Reading up on film, I found Ilford Delta 3200 Professional as something that could be interesting to shoot with. I’d read a bit about it, checked out the flickr group and decided what the heck, it’s only money.

I grabbed my dad’s old Ricoh SLR and took some photos – trying to learn how this film responds, what I can and can’t do with it along with developing my own skills.

I got Michaels to develop and scan (hey, they do B&W processing in Melbourne in a reasonable time frame)… ignoring the advice of some that doing it yourself gets you best results (anyone for a Laundry/Brewery/Darkroom?)

While at Rrose, I took this shot which I quite like:

If you look at full size you see the wonderful graininess that is this film:

But a simple GIMP Despeckle gets you:

(and a much smaller JPEG file size). But I do kinda like the speckle.

The amazing thing to note is that this was shot handheld with a not particularly fast lens and without any artificial light beyond what was at rrose at 9 or 10pm in August.

My inner Apple // geek is way too excited right now.

One thing i love is that from the home screen (Welcome screen in WM5 language) you can start typing and you can choose to either dial that number, or choose from the search of your address book that just happened. Awesome. No jumping through menus just to search the address book!

If anyone knows how to make the in-built email client not do outlook style “include message in reply” and instead actually quote the message, i’d be rather grateful.

fring is also a rather cool IM/VoIP app that I can see myself making a fair bit of use of when on a WiFi network around the place (and IM on the go over GPRS).

I just have to go and get a 3G SIM card to make data work…

synce-registry -w HKLM Software/Microsoft/Internet\ Explorer/AboutURLs home ‘http://www.google.com.au/m’

Why you have to edit the registry to change the home page is certainly beyond me.

Well… one “shortcut” to the computer store later, have new HD (will travel).

Backup from previous night, xfsrestore here I come. And a good number of hours later… about 1.5million files restored.

I do wish file systems had REPEATABLE_READ though… that would be nice.

Not only is the review positive on the book (“5 out of 5″ is a good rating), it looks as though the book will be of value to the reviewer as they expand their MythTV system (precisely one of the aims we had with the book). In fact even I am looking forward to my hard copy to use as a reference when doing some things to my MythTV system….. oh, and likely when I finally give into my mum’s requests and build her one too (yes, the same mother of mine who finds keyborad shortcuts confusing but has been using Linux on the desktop for years and now even installs her own security updates).

I feel good.

Mount a file system, as a user over ssh.

I currently have a home directory in a datacenter somewhere in Sweden mounted so i can easy ls, cp etc to it. Sure, gnomevfs and nautilus let me do some of this, but not from the command line!

Awesome. Simply Awesome. Oh so true too.