Canon 450D video

There is no need to modify the camera, and I believe the principle behind this software is just to encode and write the live view stream to the hard drive. Since the camera does not have any audio input device, sound would be lacking. And for the camera will need to rely on the computer for the video capturing work, it would be nice if this software could be enhanced to take the audio stream from the computer.

This is just a testing video to see the effect of depth of field by using a cheap but fast camera lens. With that in mind, one should not say DV is superior for video capturing. And I always believe that most people would do video capturing in form of short video clips rather than continuous recording for very long.

Migration to OpenOffice.org

The migration work could be hard if you are actively exchanging your documents with other parties, however, there are some work in which you do not have to share with other people. Those work were the best candidate to get the migration started.

As a personal user, your personal documents would be the great starting point. For example, if you are a (full time or part time) student, you can start with your homework. Most teachers would not love DOC format for they could generate shifting here and there due to different versions of the software. PDF should be much better in this case, and OpenOffice.org could provide PDF without problem.

Switching users in Windows XP

I am never an expert or even a power user for Windows, but here's a handy tips which might be useful to others and myself (in the future). The situation is like this, when we found that we cannot switch between users, check this:

services.msc

And find out fast switching service, turn it on, and better yet, also make it start automatically so that it will work afterward, quick and simple.

Semantic shift in the macro world

This is a corner of my mobile phone screen. It's a white closing bracket ")" but in the macro world, it changes to something like a mouth shape in rainbow colors. The meaning of things could have dramatic shift in different point of view, and even different level of scale!

Life could be similar. Within yourself, there could be some meaning, within your family, you have another role, and in your society, your country, you got entirely different position, in the cosmic scale, we might lost our entire meaning as a human being who occupies negligible space over a blink of time.

Inside a SD card

I've a faulty SD card, so why not pull it open to have a look?





I guess the smaller chip is a controller and the bigger chip contains the memory cell.

Too many solid state memory?

I counted today, and I have the following:

1. 1 piece of 1G and 1 piece of 4G MiniSD inside my mobile phone

2. 2 pieces of 2G SD for my DC

3. 1 piece of 8G SD for my DSLR

4. 1 piece of 512M SD for my DSLR, but now only used for photo-development outside, another piece of 512M SD died

5. 2G thumbdrive

And inside my new PC, I have 4G memory but then only 3G is useable by Windows XP, and fortunately, I'm also a Linux user :-)

Over 20G!

好! 但不要叫我來做...

近日香港正生書院打算遷入梅窩，但這卻引來當地居民強烈不滿。

在於梅窩居民來說，這似乎不難理解。但在於普通市民來看，這似乎又太不近人情。這實在有點奇怪，但這卻又是一個正常不過的現像！有些大家看來都很好的事情，基本上要執行，每一個人都會贊成，但其實背後卻有一個重要的假設，那就是不要在我家附近！

若我們把這個現像推遠一點，我們就發現其實這個簡單的模型確實能解釋很多事情：

1. 捐錢幫助窮人實在是一件好事，但請不要叫我每月都捐出我收入的一個部份，別人要是這樣做我會很讚賞，但我就不會了

2. 捨身救人的好人：某某警察或消防員很偉大，但我的兒子最好不要當那些職業，要當也要以自己安全為首要啊！

3. 接納精神病人仕：那當然是一件好事，但請不要叫我參與

似乎這個 NIMBY 現像就是人自私的具體表現吧！但請不要怪別人，因為只要我們回頭想想，其實我們也是一樣的！