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I usually keep a backpack with me, but for groceries that won't fit, this is very handy for groceries or anything else you might need to pick up and carry around. It compacts down to 4.5 x 2.5 x 1 inches (the size of the little pouch on its side).

Now that is an ultraportable! I especially appreciate the capacity for 4GB of RAM vs the Macbook Air's limitation of 2GB.

Hmmm. A G7 with RAW would be as good as G9, maybe even better (less noise). Thanks for the offer. I have no idea if I even want to buy another point and shoot at the moment though. I'll keep it in mind if I ever decide to pull the trigger.

I could I suppose. It's my main desktop at home though, so I'm wary of "Release Candidates". Microsoft hasn't exactly impressed my lately...

I was concerned about drivers. I think, right now, that I'm not missing any that could work in XP 64-bit, but I was worried that over the lifetime of the computer 64-bit XP would no longer be supported by the manufacturers. A lot of companies are skipping 64-bit XP from what I understand. For...

But you can't replace the touch pad on a laptop. They all have a single button. It is shitty to use. I don't hate Macs but give me a break; two buttons make your life noticeable better. It's a big deal for good reason. Ideally, I'd like a joy nipple, but I'd settle for a touch pad with two...

I've been seriously thinking of getting a very compact Canon (smaller than the G9) and using CHDK to get RAW files out of it. At the moment I use a Panasonic LX1 as a Point & Shoot, but the lens on it makes it inconvenient to pocket.

That would make me blow my brains out. In Windows it drives me nuts that I can't hold ALT and drag a window, but, instead have to go all the way to the title bar. If you become used to a convenience that saves you time and effort, living without it becomes perpetually annoying. (I don't know...

Complete lock-up, no CTRL+ALT+DEL, no nothing. You have to hold the power button for 5 seconds to shut the computer down because nothing works. In XP I could usually just kill the offending app, and go about my business, but in Vista I often have to completely kill the power. As for certified...

True. But Vista really is fucked on a fundamental level. I've never had an OS crash this often and this hard on me. (Probably Windows '95 but I won't claim to remember that accurately enough to hold to it.) I mean it hard crashes on me! Linux never hard crashes on me. XP may have hard...

I just hate clutter, so I rip my CDs and my DVDs. It's mostly from store-bought physical media. The downloaded music I have, of which I have a great deal, is all stuff the artists have licensed for free distribution (concert bootlegs of taper-friendly artists, promotional singles released to...

I'm at 4.1 TB without considering redundancy. I have two fileservers, one for video, the other for music & photos. The first has 5x250GB + 1x300GB all in a RAID 5 (except for the extra 50GB on the 300GB which is the boot partition), and the second has 5x200GB + 1x 300GB in the same...

Yep. I put a UV filter on a lens if I'm taking pictures at a social function or in some other dangerous situation. If I'm out taking landscapes and I want the best picture I can get, the UV filter stays off & I'm just careful extra careful with my lenses. With a lens hood attached I find...

I didn't participate at all when StorageForum was first started --I didn't post at SR back then either (despite reading the posts there quite regularly)--, but I would like to chime in and say that I find this forum to be quite a unique place, one of the very best little corners of the 'net...

Indeed. NOD32 and BitDefender lead against new threats; Avira Antivir & GData lead against old threats. Unfortunately, everyone's getting worse, month-by-month.

Actually, Canadians can use un-refined Uranium for energy! We do have to package it into fuel rods of course, but our Candu reactors will produce a self-sustaining, moderatable fission reaction from Uranium ore with 0.72% U-235 (the good stuff) no problem. (That's the naturally occuring...

That does look pretty fun.

Great explanation E_dawg. I didn't think of the (obvious) fact that you have to display each photo at the same size. Of course you're right. Definitely not, I should have thought of P&S as a good, more extreme example of the effect. The big problem for me these days in judging this stuff is...

Since a cropped sensor is just that, a crop of the frame, I don't see why you'd need to multiply the shutter speed. If the photo is clear, a crop of it would be clear as well (at any given pixel density). Of course, as digital sensors begin to significantly out-resolve film (in a pixel...

WOW. They cut pretty close to the ground there sometimes.

Tannin, I think you can set the 1D MkIII to shoot slower. That might help with the "less than you need or more than you need problem". I have no idea what custom setting this might be, but I'm pretty sure I read about it somewhere. I also don't know if it would actually help or not.

The noise performance at higher ISOs is surprising & inconsistent with what I would expect. They rate it as superior to the Canon 40D. I imagine there must be a sacrifice in detail to accomplish that.

Both the Sigma 100-300mm f/4.0 & the 300-800mm f/5.6 are available in 4/3 mount. There's a 2x conversion on both those on an Olympus DSLR body of course... (600-1600mm, holy batman). The monster Sigma is very highly rated for image quality. Of course it's like carrying around a 2nd body --a...

I once did about 3000 km in a long weekend... Nearly 45 of the 90 hours that the trip lasted were spent driving. It was in university to visit a cottage, and it was a great weekend. I had help on the driving, but I'm not sure I'd ever do it again. I drove from Halifax (with some help) to a...

I LOVE XKCD. For those who haven't been before, make sure to mouse over the image to see the image comments; there's often a second joke, but sometimes the comment is crucial to getting the most out of the comic. If your browser shortens the comment with a "..." examine the page's code to find...

No, it runs fine (except for the ridiculously slow "Save As:" dialog). Saving takes forever too. And the reason I bothered with Vista is that the computer has 8GB of RAM. XP 64 wasn't an option, because hardware I had wasn't supported. It seems a lot manufacturers skipped XP64 and made...

Apparently Vista SP1, doesn't offer any performance increase at all. Microsoft's moving even further backwards. Good for them. On another note, does anyone find Vista filesaving dialogs take ages to open, network folders hang for a long time, and domain logins will take up to 2 minutes...

10 would be enough I think. I'd still prefer to use linux though. It makes so many things easier for me. The only drawback is the lack of fixed-rate online backup. I'm thinking of virtualizing XP under linux to solve this problem.

The difference between 24mm equivalent and 28mm is definitely a big one. I'd be willing to compromise given the size advantages in this one case, but I'd definitely prefer not to. (As I've alluded to before with my praise for Pentax for bringing the wide ends of their standard zooms all the...

No, just the viewfinder. Definitely not the LCD. The Nikon LCDs are certainly bigger, brighter, and more detailed than the E-3's --although the articulating LCD on the E-3 looks very useful. I'm not sure what I'd prefer in practice: the flexibility but poorer quality of the E-3, or the...

Is it possible to add physically local storage to a VM that is seen by the virtualized OS as local, but isn't included in its disk image and is a separate filesystem? I know you can access physically local storage that isn't in the disk image using SMB or NFS, but is it possible in Xen...

Logitech's webpage sucks. What the hell is that, and what does it do? Your description intrigues me...

Maybe I can run Mozy in a Windows XP VM on the server just for backups. I'd have to make the storage appear as local --not network attached though. Hmmmm. Sometimes I think it's crazy that this is all so complicated.

I'm not going to bother with RAID. It's so much more economical to just add disks to a JBOD in software. That way I can always buy at the best GB/$ ratio. It'll be LVM on Linux rather than dynamic disks on Windows. OTOH I'm thinking of XP just so I can run Mozy. The Linux version doesn't...

I'm pretty sure the lens (I'm actually trying to spell it the way the masses do) on the E-410 was a 14-42mm f/3.5-5.6. I know the speed isn't anything special, but that is definitely a special lense IMO.

The 20D didn't have any dust-reduction treatment at all. No mirror shaking, no coatings, nothing.

Henry's held a Digital Photography Expo in Ottawa last weekend, which I went to. Gitzo's Sweet New Tripods (actually 1-2 years old): I saw Gitzo's GT1540T & GT1550T ultra-compact, carbon fibre tripods. I had to resist the urge to buy them very vigorously... The former folds down to 39.0cm...

Not necessarily true. ExpressCard supports PCIe and USB 2.0 Highspeed connections in the same form factor. It depends on the card as to which bus is actually used. Of all the ExpressCard readers available presently only one uses the PCIe connection (I can't recall the make or model off-hand...

Hey guys. I'm going to be building a new file server soon. I'd like to just use onboard SATA ports and not have to buy a separate RAID card just to get some extra ports. Ideally, I'd like 12 SATA ports onboard, but I think that's impossible. The Gigabyte GA-N680SLI-DQ6 has 10 ports, but is...

The biggest problem, in my mind, isn't backing up the messages themselves. You can configure a POP downloader and leave it at that. The biggest problem is backing up the metadata. I don't have a complicated labelling/tagging system --I depend on search a great deal--, but I need a limited...

By the way, e_dawg got the 12-60mm, not the 14-54 I was talking about.

SLR Gear have their first two Olympus lens reviews done. The Olympus 14-54mm f/2.8-3.5 e_dawg just got, was well-liked by the reviewers (it's the 2nd link above). From the conclusion:

Thanks Mercutio, I was considering recommending one of these over a colour Laser at my office; I'll have to reevaluate that. Incidentally, what models do you have experience with? The 8860's black cartridge is supposed to be good for 14,000 pages, but I wouldn't be surprised if that was BS.

I certainly shouldn't have suggested otherwise (and didn't really mean to). I just wanted to note that I found their photo output to be noticeably better than Colour Lasers, which is not exactly a compliment. Consumables are that bad? I thought the whole point is that they were easier on...

Thanks for the detailed comments e_dawg. I'm quite curious about the Olympus system. That 12-60 f/2.8-3.5 looks like a phenomenally useful lens --I'd love to hear your comments on it once you've had a chance to use it for a bit.

I don't know. I'm leaning towards probably not though, which is very unfortunate. The company really seems to be continuing in the tradition of the old K1000, making good value consumer/hobbiest bodies, and completely ceding the top end of the market. I guess it's worked well for them in the...

Just to clarify, so I don't sound like a dumbass: Of course you can live without them. The alternative on non-Pentax bodies involves all of changing your grip for a moment and losing a half second; it's barely anything at all. But it's the kind of thing you'd really like to not live without...

It's also worth mentioning that Pentax produced a 43mm prime, because it is the perfect "normal" lense by the aforementioned standards. Why they insist on other weird focal lengths like 31mm & 77mm no one knows (witchcraft perhaps?). P.S. Sorry for the OT. On topic: 1. Wireless Flash: The...

If you want to get technical udaman, you have a 180 degree FOV with the human eye when looking straight forward (hence the conserved, evolutionary notches in our skulls to either side of our eyeballs). So by the definition of FOV, a "normal" lense would be something like a 10/10.5mm fisheye...

I don't know about Canon's dye-based Photo Printers, but their pigment ink printers are the opposite of their competitors with respect to clogging tendencies: they're by far the most resistant to clogging. By far... (Epsons are legendarily poor.) I believe I've also heard that the Epson dye...