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June 28, 2005
Night Shots
dave
12:27 AM
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There's some wonderful photography on notraces night shots. In the one I've linked to, the photographer explains how they're done.
via the sideshow.
June 24, 2005
Summer Rain
dave
01:24 AM
Comments (7)
It's summertime here in Hong Kong, and that only means one thing! Yes, torrential downpours, all day, everyday.
May 30, 2005
Lok Ma Chau Demolition
dave
10:47 PM
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The recent demolition of buildings at the Lok Ma Chau border crossing point was not all that successful...
Note how the buildings are not completely destroyed, but have mainly just fallen over. A competent demolition team will make the building fall vertically so that there is very little effect outside the footprint of the structure. As an example, may I direct you to the World Trade Centre, which fell as precisely as if it had been previously mined with directed charges designed to work along the lines of most stress, rather than being randomly struck by an airplane. Man, that Osama Bin Laden is a really good structural engineer!
Strollin' on the highway
dave
10:46 PM
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We're doing about 30-40 mph past these strollers, by the way.
UPDATE: the new style requires a bit more text, so I'd like to point out that walking along expressways, and even cycling along them the wrong way is perfectly normal in China. It reminds me of driving in Saudi Arabia in the way that you'd see people lining up to walk across an expressway because it was the shortest way.
Of course, driving in China also reminds me of driving in Saudi Arabia in the bizarre and fatally fatalistic way most drivers approach things.
Abbey Road, Shenzen
dave
10:37 PM
Comments (1)
It's a good take on the beatles Album cover, but it's not quite right. One of the four should be barefoot, and they should all be in step. Two of the four here are left-foot forward rather than right-foot forward, so it isn't quite right, still, it's not that bad for a photo taken pretty randomly while motoring through Shenzen.
May 19, 2005
Hangin' out at the Bronze
dave
08:53 PM
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A Bronze Cory lurks near an abandoned snail shell. The Bronze Cory (Corydoras aeneus) is a bottom feeding catfish. It's very sociable and gets along well with other fish. Good for a mixed tank, it's also quite useful as it sifts through the detritus at the bottom of the tank for food.
May 18, 2005
Preposterous Plecostomus
dave
10:07 PM
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The Plecostomus Catfish lurks at the bottom of the fishtank, waiting to attach his sucker parts to any juicy piece of green algae around.
The plecostomus (more info here) is a useful fish, which tries to keep the algae from clogging up the aquarium. They prefer to hide during the daylight, but they seem to come out when the moonlight is on.
February 08, 2005
Compact Flash Recovery
dave
10:40 PM
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TrackBack
For the last few months my Canon A85 has been the epitome of reliability. From point, shoot and transfer to PC, it's never skipped a beat.
Tonight, the CF card (a 256MB ridata unit) suddenly proclaimed itself corrupted and refused to talk to the camera. It also refused to talk to any computers, whether being read as a scsi device under linux or a removable disc under winXP.
(I have a CF card reader which means I don't have to go through the camera's silly menus. It treats the removable media like a CD or floppy disk so I can just copy and paste from the CF card to my storage area. Just to complicate things, I have a few large disks in my Linux box which are shared out over the home network so that any windows machine can see them. This makes things easier.)
Time for some disc recovery!
A quick google search revealed two main options:
- PC Inspector
- Zero Assumption Recovery
PC Inspector searched through the CF card for about an hour (with no trace of activity on the Card Reader light) before claiming no files recovered.
Zero Assumption Recovery whirred away (actually using the card, if the activity light was to be believed) before finding nothing.
It looks like the controller on the card itself is shot, so neither program could reasonably have been expected to work. However, Zero Assumption Recovery seemed to actually try to do anything.
December 19, 2004
Gourami
dave
12:00 PM
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One of my Blue Gourami swims in the deep blue of the moonlight bulb. An Albino Tiger Barb can be seen in the background.
September 29, 2004
Amazing pictures
dave
01:51 AM
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These pictures, by Yann Arthus Bustrand are simply amazing.
From the thread at Making Light, by Teresa Nielsen Hayden.
September 26, 2004
New Pentaxes
dave
09:51 PM
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This is the baby brother of this and they're both great and I wants them, I do.
They're both 6MP Digital SLRs with a Pentax K-Mount. The new one is supposed to be a cut down version, but I find it much more attractive. Maybe it's the much more affordable pricetag, the USB 2.0, SD cards, better display and more powerful flash with a faster sync speed. It doesn't have the Hyper program of the Z1-p or the *Ist-D, but that's not an insurmountable problem.
The *ist-D has a HK$12,000 pricetag in the reputable shops in Mong Kok, which equates to a HK$10,500 or so actual purchase price when equipped with a demon bargainer. I'm guessing that the *ist-DS will be going for about HK$5,000 to HK$6,000, which is an great price for a Digital SLR.
April 18, 2004
Digital Cameras
dave
09:17 PM
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We saw One of these in a camera shop today. Instant Lust. It's a six Megapixel camera with a built in rechargeable bettery and the images looked fine when we used it. And it's also very easy to use. Seconds after picking it up, my wife was able to take a picture. The colours on the big screen looked very clear and the zoom function on the taken pictures was very clear too.
The only little hassle was the price - HK$ 4,500 - which is well out of our budget for a camera. Mind you, our budget for a camera is zero at the moment. Maybe if we sell the flat...
November 02, 2003
New Camera
dave
11:03 PM
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I picked up a cheapie digital camera today. It's a no-name 2.0 megapixel CMOS camera with 16MB built in, and an SD slot for more. It was quite cheap at under HK$800, and the quality seems quite reasonable so far. It's not too good at shooting in darkness though, that seems to be a limitation of the CMOS sensor. I'll go out tomorrow and take some pictures during daylight to see how it handles that.
November 14, 2002
A new page
dave
12:00 AM
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One of the reasons that I haven't put any new pictures of Conor or Roxanne up was that my scanner wasn't working. The scanner, a Scanjet 6300C, was taking up to 30 minutes to scan a page, as opposed to the few seconds it should normally. I finally managed to fix it this week - there's now an article on How I fixed my Scanjet 6300C Scanner with no help from HP.
Expect to see more photographs appear soon. As a starter, there are some photos of the 2002 Hong Kong Folk Festival, held on 10 November 2002.
April 02, 2001
More pictures of Roxanne
dave
12:00 AM
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Well, it's been a while since I made any updates. I've put some new pictures on Roxanne's page and some new pages in the works, including some reviews of various things.
February 01, 2001
A Gallery!
dave
12:00 AM
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"It's been a long time since I had a gallery on my site", I was thinking to myself last night. "If I'm going to take all of these photographs, I should at least show them off a little." See more of my pictures on my Gallery page.
January 11, 2001
Photography
dave
12:00 AM
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Some more minor changes to style sheets and fixed some bugs with the photography page. Also, for some reason, my computer is telling me it can't open the pod bay doors...