Sandy's Blog

After a day of avoiding relatives and neighbors, Christmas day arrives, and with it (completely out of the blue) comes a new camera. Its an Olympus µ digital 600, a 6 MegaPixel digital camera.

Now I am wary of the whole megapixel shenanigans that go on, and how in many cases more does not equal better. However I am pleased to report that my mother has successfully bought me a new geek toy that has the features that I will undoubtedly use.

• Splashproof - marketed as an all-weather camera
• Good lens with optical zoom and autofocus
• Decent A3 printing
• Good outdoor photos & action shots with minimal faff, including panoramic shots
• Does pretty well at night with varying exposure settings
• Doesn’t need bloatware on the computer

Also it seems that everyone (including my brother) has the Canon variant of this camera, and although his is 7.1 megapixel I doubt it would be better for day to day use - it appears rather fragile!

Unfortunately at the moment using this camera is a bit of a faff, as it comes with less than 10MB of internal memory (about 3 photos at best quality). 1GB card is in the post though!

So anyway - some pictures of an after work snack taken in a moderately lit room at night.

WARNING - The first two photos below are in the region of 2-3MB!

Default photo with macro on

Cuisine mode:

Auto light leveling mode (noflash)

Indoor mode (noflash)

With no effort whatsoever those are passable low light photos. So yeah I am very very pleased. It also has video recording at 640×480 and facilities to take photos continuously - which is nice too.

Now I need to save up for that underwater case …

This rambling set from Boards of Canada is in the main pretty weak, but there are a few tracks I think are just fantastic, namely 5/9/78, Forest Moon, To the Wind, Mansel and Mukinabaht.

After I finally got round to re-installing windows yesterday (blue screening due to the change of hardware - so shit), I started downloading all of the games I want to play in my steam games list. Because that involved about 2Gb of downloads I looked for something else to play.

Darwinia Demo - what the hell is this?

20Mb of downloading later, and I am immersed in a virtual AI theme park gone wrong. The darwinians (little green men) are fighting a virus (red stuff), and you have to help them basically. While you can’t control the darwinians directly, you can influence their moves by promoting one to be an officer. They also do tons of really handy stuff, and can be brought back to life using engineers (they look like the hover flying things from tron).

It looks totally retro and is a real blast to play, like a mix of cannon fodder, ant attack, lemmings and tron. I bought the full version for $20 over steam an hour after I tried the demo.