That’s right. I simply don’t really care. If reaching tens of thousands of people every day was my main goal, I would have done things differently from the beginning. And I’d have given up a long time ago, because I’m simply not reaching that kind of audiences. The subjects I write about are too random and too specific for that to happen.

Nevertheless, looking at the page view statistics I’ve found that in the last two months or so, the number of visitors to this website has spiked dramatically. Various programs that request the RSS feed from the website are partly responsible for that, of course, but the spikes are too big to be caused by a sudden increase in feed traffic, and the volumes are too high for search engine crawlers, so I’m going to assume that at least some of those hits are caused by actual people.

On occassion, the people who (apparantly) do read this blog say something about it to me, and it turns out that there may actually be some who enjoy reading the stuff that I put here. That is, and always will be, a pleasant side-effect. But nevertheless, receiving that kind of feedback – whether it be from a friend whom I’ve known for years or a person I’ve never met who lives halfway accross the globe (if you read this, you know who you are!) – is the best reward I never expected to receive.

My mind remains in a persistent state of being busy with all sorts of things, and some of those will inevitably keep finding their way here. They have been doing that for I believe about seven years now, and will hopefully continue doing so for many more years to come. I am and always will write here first and foremost because I choose to do so, and it will always be about whatever subject I feel like writing about at the time. But if someone chooses to read it, and finds some sort of enjoyment in the process, all the better.

To anyone who cares to read this:

A sincere and heartfelt thank you, for giving my ramblings meaning.

Luckily, memory cards are (relatively) cheap. It depends on what kind you’re buying – there’s still some major price difference going on between the cheapest of the cheap brand-less cards and the high-end cards from the larger brands – but compared to DSLR bodies, lenses, and the plethora of other accessories, memory cards are utterly insignificant.

Unfortunately, however, it seems that there are quite a lot of myths around memory cards, and how they should (or shouldn’t) be treated. In this article, I will go over a number of “tips” that I frequently encounter on the internet, and see if they hold any real-world value.

Myth 1: Formatting Cards In-Camera

A common misconception is that it is important to always format a memory card inside the camera, not using a card reader attached to a computer. While doing so may help a paranoid mind sleep at night, it holds no practical real-world value whatsoever.

The thing is, when you format a card, its filesystem is rebuilt. The filesystem is a special bit of the storage space that the card has, which tells which files exist where on the card, and which bits of memory are available for use. The basic, quick format (which is most often used) simply builds a new, empty filesystem, overwriting any that may have been on the card previously, so it’ll effectively appear to be empty. The second type of format actually goes over the entire card and writes zeroes to every memory location, so you’re sure it’s actually empty.

However, the basic, empty filesystem is such a simple structure, that there is hardly anything that could go wrong with it. In fact, if something was wrong, you’d notice right away – your camera (or computer) probably wouldn’t even recognize the card properly.

The bottom line is, a card that is formatted inside the camera contains exactly the same data as a card formatted by a PC, so which method you use makes no difference at all.

Myth 2: Format vs. Delete

Some people claim that formatting the card after each use is better than using the “delete all files on card” function, or deleting/moving the files off the card using a PC and card reader. Again, there is no real-world difference between the two.

It again boils down to the filesystem. When the card is formatted, unless you do a low-level format, a new, empty filesystem is created. When all files are deleted from the card, what remains is an empty filesystem, and an empty filesystem is in every way equivalent to a new empty filesystem. There is simply no difference.

Myth 3: Reading Cards In-Camera vs. Card Reader

Whether you use a card reader to download images to a PC, or keep the card inside the camera and hook the camera to a USB port, is not much more than a matter of convenience and speed. Many people prefer using a card reader, because they are generally faster (especially the new USB 3.0 readers, if your PC has a USB 3.0 port), there is no connecting/removing of cables involved, and you don’t have to fumble around with the camera’s card cover so much. Plus, card readers are cheap, and often support a wide array of card types (which is especially handy if you use a mix of SD and CF cards).

All of these arguments are valid points, but the low-level operations that are being performed on the memory card are identical, so in terms of reliability, there is no difference at all. The argument that using the camera drains the battery however is hardly a good point: the battery drain for reading the memory card is hardly worth mentioning at all, and if you’re remotely serious about photography you’ll recharge your batteries before the next shoot anyway.

Myth 4: Card Wear

Some people claim that you should rotate your cards in such a way that each card is worn out at the same rate as others, or recommend other ‘tricks’ to reduce the amount of wear on the card.

Every type of memory card on the market today is based on flash memory. It is true that this type of memory has a limited lifespan. After being rewritten a certain number of types, it is no longer reliable. However, even the cheapest of the cheapest flash memory units are rated for at least 10.000 write cycles, and will typically go way beyond that mark before any problem actually starts to occur.

A typical usage scenario involves two steps which cause the memory to be written to: first, a picture is taken and written to the memory card; second, the picture is  downloaded to a PC and deleted from the card again. That is two write cycles for every time the card is used on a shoot.

This means that the card will have to be used at least 5.000 times before there’s a serious risk it wearing out. If we’re very optimistic, and say that you use the card every day, that will still take you 14 years, and by that time, the card has probably been replaced by a different type of memory card, or a faster/larger card, anyway.

In other words, card wear is very unlikely to ever become a real issue (at least as long as you use established brands). And if a card does start to give trouble, throw it away and buy a new one. They’re too cheap to risk losing your photos over.

Myth 5: Data Corruption

At one point, I encountered the ridiculous notion that taking a photo when the memory card inside the camera is full could cause existing photos to become corrupted. If such a thing were to happen, the blame would be with a completely incompetent programmer. It is simply ridiculous beyond imagining that such a thing would happen in the real world; any camera that, once its card is full, will simply alert you to this fact and refuse to take any more pictures until its hunger for more memory is satisfied.

Another issue, taking the card out of its card slot (or a card reader) while it’s being written to (which is typically indicated by some sort of light) is potentially damaging. While it’s unlikely to make the entire card useless, there’s a good chance that at least some data will be damaged if you do this. Plus, whatever action is being performed doesn’t usually take much more than a few seconds anyway, so just be patient already.

Things You Should Do

After discussing all these things that are not important, let’s also go over a few points that are definitely helpful.

• Less More is More
  Memory cards are cheap enough that you should be able to buy a good amount. There is no such thing as having too much memory, and it’s an eternal shame if you miss a shot due to a lack of memory. Having more cards than strictly needed also enables you to go longer between downloads.
• Carry a Spare
  You wouldn’t be the first photographer who brings his camera somewhere, only to realize you left all your memory cards at home sitting next to your PC since you’ve emptied them the night before. It can never hurt to keep a spare card in your wallet, just so you always have at least one card at hand, if you need it.
• Buy Only Established Brands
  While cheap cards may be, well, cheaper, it’s a wise thing to avoid them and only go for established names. The difference in price gets you a card that is much less likely to fail, and can work at higher speeds. Examples of well-known brands include Kingston and SanDisk. The SanDisk Extreme series of memory cards (to which I can give my personal recommendation) have been known to survive being submerged under the sea for over a year, whilst cheap brands are not guaranteed to survive as little as a two-foot drop.
• Watch the Speed Rating
  Each memory card, or at least – each proper memory card – is rated to perform at a certain mimimum read/write speed. Whilst a slower card will hold pictures just as well, a high-speed card is essential if you want to shoot video (especially HD), and if you use that fancy high-speed burst mode that your camera has, you’d better pack a really fast card if you want to be able to keep it up for more than a second or so. A speed rating of at least 30 MB/sec is recommended, but the higher, the better.
• Play Safe
  Whilst the better memory cards are often designed to handle unfriendly circumstances (such as shocks, temperature, and moisture) better than cheaper cards, it is of course safest to avoid the type of situation that might break your card in the first place. Don’t take them swimming, don’t throw them into fires, don’t drop them from a ten-story building, don’t feed them to your kids, that kind of thing.

Bottom line, there’s a lot to say about memory cards, but as long as you stick to buying quality materials, it’s extremely unlikely that they’ll ever let you down. And has to how you format them, and how you transfer their content to your PC: some personal preference aside, it really doesn’t matter.

(click to view the rest of the album)

The picture you see above is entirely un-edited (aside from being coverted and resized, because a 25MB RAW file is kind of ridiculous to post on a blog).

It was taken a little while ago on a moving train, at night, with a small aperture and low sensitivity (f/32 and ISO 100, respectively) , and an extremely long shutter speed – just over one and a half minute (even dSLRs don’t usually go above 30 seconds and even that is an extremely rare setting). The front of the lens was directly against the train’s window so as to avoid reflections, and the camera was rotated slowly (roughly 60 to 70 degrees counter-clockwise) about halfway through the exposure.

The result is that over 3 kilometers of lights that happened to be somewhere in the area – car headlights, billboards, buildings, street lanterns, anything – were captured, into an image which is quite abstract and weird, but also quite fascinating (in my reasonably humble opinion).

Photography can be about creating a depiction of a scene or object, which is both accurate and visually appealing, and a wide variety of “rules” exist to aid in accomplishing that. But photography can also very much be about breaking the rules and doing something radically different – being creative. I think this image shows how interesting it can be to just go straight against everything you’re supposed to do and try something totally unexpected.

The rest of album (click the image above to go to it) contains other, similar-style photographs, but the one above is probably my favourite of the series (with this image, capturing an entire train as it races by, as a close second).

Every postal service company in the world does basically the same thing. They deliver something somewhere, and how expensive that service is depends on two main factors: how far away it needs to be delivered, and how big it is.

Since we have yet to establish any major colonies outside of our little planet Earth, and postal services generally have their area of service well-defined, the first of those two factors is pretty much safe. However, when I look at any given weight vs. price table – whether it be for a domestic letter or a full container load sent to the opposite side of the planet – there seems to be one crucial flaw:

All – or at least nearly all – postal services assume that the items they deliver will have a positive weight.

Imagine this:

You take a box. The size doesn’t really matter, but making it as large as your local postal service will allow will make this experiment more interesting, because it’ll also be a lot more difficult to handle the box.

Inside the box, put an air-tight bag. Plastic would probably the most suitable choice. Latex/rubber balloons may work, but the material being porous might become a problem in terms of endurance of our special little parcel.

This bag/balloon/whatever thing is then filled with helium, and the box is taped shut. Slap on a label addressed to, well, some random person, and take it to the post office. Walk into the post office with the large box, pretending that it’s really heavy. Then watch the surprise on the poor post office clerk’s face as the box will stubbornly refuse to be weighed.

Not to mention the dilemma of what the price for delivery should be – as in most cases, the cheapest category is 0 to however many kilograms (or grams, or pounds, or potato-weights, or whatever). Or the trouble that the box will cause everywhere throughout the sorting and delivery process.

Also, use insured shipping, so you can claim damage money when the delivery person accidentally allows the box to float away and go high up in the sky.

Helium is fun.

P.S. A lot is happening behind the scenes here. Aside from my unusually high post frequency (and a rather long list of things that are I’m planning to write about in the near future), I’m doing various things to improve the blog as a whole. The category system has been reorganized, I’ve set up a connection with Facebook so that new posts here are automatically published there as well, and some various other things. Also, in the background I’m working on a shiny new theme for the site. It’s going to be awesome!

(click to view the rest of the album)

To summarize (very bluntly) what’s going on, three guys find some sort of entirely unexplained artifact (where it came from, what it is, how it got there… nobody knows) which seems to give them telekinetic abilities. At first it’s limited, but as they practice using it, they become better at it, and are able to manipulate larger objects and exert more force. At first they mostly use these abilities to play pranks. With practice, they gain the ability to shield themselves from impact, and eventually become able to not only lift objects, but themselves as well – flying.

One of these three guys is Andrew. Andrew is the unpopular kid who gets bullied most of the time, and Andrew also happens to have the strongest telekinetic abilities. Despite their agreement not to use their powers (for the lack of a better term) against living things, Andrew, who gets more and more agitated with the people who bully him, his alcoholic father, and so on. After accidentally killing one of the two other guys – Steve – Andrew starts to see himself as a strong, alpha creature and, and rationalizes that he should thus not feel guilt about what he does to those who prove to be weaker than him. From there on, it’s only a small step to use his abilities to against those who have been hostile to him in the past. Eventually, this escalates into a superhero-like struggle between an increasingly irrational Andrew and Matt (the other guy with the telekinetic abilities), who tries to make Andrew see reason.

Now, some things in Chronicle could have used a little more elaboration. Whatever the thing was that caused Matt, Andrew and Steve to gain their abilities is never explained. When Andrew first starts to turn to the dark side of the Force, he robs a gas station, but does it in a fireman suite. Aside from the fact that his drunk father used to be a fireman before he got injured on the job, no explanation is given for why he uses that suit. The ending of the movie could have been better – it felt a bit like it was added in an afterthought, rather than making it the proper ending that they should have had.

The movie is seen through the camera that Andrew had apparantly bought and decided to carry around and film “everything”, conveniently just before the moment where the telekinetic abilities are introduced. Why he does this is left entirely unexplained (an introvert, secluded person who frequently gets bullied is at all not likely to start attracting a lot of attention to himself and making himself appear eccentric and weird by carrying around a video camera all the time, but yeah), but it provides a narrative style that reminded me much of Cloverfield. Which is an awesome movie. Go see it now if you haven’t already.

Most of the characters are fairly stereotypical and none are given anything that resembles a deep background.

However, I believe the strength of the movie lies not in the characters, or the details of the rather convenient string of events that lead Andrew to go insane; instead it should be found in the question of how humans react to having power, having an advantage over others. And I think Chronicle shows that the answer to that question does not necessarily need to involve skin-tight pants and capes, in a way that is not necessarily surprising, but still quite interesting to watch. It’s intriguing to watch how three people first discover something that binds them together and turns them into close friends, only to have that same thing rip them apart, in a rather violent and bloody fashion.

So, yeah, there we go. Chronicle. While probably not omg-this-movie-is-so-good-I’m-going-to-watch-it-every-day-for-the-rest-of-my-life, it definately touches on a strong subject – one I am quite fond of myself – and does so in a pretty good way. The other details of the story could have been more fleshed out, but they’re sufficient to function, and as a whole, watching Chronicle did not make me want to kill myself. In fact, I did enjoy the experience.

P.S. I’m considering to re-design this blog. Until now, it’s a standard theme which I adjusted and tweaked to my liking. But I have some other pretty cool ideas on how I’d like it to be… and it’ll probably take a while (I have never done a WordPress theme from scratch, so it’ll be an interesting journey). But it’ll be cool. Stay tuned, and such.

Recently, an article by theoretical physicist James Gates came to my attention, which reveals a very interesting thing that leads to suggest that we may actually live inside a Matrix-like environment. Since the article is probably unreadable gibberish to most people, let me explain.

The article deals with a specific, complex type of geometric symbols called adinkras. Essentially, these are a drawing built out of lines and dots, which must follow a (fairly extensive) set of rules regarding how these lines and dots may be placed, how they should be coloured, and so on.

What do line drawings have to do with the matrix, you might ask? Well, the interesting bit is that, once these adinkras are complex enough, mathematically they can be used to derive certain equations. And not just any equations, but certain known equations that play important roles in modern-day physics. It is in fact not unlikely that these figures could some day be used to derive entirely new equations and lead to new insights in physics.

It also turns out that certain patterns emerge from adinkras, patterns that resemble binary computer code that we use in all of our modern electronics. Of course it would be easy to find some sort of binary pattern in nearly anything, however, it doesn’t stop there: the bit patterns that are found follow a specific form of error-correcting code (ECC), which we also use in our computer systems. (Error-correcting code is essentially a means to add some additional information to a set of information, by means of which it is possible to ensure that the information hasn’t inadvertently changed.)

It is entirely possible that it will turn out that this is no more than a happy mathematical coincidence. On the other hand, if one asks the question how you might find out if you live inside a Matrix-like world, the answer might be to try and find the presence of computer-like code within the laws that describe the physics of the universe. And maybe, just maybe, that code has been found.

Two days ago I started watching a movie. I believe it was called Mass Effect 3.

Or well, watching a movie is pretty much what the first two hours or so of the game felt like to me. It seemd mostly like an endless stream of cutscenes with an occasional dialog choice and a couple of short, extremely Pokémon-y (ie, linear) bits where you actually get to walk a bit

Luckily, it got better after that, and now I’m at the point where you do actually have a fair amount of choice in what you do and where you go, and at this point, it’s definately enjoyable to play ME3. Despite the fact that it still suffers from the same things that the previous incarnations of the game did: especially at the start when walking through the Citadel you get overloaded with so many new side-quests and stuff that it’s entirely impossible to keep track of the things you’re doing/going to do, and the game is very much a Pokémon game.

Not that it has anything at all to do with the colorful little creatures from the 90′s, it’s just my way of stating that the entire game world is built in a very convenient manner. Every little detail that’s there has something to do with some mission in one way or another. Every place which has objects that you can use as cover that you encounter in a mission is a place where you’ll get attacked by some sort of bad guy, no exceptions. Every route that doesn’t lead to to your objective is conveniently blocked off by a door you cannot open, rubble, fire, or some other conveniently-placed object.

And as good as the rest of the game may be, this is just something that makes everything feel so very damn convenient.

Anyhow, watching Mass Effect 3 is not the only thing I’ve been up to recently.

Up until recently, I’ve been using an old digital camera, an Olympus C-350 to be exact. With 3.2 “effective” megapixels (whatever that may mean), more digital than optical zoom, a tiny poor-quality 1.8″ screen, as many menu options as a water heater and the speed of an upside-down turtle on crack, this camera stems from the era were digital cameras were only just rid of floppy drives as primary storage medium and they barely became affordable to the general public. In the time this camera was bought, it’s then-impressive 64 MB memory card (the infamous xD Picture Card, no less) cost a small fortune.

And it was a good camera. For a compact camera from that period, at least.

But alas, I was no longer happy with it. The images it produces are consistently blurry, low-res, and chock-full of noise. The card will hold only 60 or so shots, but after the third it’ll have depleted it’s batteries. Then again, taking a single shot (and writing it to the card) takes about a week and it’ll try to use the flash no matter how much light there is, so then again, that sort of battery life is almost impressive.

Since it’s been on my list for a while anyway, and since I am now in a position where I can afford it, I decided to upgrade.

And a serious upgrade it is. I now have in my possession, a brand-new Canon EOS 60D digital single-lens reflex (dSLR) camera. With 18 megapixels on an APS-C sized sensor, 9 cross-type AF points, 5.3 frames per second burst rate, very good noise performance, an absolutely gorgeous 3″ LCD screen with tilting/rotating capability, and full HD video, the word “upgrade” seems a bit of an understatement.

To start with, it’s paired with a Tamron 28-75mm F/2.8 lens. Bought second-hand, it cost me as much as a kit lens would have, but delivers far superior performance. And first on the list for expansion is the Canon EF 70-200mm F/4 L.

I’ve received the question why I chose a Canon. As you might know, in the world of proper cameras, there are basically two major brands: Canon and Nikon. There’s a few others (Sony, Pentax, and so on) but they’re not as big. Canon and Nikon are kind of like Microsoft and Apple: both have their base of devoted fans, and fans of one brand hate the other brand and vice versa.

For a large part, brand loyalty in the dSLR-world is easily explained by the fact that lenses are expensive. Once you own more than one or two lenses (especially the more high-quality ones), they often represent an investment far greater than the actual camera, and since lenses are only interchangeable between the cameras of one manufacturer, it’s a very bad idea to switch brands or use multiple different brands, financially speaking.

Having said that, I bought a Canon because the 60D offers what I’m looking for at a price I’m willing to (and able to) pay. Other than that, both Nikon and Canon will probably always be in an endless war with eachother, and one may occasionally have a small advantage only to be overtaken by the other again – but in the end, both brands make very good products, and which one is best for you really boils down to personal preference.

Very much like the war between Apple and Microsoft. Yeah, I said it. Live with it. Because if you put aside personal preference and look at the situation objectively, that’s how it is.

(And in the background, the competition will only drive manufacturers to innovate and continue developing better products, which benefits to everyone.)

For the moment, I’m mostly just playing with my shiny new toy, and getting as familiar with it as I possibly can. On the somewhat longer term, I have some great photo-opportunities coming up. And who knows, maybe I’ll actually be able to take some decent pictures.

The idea is to detect the movements of the player to complete different tasks. You can’t just sit and tap your fingers against the screen or controller like in Angry Birds, partypoker or Call of Duty. The motion sensors have certainly done well in the sales. Which is superior though? Lets look at the Kinect and Wii.

Nintendo Wii

One of the biggest challenges Nintendo had was making sure the players had to move during the game. We soon worked out that you could still gain a good score without all that much effort though. You can flick your wrist and be just as successful.

By bringing out the Wii Remote Plus controller, the Wii evolved and requires more movement now. However not every Wii player was going to go back and buy the superior controller. On the plus side the sensor for the Wii is not an ugly feature in the living room, thanks to its minuscule stature.

Microsoft Xbox Kinect

The wonder of the Kinect is that unlike the Wii, you don’t need a controller. If you want to pick a category on screen, you hold your arm up. It feels like a novelty sci-fi gag at times, but you can’t deny its superiority in terms of active fitness games. Women are likely to buy Dance Central or the Zumba game to exercise at home.

The downside is the size of the motion detector. It’s larger to aid movement detection, but it’s bulky on top or just below your television. On the plus side you don’t have to unplug the Kinect when you play regular Xbox 360 games.
Overall the Kinect seems to win, although both have their merits and Nintendo certainly have more experience behind them. Who knows what they’ll create for the Wii next.

(Click to view the bigger version.)

Unfortunately, there’s way too much truth behind it.