Wimminz – celebrating skank ho's everywhere

July 5, 2014

Canon SX50 HS review

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , — wimminz @ 7:08 am

Serves me right for saying shit…lol… OK, by pop-u-laire request…

First off, if you read the Amazon reviews, you have to wonder if half these people are reviewing the same product… so lets start with the alleged complaints.

The EV (electronic viewfinder) works perfectly for me, perfectly functional, perfectly usable, though *clearly* the design ethos is use the LCD screen, and EV is the equivalent of the floppy disk and parallel port, but then I am prepared to wear spectacles to correct my eyesight.

It doesn’t come with a manual, funny, I got one in mine, sure, a brief one, not in depth, that’s what the CD is for, but more than good enough to get you up to speed, albeit not good enough to find specific camera functions and UI menu items.

The buttons are all too close together, then you must be obese with fat pudgy fingers, and TOTALLY incapable of typing anything on a smartphone.

etc

You get the idea.

So, here is my review.

In the box you get, Camera, carry strap, lens cap, battery, mains charger dock, “paperwork” bundle of 2 x CD and manuals, there is no USB lead, but most people have one anyway and in any event you don’t need one, just transfer the memory card itself, there is also no memory card, and the camera does not have any internal memory, so you definitely need a memory card of some sort.

I also purchased a spare battery, 2 x 32 GB class 10 SDHC cards, a tote bag and a remote control / shutter jobbie.

The battery docks in the mains charger for charging, not in the camera itself, takes 2 hours from empty for a full charge, see why I bought two batteries, and I bought 2 x 32 gig cards because it is more versatile that one 64 gig, which was what I used when I first unboxed the camera.

If you are only ever going to use AUTO mode, I’m not sure why you are buying this, or any similar camera, buy a point and shoot for half the money or less, certainly you will only ever get maybe 20% of the functionality of which the camera is capable if you stay in AUTO mode…. we’ll come back to this….

Generally speaking I have it on C1 pre-set, C2 I have pre-set to similar values but a default 12x zoom, this again is because the idea of C1 and C2 is not so much to give you anything special, all the other modes on the Canon rotating dial give you every option you can think of, the idea is to have to main common modes that are set just as you like them, that come up and are available within 1 second of hitting the ON button.

The old adage about the best camera is the one you have with you sorta applies here, if you spend 3 minutes sorting through menus you might miss the shot, and *this* is where all the AUTO users come from, instead of RTFM and actually using the available features they just leave everything on AUTO forever.

The native resolution of the SX50 CMOS sensor is 4000 x 3000 pixels, the native resolution of the Samsung SGS3 camera is 3264 x 2448, because the sensor itself is relatively small, compared to a genuine pro level DSLR, low light levels are where these cameras perform the worst, and to a photographer “low light levels” means “not in direct summer sunlight”, so every single indoor photo you ever take is going to be low light levels.

Incidentally, the smaller the physical pixels individually are, the worse they are, eg the less light they can capture and the more noise they capture, so the Sony Cybershot with the same size sensor and 20 mega-pixel as opposed to the Canon’s 12 mega-pixel sensor is going to have a harder time of it, but a full frame DSLR 18 mega-pixel sensor will have individual pixels an order of magnitude larger, eg will capture ten times the light and generate one tenth the noise…. but does this matter for 99% of users?

One final note on this, the SX50 will (in every mode except AUTO) write both a RAW and a JPEG to the memory card for every pic taken, RAW = a digital negative, anything and everything else is literally less, the ability to set white balance ALONE makes RAW worth it, sure, you can kinda duplicate this in image processing of jpegs, in the same way that a fleshlight is kinda as good as a 16 year old cunt… if it doesn’t shoot RAW, you may as well buy a point and click, if it does shoot RAW, never shoot anything else, ever.

Two minutes with Google will find you more shit than you can shake a stick at showing you just how impressive the SX50 can be, both in picture quality and the excellent zoom, that’s not what I am going to do, I’m going to take worst case scenario, which is why I mentioned the pixel resolution of the SX50 up there, and the SGS3 smartphone camera.

Worst case scenario is shooting a jpeg (not raw) indoors, no windows, electric light only, and framing the Canon shot so it pretty much has the same field of vision as the Samsung, eg eliminating everything the lens can do.

These pics are links to full size… jpegs… Neither one is processed in any way.

Samsung SGS3

Samsung

Canon SX50 HS

Canon

As you can see, at the resolution displayed on this page, not much in it at all, and when you look at the full size images these two thumbs link to, you cannot genuinely claim to see huge differences, for example the clarity of the text on the oscilloscope or the Farnell PSU, but, if you look at little deeper, you do see a better colour range in things like the wires hanging down over the oscilloscope, and if you look at the mould on the wall below the oscilloscope you can see it looks much more “real” than it does in the phone picture… but again, let me stress, this is worst case scenario, shooting jpeg, indoors in “low light levels” and at similar field of view to the phone camera.

The more observant will also see differences in lens barrel distortion and so on, and those of you who choose to download and save and examine in photo editing software will also see differences in the curves and histograms.

IMG_0058

This shows one huge advantage of the real camera, I am stood in exactly the same spot, I am still shooting jpeg, same low light levels, everything else the same too, but instead of having to physically move the camera to compose the shot, as you do with the phone, I just zoom in a little, it is still, in every way, a crap photo, it is a 3 MB jpeg, and that means 13 MB worth of RAW photo data has been thrown away, and just like the magazine cover girls, this is what every photographer starts out with and then tweaks to give you what you see, and you only see the finished product.

Yes, there are clear, if not massive, differences in the *apparent* quality of the sensor between the Canon camera and the Samsung phone, nota bene *apparent*, because most of the differences are masked by everything else I have done to set the shot up that way, and by shooting jpeg in both, etc etc, but even here, the more you look at the two pictures (you do need a large screen really, a laptop is considerably less than ideal) the more you will see the quality coming out in the Canon one.

The third shot shows the massive impact a half decent lens has, there is only one point in space and orientation etc from where that shot can have been taken by the Samsung, the canon can duplicate that, and do it better, but the Canon can also be in that same point in space, and orientation, and take literally thousands of clearly quite different pictures, RAW, so no I am not talking about different exposures or white balance or anything else, as none of these feature in a RAW image, I am talking *solely* about composition.

The third shot is literally impossible to take with the Samsung.

Don’t get me wrong, I use the cameras on my SGs3 and Note2 every single day, I will often take 20 or 30 pics a day, at work, of work, record keeping, CYA, and I can put BOTH of these devices together in my shirt pocket.

But, if you want to take a picture, as opposed to record keeping…. no contest.

Which is why I rant on about shooting raw, individual CMOS sensor physical pixel size, and so on, because there is literally no point in spending about 350/375 quid all up for the kit I bought (listed above) unless you actually use those capabilities, if you insist on smart-phone style point and click jpeg shooting then you don’t need more than a 100 quid camera, the Canon powershot A3500 is all you will ever need… 70 quid delivered.

White balance? Here are two shots.

Unedited, take as a jpeg

IMG_0018

Unedited, except for one click adjusting the while balance, taken as a RAW and then exported to jpeg.

2014-08-04T14_48_24

A picture tells a thousand words…. look at the full size versions, and you tell me which one pops out at ya….

In closing…. software.

The bundled Canon software is reasonably good, imagebrowser does a *real* good job of importing and organising stuff from the camera via usb, and digital photo pro does a passable job at basic photo editing and raw processing…. augmented by the fact that the SX50 itself, if you RTFM and set it up right, automatically incrementally numbers every shot, as well as putting it in a folder structure named (in digits) for the year, then the month, then the day…

Speaking personally I can’t tell you shit about Adobe lightroom, cloud crap, got to sign up for an online account even to download the demo, so I didn’t.

Already being a user of Corel VideoStudio Pro 17 for the Canon HD movie camera, it was a no brainer to download and try an evaluation copy of Corel AfterShot Pro 2 for the SX50, and I bought a copy… works well enough for me.

Thanks due to the person who turned me on to ACDSee Pro 7, it rocks…

April 4, 2014

The Personal Computer – part one

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , — wimminz @ 11:42 am

Back in the day, I had an Acorn A5000, it needed an OS upgrade, so I contacted Acorn and they sent me, free of charge, a small packed with four EEPROM chips, and that was how you upgraded the OS, remove the four RISCOS 3.0 chips, insert the four RISCOS 3.5 chips, job done.

Speaking as an engineer, sticking the OS in ROM like this is a wonderful thing, it pretty much makes it immune to malware corruption and so on, so I can really *get* the fact that the designers of the Acorn / Archimedes range, being engineers first and foremost, saw this as a fantastic design feature.

The fact is, MS *could* do this, it’s not much different to having the gold build release which is now on DVD, and all the myriad updates downloaded separately, but, you couldn’t actually *apply* them to the OS, you’d have to LOAD them at boot, not PATCH the files in question, still, it could be done, if you were prepared to re-write windows from the ground up.

The middle ground here is flashing a BIOS with an updated later version, it’s not technically impossible, or even very hard to do, the only issue is once you start out from a different design ethos, which is what IBM did with the PC spec, you can no longer do it and remain within the PC spec, technically, you are no longer selling what was once known as an “IBM Compatible PC”

If you have read my recent shit about lightweight cheap craptops and windows 8 and downgrades to windows 7, you’ll be forgiven for having a lot of sympathy for what I am about to say.

The IBM PC spec included the fundamental principle that you could take a bunch of inert but compatible hardware, add initially on floppy, later on CD, now on DVD, the OS install media, and end up with a working PC.

*perhaps* you would then have to whack in some separate floppy / CD / DVD that contained drivers, to make certain components work, or work better, but, and this is crucial, these installers functioned from within a working PC with an already working windows environment and desktop.

*perhaps* your network card would not work without these drivers, perhaps your graphics card would not show the full feature set, perhaps the hard disk worked in PIO mode, but the bottom line was despite all these, you had a working PC, WIMP GUI and all.

So even if you had these relatively minor issues, you could resolve them, trivially, onsite.

Now, going back to the cheapola windows 8 craptops with UEFI etc, (if you haven’t read those posts, perhaps you should now, or this may not make sense) since by definition they utterly fail on every level to do what it says in red text above, particularly the bold underlined sentence at the end, and by utterly fail I mean it is outright impossible to do, not just difficult, or technical, or time consuming, but impossible, to my mind, these devices cannot be called PC’s.

Technically they have more in common with a tablet, forget the fact that they have a keyboard and come in a clamshell case and so on, the only way they can work is if you blow a disk image on to the disk, specifically tailed for that specific set of hardware, at build time.

  1. No longer is it a set of inert components, now the hard disk has an image blown to it.
  2. No longer can you get a functioning windows environment *just* from standard OS install media and inert components alone.

This is a pretty good description of a tablet, or a gaming console, or a set top box, or any other specialised device.

I will ask you to note that throughout the IBM Compatible PC period, which to my mind started with MS Windows 3.1, at no point where servers ever referred to as PC’s, even though they were in many ways broadly similar, and shared many common components, and even common physical characteristics, definitions, layouts, such as ATX etc.

People did not lie so much back then, even for example Dell and Compaq, who had a nasty habit of rewiring cabling a different way from the ATX standard, would correctly call their device a PC, but would not make the false claim that it was an ATX device.

Today, Toshiba and Samsung and probably all the rest of them too make a whole range of devices that are cheap and nasty, cut down UEFI, and are not PC’s.

I haven’t been able to say anything about this before, but thanks to Build 2014 Microsoft has finally let half the cat out of the bag, now you can choose between the truly crap Windows 8 “tiles”, or the classic start menu system, and Sinofsky is history.

See, the thing is, deals were done, and it is the nature of things that it takes a long time from deals being done to the final effects being manifested.

But one of the deals that were done was to do with the saturation of the PC market, nobody was ignorant of the fact that any old XP machine could be given a new lease of life with an SSD, and really, windows 7 only sold because is was pre-installed on new boxen, almost nobody went out and bought the DVD.

Intel wanted to get rid of the BIOS and go with UEFI, it’s cheaper, and allows for hardware to be made more platform agnostic, a north-bridge chip-set written for a X79 can’t be used in much anything else, a generic 32 bit wide bus controller could conceivably be used in almost anything, depending on size and power consumption.

ARM and Samsung were eating everyone else’s lunch, and the nightmare scenario for everyone was a practical and efficient and affordable FPGA, just whack a bunch of them together with interconnects and tell them, you will be the bus controller, you will be the CPU, you will be the gfx subsystem…

Meanwhile Asus and HP and Toshiba and everyone else are looking at the end of the PC hardware market, fuck it, XP and an SSD in an XP era box is good enough, so build costs have to be slashed, if fuckers won’t buy a 1,000 quid laptop, we’ll just have to build a 300 quid laptop, and don’t forget all the OLPC (on laptop per child) hoo hah was doing the rounds.

But, put a like for like OS on this new breed of hardware, and people are going to complain BITTERLY about how slow and crap it is, compared to for example a stinkpad T series.

In fact, the only way you could get marketing to make these things seem attractive is to build the same thing and put Andoid on them, oh.. wait…where is my IE?

And so it was, that the hardware sellers are the tail wagging the dog, responsible for the vast majority of MS operating system and office suite sales, so they say to MS, we want this NEW operating system to look and feel different to the OLD operating system, that way, people cannot compare the two, and secretly, even if they do, they will blame fucking windows, and not our sucky hardware.

Windows 8 is a *good* operating system, put it on *good* hardware and it fucking rocks, you do realise that Windows Server 2012 is just Windows 8 once the first stage bare install is done, then you start adding modules like DHCP / DNS controllers, AD controller, SQL server etc…. so Windows 8 is at heart a fucking server quality OS, it is not a piece of shit.

But, Sinofsky and others agreed to make it look “different to windows 7” because their biggest by far customers in volume terms, hardware builders, demanded it.

I was even told, though I give this somewhat less credibility, that Office365 came from the same place, because frankly trying to run a local copy of Office 2010 on these crapware devices is a lesson in pain and patience.

If you look carefully at the marketing, nowhere will you find these devices actually described as “Personal Computers”, instead they talk about mobile computing, which could as well be applied to my samsung phone… it’s the same as the dearth of “ATX” in blurbs that dell and compaq were punting out a few years ago when they were chasing the desktop biz market, and wanted to undercut everyone else by 200 notes a box.

And so, to conclude part one;

  1. It is important to realise that really good choices made by engineers (put the OS in EEPROM) can fucking bomb when it comes to marketing, because suddenly nobody ELSE can market THEIR shit, using your shit as their platform.
  2. It is important to realise that really clever choices such as the IBM Compatible PC and ATX allowed for a great deal of flexibility, Compaq could rewire the apparently ATX format molex cables and still legitimately claim IBM Compatible PC, they just did not claim it was an ATX, just like almost no craptop claims what chipset it used, but note the previous post on the tosh and stinkpad, the stinkpad DID list the chipset used, it said Intel QM77 Express.
  3. It is important to realise that what an OS looks like and what is does is as important as where you put it, so that other people can use it as their platform in their marketing shit.
  4. It is important to realise that for the bulk buyer, EVERYTHING is customisable, NO supplier, no matter how big, can say there it is, take it or leave it…. a famous example of this was Samsung LCD tellys bought through the Dixons/Curry/Comet group had a cut down operating system compared to the ones bought direct from Samsung or a smaller reseller, which is 100% of how the 46″ 7 series in the Comet window was 200 quid cheaper than the 46″ 7 series in the small resellers window…. you were not buying the same fucking thing.

Windows 8 is actually a great OS, better than Windows 7, IF YOU BUY THE FUCKING OEM INSTALL DVD and DIY, and it is the work of moments to kill the tiles and bring back the classic start menu.1451_35b3effb0e55fde0acf18553e6e3868480

Back in the day, there was a utility that Joe Public could use, to cut the Win98se installed disk footprint down to 17 megabytes, yes, you read that right, megabytes,it was magic for embedded systems that would otherwise have struggled to run windows 3.1…. those tools are still available, just not to joe public, and the win8 install on a new 300 quid craptop has very little in common with the one you get from an OEM DVD.

Even on a cut to the bone minimum spec Atom based device, the BIOS and chipset will account for 2% of the component cost…. call it ten bucks a unit, if your production run is 50,000 units, there is a half a million dollars right there to chip away at, and if you can leverage that and also buy a cut down and fucked up hard disk, with a weedier than wholesale onboard chipset and drive interface code, and save another ten bucks a disk, but it doesn’t matter, because you no longer have a requirement to do a bare metal install, and so on and so forth.

Now Microsoft, you want to come to this party, and be the per-installed OS on this range of 50k units, and the 5 sister ranges, which are basically all the same thing with some arbitrary marketing crippling going on, well, there’s  quarter of a million sales of windows and office up for grabs, OK, we just need you to go ahead and alter this a bit… cheers…

Device A B and C are identical, apart from the performance and price, and turning A into B into C is literally identical to remapping the ECU in your car, sure, pay the licence and we will unlock the other core, pay another licence and we will unlock the core clock multiplier by another two x.

The difficulty here is that you as the consumer will make only one single purchase, will not be aware of any of these back room shenanigans, and will do exactly what the craptop manufacturers want, THEY made a sale, YOU blame Microsoft and Windows 8.

… to be continued…

 

March 22, 2012

Dear diary

Filed under: Wimminz — Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , — wimminz @ 9:48 am

Today I are been mainly….. ignoring the wimminz… lol

Allow me to explain.

My alarm went off around 7, I turned it off, scratched my balls, thought “fuck it” and rolled over for another hour’s kip.

I got up at 8, scratched my balls, made my morning coffee, check emails etc.

I made my second coffee and watched all the late teen / early 20’s pussy walk past my window (I live in a student area in a university town) and notice I have a text from a local skank who wants to stop by and blow me for lunch.

I amble into the front room, where my main PC is connected to my 55 inch Samsung, because I have just bought a Radeon 6900 series GFX card so I feel like playing a little Skyrim / Fallout / Crysis at 1920 x 1080 with everything  turned up…

I get so carried away by this that when the skank ho swings by at lunch-time to blow me my head is still in another place, I’m lining up head shots of another kind entirely….

I could go on, but I am sure you get the general idea by now.

Wimminz themselves have reduced themselves to a position with me where;

  1. If the flesh is under 25 it *may* be enticing…. but sadly the personality it will come with will soon ruin that little porno illusion.
  2. If the flesh is over 25 but offers blowjobs to go it “may” be enticing… but the flesh it comes with will often ruin that little porno illusion.
  3. I actually do not need some bitch to cook and clean, I find it zero effort to keep myself and my place clean, fact is if you don’t *make* a fucking mess in the first place…
  4. As the years have passes and the wimminz excesses have worn me down, I find myself less and less willing to put up with *anything* from them that does not fall into the category of “100% pure what I want from them”

Read point #1 again, even the young fresh flesh, the thing all wimminz revere and mourn the passage of, only has a momentary porno relish, until reality sets in with the realisation that the bitch will sure as shit ain’t shinola have an attitude that will ruin the illusion.

Fact is I even have one wimminz who will wait on me hand and foot, who will feed and fuck and even house me, and she is very clean, not just in her home, but never ever get any kind of smell from her cunt, not even stale piss, this girl has it down pat, she basically worships the ground I walk on, which, see above, is about the only attitude from a woman that still flies with me, and yet I can’t bring myself to spend more than one weekend in four with her, because of item #2

Which is why my diary is full of “Did what I felt like doing” followed by “did what I felt like doing”

The cold hard sober facts are that my diary could oh so easily have been full of “did x for the wife” and “did y for the kids” and “did z for the wife“, and I could have oh so easily been happy and contented with that shit, but it was not me or my cock that ruined that illusion for life, nossir, it was the fucking wimminz, ALL OF THE BITCHES, with their constant whining for fried fucking snow, after a while it rubs off and you find yourself dissatisfied, not that you don’t have fried snow, but that the wimminz keep pissing in the snow and telling you it is sherbet, so the dissatisfied behaviour rubs off and you say fuck it.

Take off the rose tinted glasses and nostalgia for for teen flesh and look back at my own first serious live in girlfriend, actually look back at what it was really like once you subtract all the docile shit you were imbued with, bitch was a fucking nightmare, that’s a fact, and as ever it was down to not wishing to ever, ever, ever pay the price or consequences for her own actions, it was ever thus and yes folks, AWALT.

It is a hell of a thing when the wimminz have taken female flesh and made it essentially borderline unfuckable to a cocksman like me, that takes fucking DECADES of sustained effort, the sort of shit that makes making the jews and arabs live in peace and harmony look like a simple day’s work.

Unlike the Jews and the Arabs, I was basically built from DNA that made the wimminz the thing I wanted to fuck in preference to almost anything else in life, in preference to a career, in preference to a fleet of motorcycles, in preference to just lazing around all day, in preference to being independently wealthy…

And yet the wimminz have indeed put in those decades of effort, and were ably supported by an army of niggerz and manginas, all of whom were in it for the paycheck, well, welcome to the world you wanted, bitches.

Before I go, the one who was going to blow me mentioned in conversation that apparently Jason Statham, who is now apparently some Hollywood hard man and heart throb, has dissed Kim Kardashian, for being a “brand”.

Now as far as I can tell, the Kardashians are in some recursive way common to many celebs famous for being famous, e.g. in the papers every fucking day, and certainly when I have looked at them they just look like sluts, and not every fuckable ones at that, so not exactly a hard target to choose, but what struck me and made me comment was the fact that Statham is dissing someone else….

Hard man my ass, look at that designer stubble and those oh so purty sweeeeet lips, Jason Statham is a bitch, with a bitch’s mouth, in more ways that one, jaw dropped moment from BJ girl that I could diss the sex god in such a manner, and I just threw out, off the top of my head, that he just does not LOOK like a man, unlike say for example Charles Bronson…. at which point the slut groaned and positive begged to suck my cock.

So there you have it, everything from Crysis 2 to Mr Majestyk, it can only be a day in a man’s life… pmsl

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