I’ve just come across this little LG PDA which, amazingly, has been knocking around the office for a decade - it was reviewed in the December 1998 issue of PC Pro. Even stranger is the name: the Phenom, a title now belonging to AMD’s consumer CPUs.

Plugging in the power supply and switching on to see its black-and-white passive-matrix screen, I was whisked back to a peculiar moment in computing history. (more…)

Being a Canon man I’ve never been tempted by Capture NX before, but the press launch last week convinced me I should give it a whirl. Despite the name, it’s a proper digital photography workflow package with tagging and powerful processing tools, and the new version is being aimed more at the mainstream than professionals.

Unfortunately though, I’ll never use it, for one simple reason.

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I’m not the world’s biggest Vista fan. I don’t have it on my desktop machines, but I do on my laptops since even I’ll admit its suspend & resume is far more reliable than XP’s (or Ubuntu’s, or Fedora’s for that matter). One of the things I truly hate about it though, is the networking configuration interface. It never fails to lead me round in circles no matter how much I use it. It’s like a maze with moving walls and it gives me the willies.

So imagine my surprise today when it actually did something useful. (more…)

Here are the actions yours truly just performed in order to utterly fail to play a DRM-protected album, bought and paid for, by me, approximately two years ago.

Double-click on first track, sitting neatly in Cardigans | Gran Turismo folder under My Music. Windows Media Player starts. Tells me it needs rights. Click ‘get rights’. Need to download Napster client.

Sigh. (more…)

You think it’s annoying when Vista won’t let you play an HDCP video, or your printer locks itself out because it’s decided it’s reached the end of its life?

That’s nothing.

How about being a train driver and the train you’re (allegedly) in charge of refusing to move because its computer is in the wrong mode. (more…)

The image you see above is the result of a small torrent of Canon IXUS cameras that cascaded into the office today. There’s an IXUS 80 IS; an IXUS 85 IS; an IXUS 90 IS; and an IXUS 970 IS.

You’ll notice they all look rather similar. (more…)

Finally got my hands on Canon’s latest addition to its DSLR range, the EOS 450D, at the end of last week. Am always keen to see the new models in this particular range since I own a 350D, which is now three years old.

My 350D produces 8 million pixels; the 450D 12.2 million. So here’s a 100% crop of two shots I took with the two cameras, roughly 20 seconds apart. I used the same lens (a Tamron 28-75mm f/2.8 XR Di), at the same exposure settings (1/80th of a second at f/8) - click to enlarge them to full size:

Both were taken in RAW mode and processed in Canon’s own Digital Photo Professional application with identical default settings - same white balance, same sharpness, same contrast, same everything. I think you’ll agree, the difference in detail is less than obvious. The shot on the right - the 450D - is a little larger in size of course, but the actual rendition of detail is as near identical as makes no odds. (more…)

So anyway, get yourself into your time machine and set it for sometime around 1986. Once you get there, pop on your invisibility cloak, find someone who looks spoddy and follow them into the dining room. See that BBC Micro in the corner? Pop over and give the top a quick tug. Chances are it’s not screwed down.

That’s because, in the old days, computers were for hobbyists with soldering irons, and they were forever taking the tops off to install new circuit boards they’d made.

Doesn’t happen much anymore, of course - you might pop the side off once a year to install a new graphics card, but most people wouldn’t consider actually building new hardware to go inside their computer. And for very good reason: the insides of a modern PC are massively more complex and to build an add-on part yourself that would actually be any use is more or less impossible.

Thing is though, designing and connecting your own hardware to a PC, while unlikely to win you admiring glances from the opposite sex, is bloody good fun. Fact. I’ve been tinkering with the whole area again for the past year or so - for reasons I may document at some point - and it turns out that there’s a massive array of components that are relatively easy to interface to a PC and do interesting things with. (more…)