Author name: chipx86

New Toy: Panasonic DMC-TZ3K Digital Camera

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I received a Sony Cyber-shot DSC-P71 digital camera about four or five years ago as a present, and it has performed well over the years, providing me with lots of decent quality shots. However, the lack of such features as image stabilization and auto-rotation indicators, plus the need for AA batteries has had me thinking of purchasing a new camera. I didn’t know when, or which camera to buy, but today I stepped into Costco and had an overwhelming urge to survey the camera section.

The new cameras were pretty cool, all with features that my poor little DSC-P71 couldn’t begin to match. I was tempted by the newer Cybershot they carried, but I didn’t really want to give Sony much more of my money, nor did I want to deal with Sony Memory Sticks any longer.

I was about to leave when I saw a stack of attractive camera boxes off to the side containing my newest little toy, the Panasonic DMC-TZ3K. I made some calls and had people read a few reviews for me, and talked to my uncle who was there about it. He was fortunately familiar with this camera, and after discussing it, I decided to buy it, figuring I could always return it if I didn’t like it.

I’m not returning it.

The basics

I’ll get the basics out of the way. I paid $320 for this camera. It’s a 7.2MP camera with 10x optical zoom (yes, 10x optical) and 4x digital zoom on top of that (making a grand total of 40x zoom). That is, unless you are taking a 3MP photo and have Extra Optical Zoom enabled (which extends your optical zoom to 15x), in which case you’ll have a grand total of 60x zoom. They’re not kidding around with the zoom here.

The LCD is 3 inches. There is no viewfinder, which is a shame, but the LCD works pretty well in the sunlight (especially with its “outdoors” mode enabled). The camera takes SD cards (which the box does not indicate, oddly enough). The camera features various auto-focus modes and image stabilization. Pictures can be taken in 4:3, 3:2, and 16:9 aspect ratios. Videos can be taken in 640×480 or 848×480 resolutions at 30fps.

The camera is offered in three colors: Black (DMC-TZ3K), Silver (DMC-TZ3S), and Blue (DMC-TZ3A).

Alright, that’s all cool, though most of it is what you’d expect. Now on to my favorite features.

Scene Modes

The DMC-TZ3K offers two independent Scene Mode settings on the mode dial, allowing quick switches between the two. The Scene Mods offer presets for such things as exposure, color temperature, etc. Included settings are Portrait, Soft Skin, Self Portrait, Scenery, Sports, Night Portrait, Night Scenery, Food, Party, Candle Light, Baby 1, Baby 2, Pet, Sunset, High Sensitivity, Starry Sky, Fireworks, Beach, Snow, Aerial Photo, and Underwater.

Did you notice the really odd ones in there? Self Portrait? Aerieal Photo? Baby 1, 2? Pet? I’ll go into a few of these.

Self Portrait makes it easier to take a self-portrait of yourself. The self-timer light on the front will flash if the camera doesn’t have a good auto-focus on you

Aerial Photo is pretty easy. It makes pictures taken out of an airplane window much nicer. I haven’t tested this, having not been in an airplane since I bought this this morning.

Baby 1, 2, and Pet are interesting, and will lead me into Travel Settings and Date Stamping. Before taking a picture with one of these modes, you can specify the birthdate of the baby or pet (it will remember the last saved values). It will then adjust the settings to take better pictures of the baby or pet and display their current age (to the day). The data is associated with the picture, but not included in the image, though it can later be Date Stamped onto the picture or printed along with the picture.

Travel Settings

This camera makes it easy to keep track of what photos were taken when during a vacation. You can set the start date of your vacation and the timezone you’re in (or travelling to). The pictures taken while the vacation mode is set will be associated with that time and timezone. The LCD will also show you the current day of the vacation (when taking a picture) or the day of the vacation the picture was taken (when viewing older pictures). This can then be Date Stamped onto the picture, much like the Baby and Pet scene modes.

Date Stamping

The camera stores some metadata along with the picture. Some pieces of data (current age, current day of vacation, timestamp) can at any point be stamped onto the picture (either the original or a copy of it). If desired, the camera can stamp it onto the picture as it prints without touching the actual file on the camera.

Voice Recording

Another piece of data that can be associated with pictures is a voice recording. Ever take a picture and forget what it was about? Now you can just choose to add a little voice memo to a picture and play it back later. I’ll probably be making extensive use of this.

Clipboard

Okay, this is probably one of my favorite features right here. Often times we’ll be designing something on the whiteboard at work and we’ll want a copy for later reference. Of course, the best way to do this is to just take a picture. The problem with that is that you then have to sort through your pictures on the camera trying to find the whiteboard picture later on.

When the Clipboard mode is selected, any pictures taken will be stored in a special area for later access. You can browse your list of clips (whether they’re whiteboard photos, documents, maps, etc.), associate voice recordings with them, or whatever. The camera settings are automatically adjusted when taking these photos so text on a whiteboard or on a piece of paper becomes very readable.

They took this feature a step further by making it more useful to those who take photos of maps. You can specify on a per-picture basis the zoom level and position to display, so that when you open up the clip of a map, you’ll be positioned directly over your area of interest, zoomed in to the street. It’s like Google Maps, except not quite as useful.

LCD, Exposure and Photo List Modes

The LCD is quite large (3 inches) and they took advantage of this by providing some nice features. Various display modes can be quickly activated to show all the basic information (battery life, exposure setting, etc.), one of two alignment/positioning grids, an image histogram, or nothing but the photo.

The standard LCD brightness setting is good for indoors, but when outside in the sun, sometimes you need something more. A quick button press will let you turn on the Outdoor brightness setting, making it far easier to see in the sun. They also offer a “High Angle” mode, allowing the LCD to be easily viewed when the camera is a foot above your head.

Now, this one impressed me. Maybe it’s standard nowadays, but I certainly didn’t have it. Ever take a picture and go “I wish I took a darker/lighter version of that?” Yeah, well I have. This camera offers an option for quickly taking three successive pictures in three exposure levels, allowing you to sort out which you like best later on. I’ll probably be making use of this all the time.

I usually keep a lot of photos on my camera, as I’m quite bad at spending the 10 minutes to dump them on the computer and reformat the stick. So when I want to find a photo I’ve taken, I usually spend a good amount of time looking. This camera eases that just a bit by offering a calendar photo list mode. It will show a calendar view of the current month and mark each day a photo was taken by the first photo taken on that day. Clicking on the day will display all the photos that were taken that day.

If you need to view and compare two photos side-by-side, the camera lets you easily do so. Simply choose the option and rotate the camera. You can then select the photo you want on top and the one you want on the bottom. This is really useful if you just can’t really decide which of two photos you’d rather keep.

In short…

This camera rocks, especially for the price. There’s a lot I didn’t talk about, like the image stabilization and anti-blur (which as far as I can tell works pretty well). I’ve only used this for half a day now (though I’ve played around quite a bit with it, to the point of needing to recharge the battery again). If anyone has any questions, I’ll be glad to answer them in the comments. Likewise, I’d love to hear what other people think about this camera.

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Pipe into your netlife: Comic feeds

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Penny Arcade and Control-Alt-Del are great comics. I love to read them and do so when I’m not feeling really lazy. See, I pretty much live inside my Google Calendar, GMail, Remember the Milk, Google Reader, and Netvibes tabs, for the most part. I’m pretty lazy when it comes to some forms of content, and if a comic doesn’t show up in Google Reader, I’ll typically ignore it until someone points out a particularly good strip to me.

While playing around with Yahoo! Pipes, I realized I could finally do something about this. I began to play around with a couple of pipes to read in the RSS feeds, look for all comic entries, and change the content. The trick was to copy the location the feed item was pointing to (which would contain the actual comic image within the page) to the description, and then apply a regular expression to the description to turn it into an <img> tag pointing to the image itself.

I got lucky. To my knowledge, there is currently no way to fetch content from any arbitrary HTML page and do something with a piece of that page. I suspect their Fetch Data module might let me, but I haven’t managed to get it to work just yet. I was able to pull this off since the comic image was stored with a predictable path based on the date of the comic, and the page being linked to also contained the date. A regular expression was all that was needed to parse out the date and rebuild the path.

Anyway. the end result is that I now have inline comics in my Penny Arcade and Control-Alt-Del RSS feeds! You can add them to your RSS reader below, or take a look at how they were made.

  • [Pipe] [RSS] Penny Arcade News and Inline Comics
  • [Pipe] [RSS] Penny Arcade Inline Comics
  • [Pipe] [RSS] Control-Alt-Del Inline Comics

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libsexy v0.1.11 released

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We just put out a new bugfix release of libsexy. A number of important SexyUrlLabel changes went in, so please upgrade, as notification-daemon and xchat-gnome both use this.

As always, the latest version is available on the libsexy page or in the download directory.

Release notes:

  • Fix a typo in SexyUrlLabel that was causing the widget to never be marked as unmapped, which prevented it from re-mapping the event window when the widget was shown again. (Bugs #364030 and #353946)
  • Fixed the cursors to properly indicate whether the text was selectable.
  • Get rid of the unused SexyTooltipPriv structure to fix building on Solaris. (Bug #378066)
  • Remove some debug output from SexyIconEntry and SexyTreeView. (Bug #355129)

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Pipe into your netlife

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Yahoo is doing a lot of interesting things these days. While Google gains a lot of the attention when it comes to search and web applications, Yahoo should not be ignored. del.icio.us and Flickr are of course two widely popular services, but they have a few useful utilities floating around their developer site.

There’s one tool in particular that I found tonight that has already proven useful. Pipes. Pipes allows a user to quickly put together a simple set of pipeline filters for turning various forms of data into an RSS feed and accompanying JSON file.

Such forms of data include user input (validated as a date, geographical location, number, text or URL) and web-based input (Flickr pictures, RSS2/Atom feeds, JSON/XML data, Google Base listings, Yahoo! Local searches, and Yahoo! search results). This data can be fed through several layers of pipes (including back into another Flickr pipeline and such as query input). The pipes can transform the data, walk through each feed item and modify or extract data, combine data together, sort, remove duplicates, apply regexes, translate languages, and so on.

This can be pretty powerful. While still a young project, many users have already published pipes, myself included. With the increase in API-enabled web services, I can only expect this to become more powerful, with work. It’s just a little tricky coming up with actual useful applications.

So I played around a bit and started to experiment with what could be done. I ended up with a couple of simple, but very useful pipes. One thing I have wanted for the longest time was a way to see feeds from several Planets in one listing (for Netvibes, since space is precious), without having to deal with duplicate entries. Pipes made this all too simple.

Unique Planets Pipe

I’m feeding several feeds into a Unique operator, saying to filter based on the title. I then output that. That’s all it takes. You can see the results and even add the RSS feed.

I then took this one step further and decided to write a quick pipe for searching through the planets. Now, pipes are reusable, so I was able to incorporate the Unique Planets pipe into this. This was fed into a Filter, using a couple of text inputs (for a text string and a name) as parameters to the filter. The screenshot below will clarify this. The result is the ability to quickly search four planets by name or content.

Planet Search Pipe

You can play with the results. Go ahead, give it a try.

Pipes can be published for other people to use, or they can be used privately. Private pipes are great when you want to deal with data that can’t easily be queried, such as your Twitter feed or your own Flickr feed.

Pipes are also quite useful when you have a small web application that needs to deal with several other feeds, filtering results or combining data from multiple sources. Sure, you could write this all yourself, but it’s far easier to change and maintain a Pipe than a whole bunch of code.

If you want to play with pipes, I recommend just jumping in and playing. Also take a look at some other people’s pipes, and you may want to browse the tutorials. For some starter ideas, try making a pipe that searches your local area for sales or singles or something using Google Base and Craigslist, or one that searches all your favorite blogs for a certain keyword, or maybe something that keeps track of your friends’ blogs and Flickr posts.

Now, pipelines are hardly a new concept. Several programs offer them, including some development environments that rely solely on pipelines for development in order to quickly produce simple programs. What makes Yahoo!’s Pipes interesting is that they make it very easy for almost anybody to quickly build a pipe to modify or search all kinds of data on the web that people actually use. This makes them more immediately useful to many people, and of course Yahoo makes it dead simple to start out.

What would be useful in the future, aside from adding native support for more services, would be to output data in other formats or somehow easily lay out information onto a page from one or more feeds. The project seems pretty young though, so I’m sure in time, this will mature into a much more useful project, both to developers and (certain) end users.

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Watching you watching me watching you

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We live in a new, very public age. While most of us didn’t quite grow up with the Internet, it’s been a major part of our lives. To these new generations of kids, a world without the Internet belongs only in the history books. It’s made the world closer and more open in many ways. This comes at a price of course.

Ever since the book “1984” was published, many people have been strongly concerned about their privacy and keeping “Big Brother” from knowing every detail of their lives. “Big Brother” is typically thought of as being the government, but that’s not necessarily true these days. While it’s quite possible that our lives are being monitored more closely by government agencies, “Big Brother” is really closer to you than you think. It could be your friend, your parents, somebody across the world. And is this really a bad thing?

We put out so much personal information these days, often times without really thinking about it. A lot of us seem to have a need to share our lives with the world.

Blog posts about the recent developments in your life or in that of someone close to you. Pictures uploaded to Flickr, complete with timestamps and information showing exactly where the picture was taken. Discussions on a public forum. Presence information on IM accounts showing when you’re at your computer, your mobile phone, how long you’ve been idle, and what your current away state is. Twitter updates saying what you’re doing right now and what you have been doing over the past several days. Complete social relations maps showing who you know and how. Online videos showing you and your family at a gathering. Nearly all of this indexed and easily searched by anybody anywhere in the world at any time.

There’s all kinds of information about us out there, and a lot of people are watching, probably more than you’d suspect. Some guy 500 miles away may know you better than your neighbor does. Now, this is all information we choose to put out there. You’d don’t have to have a blog, or use IM, or put your pictures up somewhere, but you probably do, and your kids most certainly will.

Is this bad? I don’t think most people involved see it as a negative thing, and hopefully most are aware of how much personal information they’re leaking. People usually just consider it as a normal part of being in a wider net community. Posters on LiveJournal or Planet GNOME know they’re not only talking to specific communities but to the world. It brings people from all over closer together. Friendships develop, ideas are born, knowledge is spread. These are all good things. On the flip side, some people you’d rather avoid are going to pay close attention to you. You may never know and you may never be impacted, or you may end up needing a restraining order. It’s all part of being in a community, right?

If we’ve come to accept this, should we really be worrying so much anymore about “Big Brother?” Afterall, aren’t we all playing that part to some degree? Do you think a government is really more of a personal threat to you than some random guy that reads your blog and watches your Flickr gallery, or is it really a higher authority that you should worry about? In the end, is this more of a benefit to people, bringing us all just a bit closer together, or a danger?

Discuss.

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VMware Tango Icons ♥ Creative Commons

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The VMware Workstation 6 betas have been out for a while now, so I’m sure those using it have noticed that we’ve been trying to make our icon theme fit in with the Tango icon style (well, to the best of my current abilities). So far this has proven to be a dramatic improvement over our older icon style used in Workstation 5.x, and it really fits in a lot better on modern GNOME desktops. The overall look feels clean and polished, mostly thanks to the hard work of the Tango project.

We’ve been lucky in that the Tango project has provided such a good variety of high-quality icons. I haven’t had to do nearly as much work as I expected in designing these icons. There were several existing VMware icons that we needed to move to the Tango style still, such as power icons, USB, serial port, message log, etc. Just a handful, but while many of them may be somewhat VMware-specific, there are some that we felt could be useful to other software projects, icon designers, and, perhaps, to Tango itself.

So we’re releasing our non-trademarked icons (everything the lawyers are okay with) under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 license. It’s only fair that we give back, afterall. There will be a dedicated page for this later, but for now, you can download it directly from here:

Download: vmware-tango-icons-0.5.tar.gz

You can see what we currently have available in the image below. I’ll put out updates as we come up with new icons and tidy up some of the remaining ones that we still want to release.

Thanks again to the Tango project for all your work in making the Linux desktop a more beautiful place, and if any of these icons look at all useful to the project, please feel free to use them, modify them, or have me tweak them.

VMware Tango Icons

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libsexy is not libegg

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I’ve been meaning to post this for a long time, and finally decided that maybe now would be a good time to do it.

I’m really pleased that a lot of projects are now using libsexy. This is awesome stuff, and I want to thank people for making use of this library.

However, the one thing that bothers me is that everybody seems to think libsexy is like libegg. I’m seeing projects bundle libsexy directly in their apps or taking a piece of libsexy, renaming it, and sticking it in their tree. Guys, this lib is not meant to be used like this. It’s a formal library, and it’s pretty standard. Every distribution that ships notification-daemon or xchat-gnome also ships libsexy, so you can pretty much guarantee it’ll be there. I know it’s not part of the GNOME desktop, but given that so many apps are using it, I’d rather see it become a blessed dependency or a configure-time option than bundled.

Shipping a copy or fork of libsexy into your apps has the following problems:

  • Upgrades to libsexy proper won’t fix bugs or enhance the applications that are using it.
  • People end up modifying their forks and never send patches upstream.
  • Some projects end up copying from other projects and never even realize they’re using libsexy in the first place.

It also confuses me that some projects end up rewriting their own versions of some of these widgets instead of using libsexy’s. For example, Evolution has EIconEntry, which is like SexyIconEntry except that it uses an HBox and some style tricks instead of being an actual GtkEntry. Let’s standardize! 🙂

So this is a call-out to the developers of Rhythmbox, Last-exit, xchat, gedit, and any other projects in any way making use of libsexy incorrectly. Please fix your apps so we can have an actual shared library that can be properly upgraded.

And to the Epiphany and Evolution projects, is there any reason anymore to not use SexyIconEntry instead of a custom HBox-based solution? A while back, I was told that the motivation was due to some rendering and usability bugs in SexyIconEntry that have since been fixed, so this is a good time to find out if there’s anything more that I could do to get you guys to use it.

Thanks.

Update: Last-exit now links against the system’s libsexy. Thanks to Brandon Hale for his work on this 🙂

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Transparent notification screenshots

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In my release announcement for the new libnotify and notification-daemon, I advised that people try the new release in order to see the transparent notifications for themselves. This was obviously a mistake as many people wanted to see screenshots. Silly me.

I guess I thought that this was one of those things that looked better in person than on a screenshot. I was also a bit tired and busy with other tihngs and didn’t want to put in any more effort. So I took a couple and hey, it looks pretty good anyway. My apologies. I should have done this last night.

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New libnotify and notification-daemon releases are out!

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I’ve just put out libnotify 0.4.4 and notification-daemon 0.3.7 releases. I highly advise that everybody upgrades, as several memory leaks, rendering glitches and other bugs have been fixed.

Along with these releases is some basic support for accessibility in the notifications and a nice, subtle transparent effect on the notifications when running on a system using a compositing manager. Don’t worry, it’s not bad at all, and it doesn’t make the notifications any harder to read. I’ve been running this for some time at this point 🙂 I would show a screenshot, but it’s probably best to see it on your own setup.

The downloads are available on the downloads page, and full release notes are below:

libnotify 0.4.4 changes

  • Fixed a bug where a notification’s ID could be reset when a different notification was closed. Patch by jylefort. (Bug #94)
  • Fixed a crash when the D-BUS proxy was not being freed on notify_uninit, which was problematic when used in a loadable module. (Bug #92)
  • Fixed a crash when a signal handler for the notification’s closed signal caused the notification to be destroyed. (Bug #116)
  • Fixed memory leaks when creating notifications. (Bug #112)
  • Fixed potential memory leaks where the function passed to notify_notification_add_action to free the user data was not being called. (Bug #119)

notification-daemon 0.3.7 changes

  • Fixed a compatibility issue with dbus-glib 0.72. Patch by Pawel Worach. (Bug #95)
  • The background of the window in the standard theme is now just slightly transparent when compiled against GTK+ 2.10 and when using a composite manager. Patch by Matt Walton. (Ticket #110)
  • Fix several rendering glitches with the borders in the standard theme.
  • Fix a memory leak when removing a notification. Patch by Sven Wegener. (Bug #105).
  • Added initial accessibility support with the standard theme engine.
  • Clicking anywhere in a notification should now close the notification. This was happening only on the body text sometimes.

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