My 3 year old 2G iPod is no longer the only one in the family… the new iPod is a pink mini, bought over the internet in Singapore’s online store (just so that we can engrave something behind it). The downside of now being able to exchange for another colour far pales in comparison to the coolness of having a personalized iPod. Just in case you’re wondering, no, its not for me, its for the wife, and she’s the one that chose the colour.
If I do get a new one, it will be a normal iPod or an iPod Photo. Planning to use it to store digital images on the move. In the mean time, the old iPod still runs up to 4 hours per charge and I have a feeling I might hack the cover and replace the battery with a “compatible” version once the battery life falls below 2hrs/charge. The first and generation iPods with sharp and perspex looking casing still looks better than the new ones with rounded edges, IMHO.
Went scouting the photo shops in Shanghai and ended up buying a Benro MP66 monopod instead for 240RMB. Its a midsized monopod that goes up to 1.5-1.6m at least with 4 leg sections. Its made of Aluminium. There’s a Carbon Fibre version that’s almost double the price. The strange thing is that when I compared the weight, they weigh almost the same, with the carbon a little lighter, but not significantly. When extended, it seems that the aluminium version is much sturdier, so that’s why I bought it. And the price is quite reasonable. What does it look like? Easy… the design is a copy of Gitzo’s, but of course it looks like the quality is not even nearly as good, and the logo looks like Manfrotto. The only complain I have up to now is that the base where you screw onto the camera body seems to scratch the body itself. That’s what I did to my FM2 this afternoon.
Got this phone from Zircon some weeks back. I think its a Singaporean or Malaysian company and they design their own phone inhouse. Its not that bad a phone. Comes with a 1.3Mpix camera (which is not that great but good enough if you need to snap that picture of a price tag, etc) loaded with Windows CE.NET (not such a big fan of Windows CE). Most of the software either comes from Microsoft itself or is designed by the same company that made the phone. The user experience is so-so, some of the software just don’t act the same. Some software behave better if you dont want to take out the stylus and prefer to use the directional keypads, etc. But its bearable.
But what’s not bearable is that the guys that came out with the phone has set up a forum with the idea to support users, etc but most of the posting there are either non answered after weeks or months or just plainly ignored.
For me I’m not using the phone anymore today. The last few days I noticed that the screen began to look a little more interlaced than usual and one day it just turned all white. If you leave it for a few days it becomes normal again. With this kind of behaviour I just can’t bring it back for warranty repair if I can’t reproduce it all the time. I’m not going to go back to the repair centre every week. Anyways, I still have about 10 more months before the warranty runs out.
After collecting a bunch of filters all these while I’ve decided to get a cokin P series filter holder. The difference between this and the usual screw on filters is that you get to slip in a piece of plastic into the holder.
The cokin filters don’t excite me too much, as the optical quality is so-so, but what is interesting is when I get my hands on the next purchase, that’s a bunch of graduated ND filters from one of the more specialized filter companies. Singh-Ray is one of them, but the prices of one of their ND filters are quiet high for something you don’t use for most photographic occassions.
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