Julianna Yau’s blog

John Degen weighs in on the recent article by Mr. Best Buy and the Vue Weekly article.

The OLPC Community Support forum is reporting that:

“As of last night (Jan. 9) we have successfully imported all of the Canadian orders into our system (except for the PO boxes.) We will be shipping out the orders tomorrow and they should pass the border over the weekend, for in country distribution starting Monday.”

I’ve checked the status of my shipment on the laptopgiving.org website, and there’s nothing showing yet. This is promising, and I wonder what it means for actual delivery dates in Canada. I feel like I’m being both optimistic and cynical by expecting to have mine in my hands by the end of next week.

What’s baffling is the post shows with a time-stamp of Fri Jan 11, 2008 12:02 am, so I’m not sure from where it’s being posted…

Steven Sandor writes about the copyright legislation delay. Sandor focuses on one of the concerns I have, which is the anti-DMCA/WCT position being co-opted as the anti-all-copyright position, based primarily on the fact that [some] people don’t feel they should have to pay for anything.

I received my new camera today yesterday and am both glad and sorry I waited so long to buy a new one. Although the price of a good digital camera has finally dropped into my price range, the difference between my new and old camera is astounding.

My old camera is the Pentax Optio LF33. Although it’s quite sufficient for snapshots, I have needed to do all sorts of extra things in the setup of my photos to get decent pictures of my sculptures. I can’t believe how much time I wasted to make up for the camera’s shortcomings.

The A720 passes my intuitive-use test, which basically involves me snubbing the manual (at least until I need to learn the more advanced features, and figure out what that button under the lens does). I did, however, need to pull it out of the box to figure out which way the batteries should be inserted. It wasn’t until later that I noticed the battery icons which were inside the casing, and further down than I expected. The icons were not visible from all angles when looking into the battery compartment.

Opening the cover for the batteries and SD card was quite easy…the first time. The second time, I couldn’t remember how I did it and had that squinty, furrowed eyebrow face while I wondered what I did the first time.

The test picture of one of my sculptures turned out very well, considering it was a “candid” shot rather than one setup against a backdrop and with more controlled light:

This is much better than the “candid” photos using the Pentax Optio (no flash on left; with flash on right) with equivalent manual settings:

The video feature was a bit frustrating because I initially thought the audio was…well, crap. It turns out that you get static in the background of videos shot with the A720 in some players. It seems Kaffeine (the default player for my installation of OpenSUSE) is one of those players. The video was fine in other players, and I need to figure out how to add a watermark to my videos.

The only thing I miss is having a swivel-display. The Pentax Optio had a display which would fold and twist in many ways.

The A720 has an exposed display, so I’m a bit paranoid about using it before my magical screen skin arrives in the mail. I need to learn to order those at the same time I order new gadgets, because I’m one of those crazy people who are terrified of scratching displays/screens.