I’ve switched almost completely from using a compact digital camera to using a film camera this year. I scan my 35 mm negatives with a low-end flatbed scanner, namely Epson Perfection 2480 Photo. It is possible to obtain reasonable results using that cheap device, but it’s not easy. I’ve been learning a lot during the process […]
About a week ago, I’ve upgraded CUPS from 1.1 to 1.2 on my print server. I know one should never touch a working CUPS installation, but as Debian 4.0 is based on CUPS 1.2 I’d have to make the upgrade sooner or later anyway. Of course, after the upgrade my printing stopped working as usually. […]
Some Czech spammers are completely impudent and ignoring Czech law forbidding spamming activities. Europe should be civilized enough to be able to prevent such behavior here. I’ve received another piece of spam from Hotel u Lípy today. Enough is enough, so I started looking for possibilities to retaliate, resulting in posting a grievance against them […]
With the increasing complexity of modern user interfaces the number of annoying bugs grows. What is worse, number of long standing unfixed annoying bugs grows. The overall number of bugs grows and I’m able to do something only with a small part of them. Complex user interfaces have been being released without coming through a […]
I’ve successfully finished my first year of distant study of civil engineering. Some fun, some hard work, as the distant study is mostly based on working out a lot of exercises. You can either actually make the exercises or you can copy them (which is formally disallowed of course). IMO the first way, although sometimes […]
When I scanned photos from the Fuji Superia 400 film I was very unhappy with grainy shadows. The grain seems to be really worse there than in brighter areas even when considering the effect of higher noise visibility in dark areas. I couldn’t get rid of it even when I tried to significantly overexpose. By […]
I’ve finally managed to process my photos from the last winter. You can look at samples of my photos taken under moon light. They are not good photos but they show how moonlight photography can look like. Note the photos are somewhat shaky because I forgot the remote control at home and had to hold […]
After using my Olympus C-2100 UZ digital camera for several years exclusively I slowly revive my old film equipment. Despite the great practical advantages of digital cameras such as immediate feedback, in-camera processing, no dust (with a proper camera), no scratches, data safety, low snapshot costs, low weight, etc., there are still some problems. I […]
When I upgraded my computer, I wanted to make it available to my family even when I’m sitting in front of it (this happens most of the time). Natural way to allow this is to connect additional terminals to the computer. The simplest, cheapest and power saving kind of terminal consists just of a set […]
Well, not only proprietary drivers are crappy, they are just more crappy than anything else. Free software sometimes suffers from serious problems too. I use a dedicated virtual machine to manage my printing services. One of the reasons I’ve put it on a separate machine is stability: While software on my other machines is updated, […]