Moments in Time Photography
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Digital Macro Photography by Ross Hoddinott starts by describing digital photography in general and the technology found in digital cameras. Various categories of digital cameras are discussed regarding their usefulness for closeup work.
The second chapter introduces various lenses, tripods, flash units, and other accessories useful for macro photography.
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I have used a Konica-Minolta DiMAGE A2, which was a fairly high-end super-zoom camera in 2004, for about 4 years. In the fall of 2007, I purchased a Canon G9. So how much progress has there been in the last 3+ years?
I purchased a Skymaster DVR 7400 digital satellite receiver with time-shift capability. In the box is the receiver itself and a plastic remote control plus the batteries for the remote as well as a user manual with instructions. The receiver appears well-built and sold from the outside. The remote is a bit on the light side of comfortable and doesn’t feel pleasant in my hands. It is perfectly useable, however, so I won’t complain.
Hooking the receiver up was a snap: connect the satellite feed to the satellite input and one of the two SCART outputs to the TV. There is also an S-Video output as well as an optical S/PDIF digital and RCA analog stereo audio outputs all of which I did not use.
Upon turning on the receiver it automatically found the Astra 19.2°E satellite that my dish is aligned to (this is a no-brainer since it is practically the default satellite here) and tuned in the channels. Wonderful!
The EPG (electronic program guide) implementation is strange: it seems to download all data in real-time, so that it often takes a while to actually get information. There is a hard drive in the device, so why isn’t the information cached there? And while I am wondering: why is the program description slowly scrolled in a separate window automatically every 5 seconds or so instead of allowing me to scroll manually at my own pace?
The EPG is optimized to show what is on a single channel (or up to 4 different channels) for the next few hours. This works well and could be improved by a mode that shows what is on all the different channels at the same time.
It is fairly easy to program a show for recording: a simple button press and after that a confirmation is all that is required. It is less easy to see what was actually programmed afterwards, you have to scroll through pages of individual timer settings which do not seem to have the show title set reliably.
The recording seems to consistently start 2 minutes late. The only way to work around this that I could find was to manually set the start time earlier.
Playback works fine some of the time. I had one show which started skiping about 25 minutes into the recording. There where short (1-5s) pauses in playback every minute or so. After 30 minutes the receiver froze and had to be rebooted to accept any input at all from the remote. This behavior was consistently repeatable.
I had recorded the same show off the same satellite feed using the ElGato EyeTV and everything was fine. The problem was clearly not with the feed. I suspect a hardware or software bug in the receiver.
The manufacturers website did not offer any helpful advice. There was a kind offer to call a premium-rate number for support, an offer which I politely declined, as I always do. The receiver was bought as an entertainment device. I do not find bugs to be entertaining, quite on the contrary. So I gave the device back and will spend my money on something else.
2 stars out of 5.
I purchased an Elgato EyeTV 310 which is a digital satellite tuner and personal video recorder for the Mac. It will decode DVB-S which is what most(*) digital TV and radio satellite feeds are. The feeds can be saved to the hard drive and time-shifted or edited and/or converted and burned to CD or DVD.
(*) Most are DVB-S. Most high-definition feeds are DVB-S2 (which uses MPEG-4 instead of MPEG-2 for compression) which the EyeTV 310 does not decode. If you want to receive HD satellite feeds, this is not the product for you.
The EyeTV 310 is a small box that has a connector for the satellite feed, power, and two Firewire 400 (IEEE-1394) ports. Plug it all in, install the software from CD, and get going … Except that when I did, nothing happened. The EyeTV did not find any channels.
I knew the satellite feed was good because it worked with a stand-alone receiver. I tried various settings, but nothing helped. So I contacted Elgato tech support using the website. Within less than a day, I had a knowledgeable, friendly reply. No boilerplate, no automated junk, a real human tech-support contact. I was pleased.
What the tech suggested did not work, so I made some screen shots and saved some log files, wrapped them up in a .zip archive and sent another email. Within a minute of sending the email, my message had been entered into the tracking system on the Elgato website. This time, I was amazed.
I though Elgato would fumble the ball on a same-day response, but I got an answer later that evening from my original support contact. No playing hot potato, the guy who knew the case kept it. The message was friendly and again very helpful. Someone clearly knows his stuff here!
The tech suggested that I try eliminating all the pieces of equipment starting at the LNB to find out what was causing the problem – he thought that despite the stand-alone receiver working the EyeTV was not getting a signal.
O.K., I will admit it: I was skeptical. After all, I had seen it work, right? But the next day, I sat down and did what I should have done from the start, I eliminated the possible causes for the error one by one.
Guess what? It turns out that I was using a bad cable. Swap the cable and the box works like a charm. At this point, I was ecstatic, and I let the tech know.
So how does the EyeTV perform? On a lowly Mac mini Core Duo with 1 GB RAM, the CPU utilization is just above idling when I watch a TV feed or listen to a radio feed. The picture quality is excellent, as you would expect from a digital feed. There is no discernible lag in frame rate, decompression artifacts, or other weirdness.
Most DVB-S feeds come with program information. In a view slightly resembling iCal, all the channels and programing are listed. A simple click on an entry brings up additional descriptions. To schedule a recording, a single button press is enough. There is nothing else to configure.
EyeTV also comes with a one year subscription to an EPG (electronic program guide) service which should list all feeds, even if they do not broadcast program information. I have not tried this because the Mac mini is offline.
Once a feed has been recorded, it becomes available for playback, editing, or archiving. If you happen to have Toast, EyeTV will pretty much automate burning a feed to DVD. That’s a nice touch.
There are some things the EyeTV software could do better: there seems to be no way to show all program entries of a certain type (say all movies or all documentaries) in the EPG view, for example. I would also have liked the level indicator to correctly show that the EyeTV was not getting a signal when I was troubleshooting. It would be nice to have more options in organizing the channel list.
But by and large, this is not just a good product, it is excellent and though much more expensive than a Windows solution well worth the money. I was (and still am) impressed by the support I got. Good support is hard and not cheap, but Elgato seems to go the extra proverbial mile to deliver it.
A rental car company gave me the opportunity to drive a BMW 120d with an automatic transmission. The car was brand new (3 km on the clock).
There was enough luggage space for two small suitcases (the type airlines will let you take on board) and a rucksack of similar size. The seats in the front where very comfortable, there was definitely insufficient leg room in the back.
The engine – which BMW is generally very proud of – was rather loud but smooth for a diesel. Despite being rated at 120 kW I found the performance of the car rather disappointing. Average (diesel) fuel consumption was 8.8 l/100 km, which is excessive seeing how I did not push the engine hard at any time.
The suspension was superb. I drove some kilometers across road surfaces that left a lot to be desired and hardly felt a jolt. At the same time I got a reasonable feedback from the road. This changed when I had to travel a short distance over a bumpy dirt road, where the ride was extremely harsh despite my low speed.
Steering felt light and direct. I could simply point the car and it would do what I intended. For some reason handling was the least like a rear-wheel drive car that I have ever experienced in such a vehicle. No tendency to over steer and also none of that wonderful feeling of the car setting down in the back during acceleration to increase traction. I found this quite disappointing as I like rear-wheel drive.
So far, I would rate the car as competent, but not great. I then tried the iDrive to use the satnav. O dear! Fortunately, I was standing still, I have never experienced anything this hazardous in a motor vehicle. The controller did not do what I expected, forcing me to pay a lot of attention to the user interface instead of just getting on with driving.
The stalk used to control the wipers was similar in design: push up once, twice, three times to get the wiper into interval mode, slow, and fast wipe. Then push down to go back down in modes. Push a little button in for automatic mode. Pull the lever to spray fluid on the windshield, push to spray the rear window. Push the lever back some more to get the rear wiper engaged. Confused yet? I was until I read the manual.
I do consider myself rather tech-savvy, but this is the first car that I simply did not get. I gave up on most of the goodies rather quickly. I found the iDrive to be a real killer – unfortunately, it might have been me that got killed if I had used it.
The engine is adequate but loud and very thirsty, the suspension is a real plus. It was not really a fun car to drive.
No, I certainly will not put this car onto the short list of desirable vehicles. Rated 2 out of 5 stars.
