This Old Blog

Panasonic Lumix GX1 with Lumix 1:2.5/14mm pancake prime I posted part two of my review on thewsreviews: http://www.thewsreviews.com/2013/06/panasonic-lumix-dmc-gx1-silver-part-2.html Nothing changed from part 1; I still believe it's a great little camera, especially now that it's heavily discounted. This time I used it with the Lumix 14mm. Whether the GX1 + 14mm is on the same photographic footing as the Nikon Coolpix A, Ricoh GR Digital V, or Fuji X100s is open for discussion, but for about US$450 body and lens, it sure does a great job for me. And when the 14mm doesn't suit me for whatever reason, I can switch it out for something else, such as the 20mm or M.Zuiko 45mm. Such is the real power behind an interchangeable lens system.

Panasonic Lumix GX1 with Lumix 1.7/20mm Monochrome ISO 160 straight-out-of-camera I published part 1 of my review of the Panasonic GX1 over on thewsreviews:  http://www.thewsreviews.com/2013/05/panasonic-lumix-dmc-gx1-silver-part-1.html Nothing particularly controversial, especially for a camera that's at its end-of-life, heavily discounted and waiting for the rumored GX2 to be released. Basically, it's a fabulous µ4:3rds camera for just $200.

2011 Maneuver Conference, Columbus, GA during a break I don't normally criticize other professional photographers. I'm generally not in their league. But there are times, when I'm around a so-called pro at work, that their choice of equipment and how the operate it annoys the pure living bejesus out of me and many sitting around me. This past week I was up in Columbus Georgia attending the 2011 Maneuver Conference held at the Columbus Georgia Georgia Convention and Trade Center , hosted by the Maneuver Center of Excellence at near-by Ft. Benning. The majority of the activity was held in the Iron Works combined Ballrooms A, B, and C (see above). By the time all three rooms were combined, you had enough room to hold thousands, and it was indeed packed. All the chairs were filled and there were people standing across the back three walls, at many places three deep. Colonels and Generals from the Army were giving talks about training, and all aspects of training. And ri

Apes don't like gridlock either. I finally checked "Rise" out today. After having lived through the original Planet of the Apes with the late Charlton Heston and the sequels that followed, this latest take was interesting, although it had a few plot points I tend to take issue with. And trust me, the end of this movie is definitely set up for its own series of sequels. The genesis of intelligent apes this time around is genetic manipulation by man. What follows are the 29 Steps to Ape Domination according to this movie: Open to Bad Humans capturing Innocent Apes in their jungle Eden. They are caged and shipped to GenSys, the Bad Pharma Company, employer of the Misguided Scientist Who Will Cause All That Is To Follow. Misguided Scientist is developing a cure for Alzheimer's, a gene-based therapy named ALZ-112 that is delivered by an altered virus. Misguided Scientist has a father who suffers from Alzheimer's. One of the captured apes is female and preg

My wife and I watched the latest Marvel movie to hit the multiplexes Sunday, "Captain America: The First Avenger". We were both pleasantly surprised at how enjoyable the movie was. The 2011 movie is meant to show the origin of Captain America in the lead-up to the major Avengers movie to be released in 2012 (hence "The First Avenger" in its title). Chris Evens ("Scott Pilgrim vs The World"/Lucas Lee, "The Fantastic Four"/Johnny Storm/Human Torch) puts in an excellent performance as Steve Rogers, a.k.a. Captain America. In his prior movies, especially as the Human Torch, Chris' characters have come across as somewhat brash and arrogant. This time around, as a skinny kid from Brooklyn, Chris' Steve Rogers is far more humble. He has to be; as "Skinny Steve" he's constantly being beat up and picked on by the bullies of the world. Chris surprisingly strikes an excellent balance between honest humility, realizing his physical

The Short Version: They're still to be avoided at all cost. The Long Version: Know when a restaurant is in real trouble? When they start giving away free beer. That's not the punch-line to some joke, but the opening in a dark new dramatic chapter to the real-life Hot N Juicy Crawfish locale I covered back in mid-July . Don't try the food or the free beer - Hot N Juicy Crawfish That lovely hand-drawn sign you see above says in cursive at the bottom, "All Day Weekends, 3-cl Weekdays", or all day every weekend day (Saturday and Sunday) and 3pm to closing during the week. That's a lot of free beer. I don't think they have much to worry about, though, because the place was nearly empty. I didn't go in to check, so I could have mistaken staff for customers, but there were a few scattered about. If their food was any indication, I wouldn't drink their beer either, free or otherwise. I don't want to see anyone loose their job, especially

My new lil' Prius, March 2009 The last two posts have been pretty negative, so I fell the need to bring balance back to the force by writing something positive about someone, somewhere. That actually turns out to be rather easy. Background Over the past month the air conditioning blower in the Prius had been getting worse over time. At first I chalked it up to the unusually hot weather we've been having until around the first of July when I walked out to the car and started it up. The car started fine but the blower refused to start blowing air. The first failure seemed like a short delay; about 30 seconds after the car started then the blower started operating as well. I thought it was some sort of unknown "feature" in the car. I even hit the car manual looking for it. But it was a slow failure of the blower. The blower failures continued intermittently. As each failure occurred they lasted longer and longer before the blower started to run. And the volume o

The Short Version: Avoid at all costs. The Long Version: A new restaurant opened in the Dr. Phillips area on Sand Lake Road. It's called Hot N Juicy Crawfish , and it aims to serve shellfish, primarily the namesake crayfish. My wife and I love seafood and shellfish, so we decided to head over and try out Hot N Juicy. After an hour-and-a-half experiencing poor service and not the best in seafood, we both left wishing we hadn't. Our night at Hot N Juicy was one of the worst, if not the worst, dining experiences in out life. This isn't the first night they opened; on they're website they've still got a special for July 9th (which is expired, naturally), but Friday night was close enough to opening night that they still had a training manager walking about while we were there. We arrived fairly late, around 8pm. The place was near to empty of patrons. For the next hour-and-a-half we would slowly be served two plastic bags of boiled seafood (one pound of crayfis

Occasionally there are products introduced to the marketplace that are so bad they inspire creative genius in the reviewer in order to convey just how utterly bad they are. Such a product is the Energizer Candle, and such a creative genius is Rob Beschizza. Originally recorded with a wonderful soundtrack, the transcription that follows can never fully convey the absolute and utter contempt Rob feels towards the Energizer Candle. Like experiencing Shakespeare in the original Klingon, you must experience this review in the original Beschizza. In more than a decade as a reporter, technology correspondent, columnist and managing editor of one of the world's most lavishly marketed technology blogs, I've never come across a product quite like Energizer's flickering LED candle lights. This is the worst consumer electronics product I've encountered in my career. The possibility that Energizer itself developed this supernaturally useless device is inconceivable. Someone th

"Chicken Fajita Burrito" Olympus E-P2 with 17mm 1/400s, f/2.8, ISO 200, +0.7 EV While running around our end of Orlando, the wife and I ate lunch at the latest local eatery to open near us, the Lime Fresh Mexican Grill located in the Whole Foods shopping plaza at the intersection of West Sand Lake and Turkey Lake roads. My wife is now a member of Groupon, and she'd gotten a $15 off coupon for $7. We both ordered the chicken fajita burrito with sour creme on the side. When they took off the $15 Groupon we wound up owing a little over five dollars. I gave them a ten, then dropped the change into the tip jar. We came out saving four dollars. In spite of the higher price you might pay over at our Chipotle down the street, or one of the many Del Taco, Toco Bell's, or Moe's, the food you get at Lime Fresh is truly fresh. My wife and I compared it with other Tex/Mex eateries we've been too, and we decided it's comparable to Chipotle's, and far bett

Normally you're supposed to finish a book before you write a review of it. Well, I've just started to read Mira Grant 's (a.k.a. Seanan McGuire ) "Feed", and I'm only up to chapter 4. It's a zombie book. I hate zombie books. Well, maybe hate is too strong a word. More like I try to avoid them. As I said I avoid zombie novels. It's fairly trivial to do so; I spot books with dark colored covers combined with garishly drawn zombies and/or zombie killer illustrations, and just automatically steer clear of them. But "Feed" is different. "Feed"'s cover is a dirty white, with the RSS feed symbol at the top, drawn in blood (well, printed to look like it's drawn in blood). That's what caught my attention, and then kept it. It didn't come across as your typical zombie book. The front cover alone got me curious enough to pick up the book and start reading the back cover. There wasn't much information there, and I would

Like everybody else in the world I've been listening to the drama unfold around the Big Three automakers; Form, GM, and Chrysler. Chrysler has already traveled so far through bankruptcy that it's preparing to come back out as a "leaner" automotive company. GM has just started it's tortuous walk through the process, with GM's spin twisting reality so much they're claiming this " isn't about going out of business - this is about getting down to business. " Horsedung. GM had the EV-1 in the late 90's. They then worked to destroy the car and any ability to manufacture more, turning instead to SUVs and big trucks. My wife and I wanted an EV-1 in the worse way, regardless of the warts. And we lived in Florida, not California. For normal small cars (i.e. non-hybrid or pure EV), GM had not one but two high-mileage brands, the Geo Metro (via Suzuki) and the Saturn. The Geo Metro was an inexpensive car with gas mileage that stretched up to the mid-

I've been reading Cory Doctorow 's " Little Brother " as an e-book via the Stanza reader on my iPod Touch. This isn't the first Doctorow book I've read; I started with his "I, Rowboat", thinking it was a comedy (it wasn't, not quite). I actually started reading "Little Brother" because of its reference in a Wired story, " Little Brother Is Watching You ", posted back on April 9th. This is the story of Ian Tomlinson, who died from a heart attack after being manhandled and then pushed to the ground by London police. What struck me was that Mr. Tomlinson appeared to be walking alone, hands in pockets, before being overwhelmed by a group of police. There's no clear sound to indicate what might have passed between Mr. Tomlinson and the police, but the video clear indicates (at least to me) that Mr. Tomlinson was in no way aggressive, while the police, with their police dogs and body language, were all about aggression and chal

In a January post I uttered the asinine comment that I was not going to bother with Mandriva after that posting because it had failed twice in succession to boot on my machines, especially europa. I forgot about that utterance and downloaded Mandriave 2008 Spring RC1 KDE One, and booted it on europa. I can say that it not only booted and ran, but the overall quality ranges from good to excellent. One of the key features I feel is important and which I always test with a new release is the ability to play back some video (any video, frankly) that I have on my system. As you can see above Mandriva found and mounted my existing partitions, including my home partition and all its data. I was able to play back a movie with Kaffeine that I had ripped with K3b (MPEG4 video, MPG3 audio) without any problems. The ability to just Do It is still a wonder, both from a technical and ideological perspective. It failed to play back a DVD. Kaffeine started up and played the opening screen and FBI war

Ubuntu 8.04, a.k.a. Hardy Heron, Alpha 5 hit the wires late Friday evening. I downloaded my copy around 8pm Orlando local time (EST). After super and kitchen duty I sat down and ran the release around the four systems I have at home to see how it worked. It's definitely an alpha, and a very raw alpha. Unlike my experiences with 7.04 and 7.10, the testing of the 8.04 alphas has been much rougher, so rough in fact that I probably won't upgrade to 8.04 until the final release. And that's assuming that openSUSE 11 is another disaster like 10.3 was. The four test computers consist of two desktops and two notebooks. All the computers are 32-bit, and only one, the M685 Gateway, is a dual core (Intel Core Duo). All the computers run Linux, and three of the four dual-boot between Windows XP SP2 and Linux. The notebooks dual boot between WinXP and openSUSE 10.2, and the desktops run Ubuntu 7.10. All operating systems are running with the latest patches from their respective suppliers

A trio of alpha releases have hit the virtual streets; Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 4 February 2nd, Fedora 9 Alpha 1 the 5th, and openSUSE 11 Alpha 2 the 8th. And, yes, they are indeed alphas. Ubuntu 8.04 Alpha 4, Hardy Heron The most mature of the early releases. I've burned and booted both Ubuntu since it's been my experience that the KDE version of Ubuntu (Kubuntu) is the weakest KDE distribution I've ever experienced. Ubuntu booted on every machine I could throw it at. To me this underscores a high overall level of professionalism with regards to its development as well as a good level of maturity at this point in time with the distribution. It is my belief that, even if the release is an alpha, that it should at least successfully boot into the graphical desktop on every machine that the current production release works on unless explicitly stated otherwise. Ubuntu has successfully booted on all my hardware since Alpha 1, and it has exhibited this capability since Ubuntu 7.04. My

Based on a comment left on an earlier post I pulled down and booted Simply Mepis 7. I remember Simply Mepis as the distribution that switched from using Ubuntu as its foundation to using Debian as its foundation. The reason given at the time was that Ubuntu wasn't upgrading adequately within a given release. Apparently baseline Debian was. This is the first time I've ever booted Mepis, and the experience has been quite positive. As usual I haven't devoted a lot of time checking every feature. Instead I just wanted to see if it would boot and if everything worked; everything to me being graphics, networking, sound, and multimedia codecs. Mepis boots just fine to a full KDE graphical desktop. The only issue I have is that the screen resolution is limited to 1280 by 1024. Contrast this with Ubuntu and Mint (3 and 4) which boot the screen up into 1900 by 1440. Lower resolutions always herald a later problem with choosing higher resolutions after installation. It's something

It's mid-winter and the start of a new year. While the weather is mild here in central Florida it's still been cloudy and rainy, so I've spent a some time downloading ISOs and booting them just to see what's available. Mint 4 KDE I've always been impressed by the quality of Mint, even if I've not used it. After reading of the announcement on Distrowatch I downloaded the current KDE beta and booted it on europa. It came up in 1920 by 1440 resolution. It's currently using KDE version 3.5, which is just fine given the overall polish that Mint KDE has applied to the KDE desktop environment. It's probably the best default look-and-feel I've ever seen delivered with any version of KDE on any distribution. What's nice about Mint 4 KDE is that everything, as usual, just works. As you can see in the screen shot above I was able to view Flash-based audio/video from CNN as well as play a DVD in the second DVD player on europa via Kaffeine. I know I've w

Booted up F8T2 Live CD tonight just to give it a spin. The test box, as usual, was europa. First, the good impressions. If you haven't tried Fedora in a while, you owe it to yourself to at least fire up the Live CD and give it a whirl. The look and feel of the entire graphic desktop has been advanced and polished quite a bit from earlier versions, including Fedora 7. The overall color theme is still blue, but the controls and window border use Nodoka, a theme I've never heard of before. Everything has a clean, muted pastel look about it. Somebody finally got the good idea to make the window controls (minimize, maximize, and close) cover the entire bar. It Just Looks Right. The mix of tans, off-whites and whites are done very well. The complete effect is one of restrained quality. F8's look and feel contrasts severely with Vista's Aero (and for that matter Windows XP), with F8's standing head-and-shoulders above anything from Microsoft. The only desktop that compares