mean that I am going to get me the new faster Extreme cards? Absolutely NOT! My camera is already at its fastest at 30 MB/s. Any faster is a waste of technology. Besides, my old camera does not support UDMA. So now I am targeting the Ultra 8GB instead. Which is great news; I just came back from Low Yat Plaza this evening, the price of an Ultra 8GB is about only RM150!

All hail technology!

Don’t throw that picture away yet!

Posted: 7th January 2010 by Jacky Yong in Computers, Photography
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How many of you remember taking a photo, only to find out that the photo turned out bad due to incorrect exposure? (It could be due to underexpose (picture turning out too dark) or overexpose (picture turning too bright).) Even though in the world of digital photography where the camera decides everything for you, things can still get very wrong. And most of the times you have no choice but to press that delete button.

Things gets worse when you find out that the photo is a very important photo that you absolutely must keep. So how can you save it? I have personally seen a lot of people successfully saving their bad pictures digitally, but they were damn fucking stingy. They did not want to share their techniques to the world. Hate these fuckers.

Luckily a bit of Uncle Google and some photoshop experience helped me to figure it out. Take a look at this picture below:

 

 

Exposure skewed

Incorrect exposure, making the foreground dark and the background bright

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Portraiture in KL

Posted: 26th December 2009 by Jacky Yong in Photography
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Went for a walkabout in October with Yan Yan and my wife, with plenty of photo opportunities. Only able to process the photos today, due to amazingly full schedule.

Anyway the title is a bit confusing, ’cause technically speaking the places we went to were not only confined to KL. We also went to Sunway and Putrajaya.

 

Deepavali Sunway

It was during Deepavali. Obviously.

This round of post processing involves some newly learnt workflow. This is the first time I utilized LucisArt for that Dave Hill look. Tell me if that works.

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Happy Midwinter Festival!

Posted: 22nd December 2009 by Jacky Yong in Computers
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Happy DongZhi, or in chinese, 冬至快乐! It’s amazing now that you think about it, the ancient chinese calculated this annual path of the sun which coincides with the winter solstice. The winter solstice is when the sun has gone as far south (if you live in the northern atmosphere of the earth) as it can through the winter, and is now on its way back to warm your icy cold butts. The chinese calendar is actually a combination of the lunar and the solar path, which is far more useful in predicting the occurrence of the full moon, the seasons and maybe even the eclipses (not sure).

Anyways enough of the technical details. Go ahead and enjoy your “tang yuan” 汤圆 with your family! 😉

Karmic Koala vs Windows 7

Posted: 21st December 2009 by Jacky Yong in Computers
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My first impression of Windows 7 was good. Coming from a Windows XP environment, W7 proves to be a refreshing change in terms of speed and looks. Perhaps this is really not a fair comparison. The aging XP was really quite bloated with all the softwares I installed. Being an easily infested little weakling, XP had to fortify itself with an antivirus and a strong firewall. That I think, contributed to its comparatively slow startup.

Enter Window 7. Microsoft promised that W7 will load faster, more secure, and at the same time, look sexier. There has been a lot of good reviews about W7, and naturally I was tempted to try it out. I finally had the chance to do it last week. Formatted XP and replaced the damn machine with Windows7. Even the installation process was a breeze compared to the old XP days. Only a minor hiccup occured, otherwise the installation went without a hitch.

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Damn that MBR!

Posted: 18th December 2009 by Jacky Yong in Computers
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Stupid beast this MBR (master boot record) is from Windows. Even in its 7th reincarnation, MBR still bugs me. I am not a big fan of Windows, but I still find myself going back to Windows. And Windows 7 looks more attractive and sexier than XP by a mile!

Anyway why do I bother about MBR? That’s because my harddisk has always been loading Ubuntu mainly, Windows secondary. Being the primary OS, Ubuntu assigned GRUB as the boot loader. Things get ugly when I switch back to Windows, as you shall see why.

In order to reformat my dual-booting machine, I first have to install the secondary OS, in this case Windows. Then only can I install Ubuntu, so that Ubuntu can manage the booting itself. Besides, the Windows installation is too stupid, it cannot detect other existing OS’es to co-exist peacefully with others. Typical Microsoft.

So my MBR is destroyed. No matter how many times I install Windows, it just will not load from the hard disk. Took me a lot of googling before I found out this MBR thingy. And how it differs from previous Windows XP! Previous XP still uses fixmbr.exe to solve this. Not since Vista. Vista and Windows 7 uses bootrec.exe instead. (There is another similar command, called bootsect.exe, but that does not work. Google it!)

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