Stephan Paukner :: syslog

I finally bought the EF-S 10-22mm lens, although I promised myself to already buy it together with the tripod. I couldn’t wait any longer, as I noticed more and more often that the most incredible landscape shots simply were taken at a (miniature equivalent) 16mm focal length. For the 1.6× cropped sensor of my EOS 40D I thus need a real focal length of 10mm, what this lens provides. I had already noticed myself that the lower 17mm (equ. 27mm) of my standard zoom provide a little too narrow view at e.g. the sky or a room or a yard or a building or the surroundings of an object. Also, wide angle views turn out to look more creative, as the object of interest appears huge while you get closer to it. However, I often hear that beginners are better equipped with a lens at the upper focal length range; a telephoto lens. It’s said that this makes it easier for them to compose images and push disturbing objects out of view. Nevertheless, I simply didn’t feel an urge for higher focal lengths, quite the opposite.

Well, and although I originally wanted to plan far into the future by only buying lenses that could be used on FF sensors one day, this is already my second lens that just fits on crop sensors. So, what about that? I finally came to an opinion that I found best expressed in the 10-22mm lens review by Bob Atkins:

Some people refuse to buy EF-S or other APS-C coverage lenses because “one day” they intend to own a full frame DSLR and I guess that’s a valid viewpoint. It would be more valid if they actually owned a full frame DLSR now, but I suppose they are planning ahead. Personally I think I’ll be shooting with a 1.6x DSLR for at least the next 3-4 years, and even if I buy a full frame DLSR at that point I’ll probably keep a 1.6x body for backup.

’Nuff said.

The first serious use of that lens will be the documentation of our current and our new lodging that’s currently under construction. But I’ll mainly aim that tool at landscapes.

Sometimes I take AVI videos with my Canon PowerShot, and I process some of them with a video editor and export them as MPEG. However, those video formats can’t be streamed, and so I like to convert them to FLV to enable a YouTube-like streaming in web galleries by a flash video player.

For convenience, I wanted to use a context menu entry for Nautilus, where I could right-click on a video file and select “Convert video to FLV”. Luckily, Nautilus supports to execute arbitrary scripts from the context menu if you simply place them into ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/. The only disadvantage is that it doesn’t check the file type in advance, thus also showing the video conversion entry for non-video files. However, you can include that logic into the script itself.

The script is a little more complicated, as I didn’t know how to better parse the file names. Probably I should have used Perl. Here is my ~/.gnome2/nautilus-scripts/Convert\ video\ to\ FLV:

Wir sind dzt. verwöhnt mit 16Mbit/s Downstream. Ich nenne diese Referenz im folgenden die 1-fache Geschwindigkeit. Für TV+Internet zahlen wir bei UPC jetzt noch den Studententarif von €55,60. Das Nette daran war, dass sich die Geschwindigkeit bei quasi konstantem Preis über die Jahre stetig verdoppelt hat. Dass mein Uni-Account mit November 2008 ausläuft, trifft sich ohnehin gut mit unserem Wohnsitzwechsel. TV werden wir in Hinkunft nicht mehr zahlen müssen (wegen gemeinschaftlicher Sat-Anlage), aber halt den Netzzugang. Festnetztelefonie nehmen wir nur dann dazu, wenn’s wegen des Internet sein muss oder preislich sinnvoll ist.

Leider gibt es am Zielort kein Kabsi. UMTS & Co. sind glaub ich abseits des Ballungsraums keine ernsthafte Option. Außerdem will ich einen zentralen Zugang mit Router, damit auch andere PCs/Notebooks, evtl. sogar via WLAN, ins Netz geroutet werden.

Das „volle Rohr“ von Tele2 schaut zwar gut aus, braucht aber offensichtlich (lt. Verfügbarkeits-Check) eine entbündelte Tel.leitung, die’s dort draußen aber noch nicht gibt. Abgesehen davon suchen die gerade einen neuen Eigentümer.

Ansonsten stünde wohl folgendes zur Wahl:

In short, and for non-computer-geeks: SSL certificates are used for data encryption, to securely transmit private data over the internet. You probably know web URLs starting with “https” instead of “http”. OK, now, those secure web sites may run on a machine that use the Debian GNU/Linux operating system. Unfortunately, Debian had a problem with generating such SSL certificates. They were recently uncovered to not secure your private data anymore. Luckily, a fix came out quickly, but there are still many websites using the broken certificates.

You want to be alarmed whenever you stumble over a website that still uses one of those bad SSL certificates! You want the SSL Blacklist add-on for your Firefox web browser!