Techies

Yes also we became victim of twitter, nowadays everyone is using this next to the blogging. Twitter is a micro blogging site, where you leave very short (aka sms kind of) messages of what is keeping you busy at the moment.

I'm testing now how this could be integrated in the site. Nothing stable yet, so hold your horses :) 

Posted by Joop

Finally I've decided to purchase a dedicated domain. The current domain is a free domain, which is pointing towards my server at home with a dynamic ip address. The server (what's in the word) is just a 233mhz cpu with 64mb of memory(!). This thing is actually my wireless router, but hacked with openwrt, making it a complete linux distro. Very nice, but a bit limited in resources.

Which one? I will not tell yet However, I tried already to upload this webpage to this new domain. Then I noticed the uploading is not difficult, however, I made quite some manual changes to the functionality on this page. And there it reveals, I'm no real webpage builder, I used alot of static references to this joop3.dyndns.org domain. Crap, of course I should always use relative links. Anyhow, nice job to go through all code and find where I used static links :) 

I will keep you updated on latest news 

Posted by Joop

After long investigating and reading reviews on the internet, this saturday we decided to go to camera shops to look around.

The idea is to by a SLR camera, something I already wanted to do for a very long time, but always found it to be too expensive. But now, with the expectation of the new family member, it became much more interesting to have a nice camera...

A note upfront, I have till now no experience at al with SLR cameras.

Initially I was looking for the Canon 450D, which was in my eyes most value for money. Most SLR camera's come with some sort of kit sell. Meaning they sell the body with some lenses. For the 450D there is a default one with 18-55mm lens, one with this lens plus a 55-200mm lens, and one with a 17-85mm lens.
This last one is actually the nicest one, since the quality is very good (glass lenses etc). But of course, this was reflected in the price aswell...
the kit including the 17-85mm lens was as expensive as the kit having the two lenses included (18-55 and 55-200mm).

So that said, I visited quite some shops (internet and real ones) to look for this one. This saturday I went to a professional camera shop asking for the Canon 450D camera. The young (but very knowledgeable) guy started to explain all kind of things about the camera, and what was my purpose of doing with the camera. He showed me things from technical stuff to what feels good to hold in a camera. In this proces he showed me several kind of cameras, including the Nikon D90. This one is slightly higher range than the 450D, but quite comparable in specs. Only quite big difference is the body which is from metal instead of plastic.

Also the D90 sells with different kits, with also the quality difference same as the 450D. The nice lens was the 18-105mm, which of course was the more expensive one. But funny was, that the price of the 18-105mm was more or less comparable with the 450D in combination with the 17-85mm lens.

I thanked the guy from the shop for his time and excellent information (spent almost an hour there) and left. Being outside, I was a bit aroused by this new information about the D90, and wasn't sure what to think. Since I was focussing mostly on the 450D, I didn't know much about other brands.

When walking to the car (I walked alone to pick up the car, and Angela was waiting for me, she is pregnant right, so me being a gentlemen ) I was processing all info in my head. And when Angela joined me in the car, I suggested to drive to the Mediamarkt, which is a big electronic shop here in Holland.
(It was half an hour before closing time) When we arrived, we went straight to the camera department to look at the camera's. And what to our surpise we saw, the D90 was in promotion! An amazing 200 euro's cheaper than the professional camera shop. To make this story a bit shorter -> Thinking -> Discussing -> Thinking -> Deciding -> Buying -> in the car home with a BRAND NEW D90 in the trunk!!!
Whoah! Nice. Of course at home immediatelly unpacking all and started playing. Again I have no experience at all with SLR, so expect some blurry pictures from me
Anyhow, Angela wanted to take some pictures of me, showing how happy I was:

The pictures I took:

And here already my first experience with the camera:

You can expect more to come

Posted by Joop

Hmm, we expect to use more video soon, and maybe you already saw somewhere else on this page, video player (flash) in combination with javascript don't like eachother that much.

Now I got the idea, to load the flash into the javascript, like the way I'm loading the pictures.

It's not as simple as I thought, but keep on trying...

hmm 42

Posted by Joop

For now very short text, need to go away so bit in a hurry.

I couldn't resist, me being a gadget freak, purchasing the following:

It's a tiny bluetooth enabled GPS logger. It will store on a predefined interval your location to it's memory. This is very nice for example to add to taken pictures, for later reference. Or, to simply look back when making a trip where you've been.

I didn't had much time yet to play with it, so expect more to come soon.

But I already have some nice ideas what to do with it. For example to store all made trips in google maps. Or to always add a map overlay within a picture.

Anyhow, my hunger for gadgets is satisfied for some time...

Posted by Joop