Community Matters

It’s one of the things that I like about the D300: the built-in flash can trigger an external flash like the SB-800 or the SB-600 without any need for additional equipment. But having used this option quite a bit for the past month I also learned about a couple of its downsides.

For one thing, the D300 really slows down the shooting frequency when you use the built-in flash. No Continuous shooting mode (only the first picture gets a flash), and even in Single shot mode there’s a noticeable delay between pictures; I use the battery grip so the cycle time shouldn’t be that long – my guess is this is all trying to prevent over-heating of the flash.

The second downside is kind of obvious. You always have the frontal flash as part of the picture composition. Yes, via the menu that controls the CLS settings for the flash you can tell the camera to underexpose the built-in flash and to compensate by over-exposing the secondary flash, but this seems more like a kludge to me.

I looked at PocketWizards but find them a bit too expensive for my liking. I also looked at the Gadget Infinity wireless trigger that keeps getting mentioned on Strobist (btw: one of the best sites out there about off-camera flash photography). But the more I read the more I wonder about their reliability.

I can’t wait to see reviews of the RadioPopper. Sounds almost too good to be true. So far this seems to hit the sweet spot of price and functionality. But now they actually need to deliver that in real life.

In the meantime I’ve done a few shots with a cable based off-camera flash setup (using HH cable and a hot-shoe adapter, both left over from my experiments with the Rebel XT; on the D300 with an SB-800 one could of course simply use a PC cable), but frankly that’s just way more trouble than it’s worth. So I will get one of the wireless solutions at some point; I guess after the RadioPoppers ship and have been reviewed.

This year at LCA the OLPC folks are handing out literally dozens of XOs to randomly picked attendees – with strings attached, so to speak. Basically they tell you “do something amazing with it” – and if you think you don’t have the time or skill to do that, they ask you to pass it on to someone else who does.

I think this is a brilliant way to create an active and innovative developer community around the XO – linux.conf.au certainly brings together a lot of the top Linux developers and the implied social contract when you get a free XO will certainly get many of the recipients thinking about what to do with them.

This is an interesting contrast to the way Asus is handling innovation around the eeePC. They needed some help to stay compliant with the GPL, they use a proprietary launcher and an in-house developed and maintained variant of the Xandros Linux distribution. All not exactly signs of embracing and understanding open source and the community around it that could help them be successful. Still, I see a lot of people here at the conference with eeePCs (obviously the list includes myself). It’ll be interesting to see how these different approaches work out for both sides…

I found another annoying little thing with the eeePC.

There are two parallel universes for cut and paste. The one that uses the Gnome clipboard. And the one that uses the X clipboard.

So if you want to cut and paste from, say, Firefox to Thunderbird, you mark your text in Firefox, hit Ctrl-C for copy, switch to Tunderbird and hit Ctrl-V to paste. That’s using the Gnome clipboard.

But if you want to cut and paste into the uxterm, then suddenly you have to do things differently. Again, mark your text in Firefox, but don’t copy this into the Gnome clipboard, Instead just switch to the uxterm and hit Shift-Ins (middle mouse button is the alternative, but that requires to press both ends of the little click-bar at the same time… not that easy).

Awkward.

Instead of enduring the cold, rain and even snow in Portland, I am in Australia at Linux.Conf.Au. 24 hours of travel suck. Days filled with great talks and a chance to connect with lots of friends and many new people, all working in open source. Worth it.

I brought both the Mac and the eeePC. Surprisingly, the eeePC seemed a lot better at hanging on to the wireless connection – it keeps dropping on the Mac at times. I need to Mac to be able to access work email and connect to the VPN, but for everything else, so far, the eeePC was actually the better solution. Smaller, easier to carry around, no problem to just put it down (it’s solid state, after all).

It’s not great for kernel builds, though. Or for editing source files. Darn.

I love the eeePC. But there are things that could be better.

I am actually surprised how often I run into things that require more performance than this little device has to offer. It’s a decent enough processor (an Intel Celeron running at 571MHz in the “Surf” version and at 667MHz in the more expensive ones). And it turns out that there’s web content that requires more horse power than that. Flash based video, for example. Who would have thought.

Obviously the screen is too small. Both in physical dimensions and in resolution.

The keyboard is less of a problem than I thought. Yes, it’s crowded, but I got used to it quite quickly.

The good news? According to the rumors we’ll get a 2nd generation eeePC from Asus within the next few months that is based on a newer Intel processor and has a larger screen with higher resolution (I see more and more references of 9-9.4″ screen with 1024×600 as resolution). I’m still trying to get more information on the CPU they will use. Let’s hope it’s the recently announced Silverthorne.

Intel has something else in mind when they talk about the Ultra Mobile PC, namely a more pen and touch screen based user experience, but to me the eeePC today is a very impressive implementation of exactly this idea. A full computer, fast enough for the real internet experience, running a reasonably customized version of a standard OS, but extremely light and small so it’s easy to take with you on the road.

I am traveling to a conference this week; I brought my eeePC and am very pleased so far. You can surf the web wirelessly almost anywhere; I have had only one password protected network that I couldn’t access as it seems the eeePC uses a different algorithm for WEP passwords than some access point vendors like D-Link and the owner of the network didn’t have the hex key available. Everywhere else connecting with the eeePC was as easy as connecting with my MacBook Pro: It sees the access points, asks you which network to connect to (I actually like the way the networks are displayed together with their signal strength better than what’s available on the Mac!), asks you for encryption keys where necessary and off you go!

You can browse the web with the best browser available (Firefox), get to your email (even though I’m not completely in love with Thunderbird on this small screen – too much wasted real estate), play media… pretty darn impressive. As you can tell, you can blog (this post is written on the eeePC, of course).

The only real downside is caused by the major upside of this device. It is so small that the keyboard is too crowded and it is sometimes hard to find a comfortable sitting position with it – it’s just too tempting to sit down anywhere and put it in your lap – and the ergonomics just don’t work out to well with that…

Yes, the MacBook Air is prettier. But at six to eight times the price of an eeePC (depending on which models you compare), I’m not sure it is worth it. And if I am allowed a snide remark… having a real right click with your trackpad as a welcome change from the Mac… (but yes, I do of course realize that in most every other aspect the Mac is much more advanced – given its price it better be!).

Anyway, my verdict so far: the perfect travel companion for the blogger!

It seems lots of people find this site looking for modem scripts for their devices, now that Leopard has changed the script format.

While I have written about the necessary modifications to have your Motorola Ming work with Leopard I don’t know much about any other device. But it turns out that Apple actually has a really useful tool to simply convert what you have for Tiger! Go, check out their CCL Modem Scripting Release Notes – it’s all explained there.

Hope this helps some of you.

The rumors just don’t stop. This time it is DigiTimes that claims to have the details, talking about 8, 9, and 10 inch versions of the eeePC, the 9-inch one even with a touch display. And this just after another story that claims to have seen an 8.9 inch model at CES.

I wonder about some reports like this. 8 inch wouldn’t really be a big boost to what is there today – and I wasn’t able to find any 8 inch LCDs with larger resolution than what the current 7 inch model already has. The same goes for the 8.9 inch version that allegedly was spotted at CES – still just 800×480. But maybe they’ll really just bump the physical size of the display in their entry level product? Not really what I’m looking for, but who knows; might make sense from a marketing point of view.

As I pointed out in an earlier post on the 10 inch eeePC rumors, the problem with a screen of that size is that it wouldn’t fit in the existing form factor – and I doubt that Asus is willing to make the overall computer any bigger.

And a touch screen? For one thing, given the target street price adding $15 to the bill of material of the eeePC is a huge deal. But even worse, the touch screen support in the underlying OS is pretty mediocre. There is no good full screen handwriting input method available. Most software would have to be modified to make this work – not a task I think Asus is willing to tackle. And a half-hearted implementation (just as mouse replacement maybe?) would look really lame, given what the iPhone shows you can do with touch screen input.

So my guess is still that we’ll see a conventional 9.3 inch or 9.4 inch screen, first.

The very positive comments on the D300′s dynamic range were one of the reasons why I ended up buying it. And so far I have been thrilled with the results. The amount of details it preserves both in highlights and in dark areas is very impressive. Especially at higher ISO values.

Today I found an article at KammaGamma that did some much more scientific analysis of the dynamic range of the D300, comparing it directly to the D200. They don’t have similar tests for the Rebel XT or the 40D, but if you use the Comparometer at imaging resource you can actually look at full size high ISO pictures taken under identical conditions with the D300, the 40D and the Rebel XTi (they have some pictures for the Rebel XT as well, but not the high ISO ones). Once again, very impressive results – clearly showing the improved dynamic range, especially at higher ISO settings.

But the most amazing article comparing the current crop of Canon and Nikon DSLRs that I’ve seen so far is this review at Luminous Landscape. It’s long, but it gives so many insights and details that in my mind it is really worth a read.

I love the D300 for low light photography without a flash – but of course flexibility to drive a flash or external strobe light is an important feature for a DSLR. And studying the manuals pointed me to two other advantages that the D300 has compared to the 40D.

1. Strobe sync speed through the PC connector is 1/250s on the Nikon D300 but only 1/60s with the Canon 40D; if you have reasonable ambient light and want to work with a large aperture, the 1/60s can get you enough ambient light onto the sensor that your picture appears slightly blurred if your subject moves
2. The fastest sync speed with dedicated flash units on the D300 is 1/8000s when using the SB-800, SB-600 or SB-R200. On the 40D the fastest sync speed is 1/250s, regardless of the flash that you use. This prevents you from doing some interesting types of shots (where you completely black out the background by going to a very fast shutter speed and using the flash to just light the foreground subject)

Since I really like to experiment with different flash settings and especially off-camera flash (more on that later) I think those are two major drawbacks of the 40D.

Update: As Ryan pointed out in the comment below, this may not be correct after all! While the documentation of the 40D doesn’t mention it (at least not that I could find it, and I spent a bit of time with the PDF and the search function of Acrobat Reader), it appears that you can make it do the long-pulse fast shutter sync up to 1/8000s, just like the D300, assuming you have the 580EX-II flash. As for the PC sync speed, Ryan doesn’t know for sure, either, but believes that it can do 1/250s as wel. I’d love to hear from people who have tried that…