18th Moon Station

Mining money

There's that recent interest in Bitcoin, up to the point where it's seen as a viable place to safe up wealth and there's even malware network made to mine the money.

I still find it hard to accept the whole concept though. Well, the Bitcoin itself is fine, as an mean of exchange. The part I still don't like is the creation. Although with caps, the money is created from mining process, where computers donate their resources to support the monetary system.

Personally, I'd prefer money creation that's tied closely to the supply of goods & services. And talking of service, not the service of supporting the financial system, out of thin air, a need created by itself.

Another trip to Rangkasbitung

Long weekend! For yesterday, there’s an invitation to a free photo walk event to the city of Rangkasbitung. This is not the first time I went there, and I still remember the last time because I fall into a rice plantation and dirtied my shoe with mud. Also for memory is that we have to go back with bus because the train is stopped in fear of vandalism from soccer game supporters.

We went there by train again, and unlike previously, we only stay around the station to have some snapshots. Three hours long of train (mostly because the train parked in smaller stations inbetween for long time), we arrived at noon, not the best time of the day.

This need a claim

On June last year, I sent my lens for a cleaning, after all there’s dust and probably fungus growing inside. To save on time and cost, I choose a local lens service suggested by the local Leica user community. They gave him a good reputation for fixing rangefinder camera and lenses.

The result are not so good though. At first, I only thought that he lost the red dot. Well, I’m not so fussy to complain about such thing, as long as the lens itself is alright.

But apparently, it’s not just the red dot that’s missing, and slightly misaligned aperture ring. The focus ring is also wrong, at least that’s what I got today when trying to compare between my other two lenses (one using M39 ⇒ M adapter).

I’ll try bringing the lens and make a claim. After half year, hoping for a service under warranty is unrealistic, and I know he will use every single reason to refuse, but I just want to at least inform about that lack of quality in service.

Amazing things baby can do

The family event itself doesn’t have much to tell other than the dwindling number of third generation family members participating every year. Well, at least the second generations are still coming, they’re the sons and daughter after all.

The first frame of the day, came out more interesting than the rest

The swarming on the left, my niece (^-^;

When the dinosaurs extinct

So the web has voiced their anger towards the demise of Google Reader.

In the other hand, I’d like to see the bright side of it. The existence of Google in the playing field is killing innovation. Actually, existence of any centralized giant is killing the innovation especially for social services. This is because social network is useless unless all the person that has value to you is available.

Majority of the users will gather to the biggest, or at first, the most trusted brand that has gained traction. After that, the cost of maintaining a competitor that can’t retain value because the commodity (user base) are all sucked to the giants are will beat them to their knees.

Check the RSS reader market that allow synchronizing between devices. Applications that support Google Reader are easily found with quality from stellar to junk. Support for other service ? Not so much. More apparent is it in the smaller platform such as Windows.

Now with the giant exiting the game, smaller players can finally fill in the niche.

Lumia x20

Right now, Nokia has announced 5 models of the Windows Phone 8 series’ Lumia phones. While the number would signify their positioning, the latest announced 520 and 720 is kind of putting a ripple to the line.

So lets just do comparison.

Colour filter

These days, the main reason I shoot in RW2 (Panasonic’s raw file format) is to re-map the colours using film pack. It’s a film simulation plug in and although not documented, I'm just assuming that it will work better if the application can re-map the colour from raw data instead of already processed JPG file.

One problem is that the colour doesn’t always came out as I want it to be. Sometimes, it can be too purple, or too blue. Moving the white balance slider doesn’t change anything and the way I can try correcting the colour is by tweaking the colour balances through the RGB curves, which I’m still not good yet.

What if, the film pack ignore white balance setting and used a defined number in it only ? It just came to me yesterday. There’s Filter setting beneath, and back in the days when nobody has yet discovered the versatility of digital, they use colour filter to do corrections.

And true. Putting a weak colour filter setting, the colour can more or less be corrected. Above that, it also left less problem than inexperienced curve tweaking.

In my case, I want to add a little bit of yellow glow, but if I reduce the blue curve, the other colours got affected a lot more than if using filter.

Anyway, this mean I can use it a lot more now and start looking again for which one is my favourite :D

Less crowded temple on CNY

As been for the last three years, I went to temples on Chinese New Year for the purpose of shooting pictures again. What else, I don’t understand the ritual to do it myself. The last two years, I visited the bigger temple in Petak Sembilan, yes, the one with hundreds of peoples coming to wait for charity.

Well, that’s not interesting anymore, especially because the place is reek of cameramen hunting for that “unusual” moments.

For that reason, rather than going to the old town, I tried visiting smaller temples in less old part of the city.

Office 2013, subscribe or own ?

The new office licensing is interesting. Microsoft opened the Office 365 as an option for using Office, and this is subscription based.

The major kick they make to users’ ass is by removing family package of 3 devices for the Home & Student edition.

The post in Microsoft’s blog post assumed you will use Office on all five devices. Now lets assume a lower number of two/three computers (desktop, notebook and tablet if it’s not Windows RT).

Edition	1 year	2 years	3 years
365 Home Premium	$80	$160	$240
Home & Student	$220/330	$220/330	$220/330
Home & Business	$560/840	$560/840	$560/840
Professional	$1000/1500	$1000/1500	$1000/1500
Home & Student*	$110	$110	$110

* Imagining if Home & Students still have 3 licenses

Consolation

A new home screen and a new colour scheme, that’s all you can see from the update.

For those early adopters, we know that our dream of long term OS update for Windows Phone 7 to 8 is all buy crushed to pieces. Well, commodification of hardware is probably the best thing ever happened to consumers and the greatest idiotic move for the business so they wont ever let that happen again.

For us, the consolation from Microsoft is Windows Phone 7.8, an update that mainly help you to fool the person next to you that you’re having the newest OS version (it’s not).

With that bitching though, I don’t really miss a lot of things from Windows Phone 8 compared to 7.8.