pure roon

It is here, arrived at work today and even though I haven’t really had chance to play with it, I have taken one photo:

That is the first photo taken with the new D200. I hadn’t even played with any of the settings, I took it straight out of the box, clipped on a lens and shot.

Off to France now for a cousin’s wedding but I will have a few days first to play around with it. Hopefully I will have something worthwhile to show when I get back!

This collection was taken whilst on an Easter Break with my family down in Sheringham, Norfolk. It snowed almost all the time whilst we were there, but only settled early in the morning.

View the whole collection here

These were taken early on Easter Morning. I was only awake because I was sharing a room with my Dad who decided to wake up really early to go and get the papers. Not having either my watch or phone to hand I automatically jumped out of bed went and had a shower and got dressed. It wasn’t until I put my watch on I realised it was still only 7am!

So rather that waste the morning doing nothing my parents kindly gave me a lift to some nearby woods to take some pictures. It was a bit dark though, so I am not overly happy with them, but snow in England only comes round once in a while and I had to make the most of it!

View the whole collection here

View Whole Collection from the Beach at Sheringham

I am excited! I am getting a new camera tomorrow and I am really looking forward to it!

I have been using a Nikon D50 for nearly 2 years now and it is about time to upgrade as I am just not happy with the results it produces. The D50 suffers really badly in low light conditions and after I went on a photo shoot with Naomi Broady, the up and coming Tennis player, it is pretty rubbish at sports photography too. It just can’t keep up! The delay between the camera focusing and being allowed to press the shutter is just too long and if your subject is moving towards or away from you then it’s gonna be out of focus.

So back to the upgrade, as the new Nikon D300 is coming out prices on the D200 have fallen quite a bit so I have decided it is time to get into the profesional range. I was tempted by a D80 which is the simplified version of the D200, but I thought that in a years time I will just end up with the same problems I have been having with the D50.

Read more about the Nikon D200 here.

So as I am getting a new camera I thought this would be a good opportunity to get out some photos out, some of which have been waiting to be processed for months!

So here are a couple from Sheringham, whilst on an Easter break with my parents:

View Whole Collection from the Beach at Sheringham

Quote

In using Apple Software Update to slip his Safari browser onto millions of Windows PCs, Steve Jobs didn’t just undermine “the security of the whole Web”. He’s made a mockery of end user licensing agreements.

As spotted by our Italian friends at setteB.IT, Apple’s Safari license says that users are permitted to install the browser on no more than “a single Apple-labeled computer at a time.” This means that if you install Safari for Windows on a Windows PC, you’re violating the license.

Yeah I noticed this little Apple update poping up every time I turn my machine on asking me to install Safari. I don’t want Safari and I wish the popup would leave me alone, but no matter how many times I say no it keeps coming back to bother me…

Nice one Apple!

In 1981 the BBC started the BBC Computer Literacy Project, and needed a computer to front the project with, and approached some of the computer makers of the time, Sinclair, Dragon and Acorn.

Acorn stood up to the challenge and put forward their Proton Computer which the BBC re branded as the BBC Microcomputer and handed over a contract for 12,000 machines. The first models sported a blisteringly fast 2 MHz 6502 CPU and came with a choice of RAM; Model A: 16KB and Model B: 32KB

Wow in just 25 years I have a phone in my pocket that would eat the BBC micro for breakfast, and it is just unfair to compare this kind of computing power to what we have these days!

Anyway, the purpose of this post was because I noticed that a new exhibition at the London Science Museum has just been announced, and my first experience of computing was with an Acorn BBC Micro!

My Dad brought home a BBC Micro when I was a kid and somehow he managed to find a whole box full of games, and I mean hundreds of them! If you had a BBC Micro, Sinclair, Amstrad or Commadore 64 then you will probably remember Elite which made a reappearance a few years ago with a graphically jazzed up version Elite II. I used to play this quite a lot, but I didn’t have the patience my Dad had. He built himself up a little empire in the game and would even invite my friends round to play with!

The BBC Micro featured the BBC BASIC Operating System and programming language and opened up the world of computer programming to everybody. Well you had to have a basic knowledge of programming just get the thing working in the first place. Whilst most programming generally involved writing small scripts that would say ‘Hello’ to you I managed to write a whole scientific calculator program that could even do trigonometry for you. Wow I would have only been about 9 or 10 at the time (Yeah trigonometry isn’t taught in our primary schools any more…) .

GOTO 10

The fun of the GOTO command, if you wanted to add in another line of code you had to remember to go through everything you had done already and update all the GOTO lines!

Please raise your glasses to the BBC micro, the computer that redefined my future!

Oh I just remembered something: