Camera Totals

Not bragging but with the numbers on the SX260 my averages are way up on the last few years. I have renamed/reorganised the Picasa albums for Earthquake for this year all as general Christchurch albums instead. This is an important reflection on the fact that on discovering the many architectural gems hidden away within certain residential streets of the four avenues, I have packed many photos unrelated to the quakes into these albums especially of late and can’t be bothered separating them out of the earthquake ones. Also we are moving on and it is time to move on since the earthquakes.

SX260 – I think about 4800 photos since the beginning of June so about 200/week on average.

A2300 – just passed 700 photos in 22 weeks. For me this is a pretty low count for a camera. Now that I have the SX150 I could be back to taking a lot more photos on the camera I take with me everywhere because it has such greater capabilities (the 12x zoom lens and full manual exposure control are obvious examples).

S5 – the total for the SX260 just passed the S5 total. Considering I had the S5 for much longer, the last time I took any photos on it was almost a year ago, because its functions can be rolled into one of the other cameras. Fairly soon all my cameras will be almost as good as the S5 and two of them are already being used a lot more regularly. The S5 is going to be given away fairly soon and it will not feature any more.

HTC Windows Phone 8S Now Available in NZ

The HTC Windows Phone 8S is one of two offerings from HTC in the new Windows 8 ecosystem. The 8X is the higher spec version. Vodafone and Telecom will have the 8S filling out the low end of their Windows 8 product range in NZ. Both have released this in the last few weeks at $449. It has only 4 GB of internal storage, but unlike some of the more expensive Windows 8 phones from HTC and Nokia, it has one very useful feature, a micro SD card slot that can take up to a 32 GB card. At the moment I have decided to buy one of these later (once they are a bit more mature) and switch to the $65 Smart plan with the 12 month term that will give me 1 GB of data and $10 discount more or less straight away, with my current phone (HTC Trophy 7)  then I can get my home broadband onto Vodafone as well at the same $55 monthly price so my total bill will be about 2/3rds of what it is now.

Like many smartphones these days the HTC 8S has a sealed in battery, but the micro USB port allows an external battery to be connected. I would consider the Mophie Juicepack external battery (a bit pricey at $119 from the Apple shop) good to have as it can charge any Micro USB enabled device and has saved my bacon a number of times with the Trophy.

Powershot SX150 IS

Since I wrote about this a couple of weeks back, Noel Leemings and several other retailers put a bundle deal (the camera plus a case plus two batteries and a charger plus a card) out at $179-199. This sort of clinched my decision and I jumped in and picked one up at Leemings.

Apart from being able  to run on AA batteries the killer features are the 12x zoom lens and full PASM modes. This camera model has just been superseded and I had thought the pricing was an end of line deal, although they said it’s not. The main challenge is it is significantly more bulky than the SX260 meaning I will need to get a new pouch – the one that comes with it is a snug fit and doesn’t have any space for spare batteries or cards. It is a plastic camera and unfortunately it has a plastic tripod thread underneath. In spite of the finish it feels like a solid well made camera and the battery door is much more solid than the one on the A2300. I found that the A1200 was available from the official supply channel in NZ but has been superseded by the A1300 which has not been released in NZ so that option was ruled out.

As I’ve noted PASM exposure modes (and manual focus) are a killer feature. When Canon introduced the SX100 back in 2007, it brought in a new series of low cost PASM capable cameras, a feature which had been missing at the low price end of the Powershot range for several years. Back in the day, some of the more sophisticated A-series models had these higher end features and still managed to be affordable; for that reason they were commonly sought after by enthusiasts due to their unbeatable value for money. But then that part of the A series was discontinued and you had to pay quite a lot more to get the full exposure controls. When I bought my first Powershot compact, a A400, that was just after the PASM modes had been retired from that series. A more sophisticated (and much more expensive) model with them in would have been the likes of the S100 (now S110) and the middle priced option just would not have been available.

What has swung it for me, despite the inconvenience of having to buy that new pouch,  is the high cost of the lithium batteries and Canon’s limited charging options for them. I was going to buy a second battery at $85 for the SX260 but putting that money plus the cost of the 2nd battery for the A2300 towards the SX150 has pretty well paid most of its price. Although this package comes with two NiMH AAs and a little charger I won’t need them as I have a pile of batteries already. I also have an A2300 to give away to a good home (the school will get it). Giving that away does make the SX150 purchase justifiable.

I may have also mentioned plans to buy a DSLR at some stage. I’m rethinking that because it hasn’t been a high priority and keeps getting put off. Along with having three PASM cameras seems to be a bit of an overkill. As I will be giving away the S5 shortly however I will make a move towards buying a DSLR but it will probably now be the cheapest EOS1100 model. Although it lacks some of the more desirable features of the EOS600 or 650 which I have been hankering after, it will do for now and still offers quite a lot of functionality. A twin lens kit is about $875 which isn’t too hard to save up for, and still gives 12 “real” megapixels in that it performs a lot better than any compact of similar resolution with vastly superior low light performance, and of course a full optical viewfinder and a hotshoe for the Speedlite 430 I already own. The LCD screen only has a resolution of 230,000 pixels which isn’t much to write home about but largely irrelevant for previewing photos since the live view isn’t so much use for a camera that heavy. I have played with live view on DSLRs before but on a big camera with a heavy flash on top it makes the use of the camera quite awkward. Likewise the video capabilities aren’t all that special, but in truth it has been many years since I have shot any video clips with any camera at all and dedicated video cameras to record on SD these days are relatively cheap and superior in performance. The screen doesn’t articulate but again this is not a feature I have really missed since I started to use the SX260 instead of the S5 lately. It doesn’t have a sensor cleaning capability but of course you could manually clean it; dust is mapped out by software instead. The lithium battery does have an extremely good life and there isn’t any GPS capability.

Why is the Windows startup folder so hard to configure

This seems to get harder and harder to do with each edition of Windows. I might be missing something, but at least in XP, you could right click the Start button and get “Open” or “Open All Users” to browse the Start menu in Explorer. In Windows 7 these options have disappeared. In Windows 8, the Startup folder no longer appears on the Start screen.

In addition, in Windows 7 and 8, the Startup folders appear in these two hard-to-find and non-intuitive locations (a big change from XP):

• The all users startup folder which used to be in C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Start Menu, got moved to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu\Programs\StartUp.
• The user’s own startup folder which used to be in %userprofile%\Start Menu, got moved to %userprofile%\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Start Menu

I’m sure MS had a reason for moving these folders around – but they just made it harder to get to this folder, and Windows 8 exacerbates this by taking the Startup folder out of the Start screen. There is a Startup tab in the Task Manager, which lets you enable and disable startup shortcuts or registry keys. But, you can’t add entries. Another missed opportunity.

Forced restarts get worse under Windows 8

You might remember from Windows 7 that it can install updates on the fly and then tell you it wants to restart automatically within a certain timeframe. Usually it gives an option to postpone the restart. Under Windows 8 the system will not let you postpone these restarts indefinitely and will force your system to restart at a certain time, no ifs or buts. You can turn this off, but it rankles that this is actually the default setting for 8. It rankles even more that this is one of two ways when Windows can force your system to restart without asking you to save any work before it shuts down your computer. The other time is if an installation needs your computer to restart. For example I just installed a new version of iTunes, and it put up a restart dialog box. I accidentally clicked the button that said to restart the computer and Windows restarted immediately by terminating all the open windows without bothering to check if anything needed to be saved or not. When it came back, as usual, Excel had recovered files. That is all very well for Excel, but not every application has this capability. There have been enough times I have lost data from open applications because of the forced restart. It is total hypocrisy considering if you click Shutdown yourself, it asks applications if they want to save anything. (As it turned out, I did lose data from QGis because of the forced close. Not much data, but enough to make me really, really mad at Microsoft)

These are more reasons why Windows 8 is becoming a tiresome operating system to have on my home computer. In fact now that I have three computers, I am slowly coming to the point where I am considering wiping Windows 8 off the most expensive one, and reinstalling it on a server edition instead, or maybe Windows 7. The fact that Microsoft considers it acceptable to kill running applications without checking if they need to save first, is one of the reasons I am growing to hate Windows 8. Some of the other reasons have already been canvassed and they tend to go along the same lines. The overall theme of Windows 8 is that Microsoft owns your computer and can behave like they want with it. If you run an application that MS doesn’t approve of, the default smartscreen response is to say the app was blocked. It is only if you click on a non intuitive link for more details that you can get the app to be unblocked. Forcing your computer to be restarted by a certain time and date may be acceptable on a work computer but not on a home one. These are examples of how Microsoft considers that it owns your computer once you install their OS on it. They are all for a certain end. And the idiots at Redmond especially the moron Sinofsky whose head has just rolled and the chief jester Ballmer, should be really really really ashamed of themselves for putting this operating system out and foisting it on an unsuspecting public. And that view is without all the other reasons that people don’t like Windows 8. So far as I can see, Windows 8 is for tablets, not for anything you do any serious work on, and that is how people should treat it.