Kristof Goossens

it’s been a while since I last posted, but that’s been because things have been getting very busy with two children. One of which fortunately sleeps most of the time, the other one who likes to go to school.

So what is new? I got myself two things for my birthday, one the cybook opus bookreader. i was looking at the different features and sizes and since most of them have the same resolution, I decided to go with the smallest screensize (which was also cheaper). i don’t have music supoort on this or a speaker, but since I have an iPod and all my music is in the apple format, i wasn’t going to be converting it anyway and it saves battery life. not to mention, my iPods suffice me when I want to hear music. I like the fact that this bookreader has over twelve different font sizes, something which the other readers I was considering lacked and which makes it easy to read the text in the size i want. Bigger when tired, smaller when just awake and active. The other bookreaders only had three sizes which were always either too big or too small for my taste. It has an expansion slot for additional memory cards (unlike the models from sony) and an easy navigation structure. Unfortunately it takes micro-sd cards instead of normal sd cards. I prefer normal SD as most laptops have a slot for those, but nothing that can’t be solved with a five euro converter. I have had to reboot it a number of times though, but it has to do with the fact that I have about 5000 etexts and 500 pictures on the expansion card, so it takes a while for the system to read them all in and display them. Fortunately the thing has an easy reset button, so that helps and I haven’t had it happen when not using the memory card, so I think I overdid it on ebooks and have to filter out what I want to take along instead of just taking everything. The screen is excellent quality and enough grey shades to display whatever you want. All in all, I’m very happy with it and it was cheap at only a little over 200 euros at the coolblue ereader store. In addition, you can get in in a lot of colours and it comes with it’s own (fake?) leather storage foldr which is very sturdy and excellent to store it in on the go as you don’t want to have the sceen unprotected against scratches and it saves you the money of having to buy a separate ebookreader-storage-holder or whatever to keep it safe in. Connection under Vista with adobe digital editions went fine (that’s a first for anything under vista with me so far) and I downloaded a lot of books from project gutenberg and feedbooks. One oddity is that I read the specs on the internet for the cybook opus say that it only has four shades of grey, but I’m certain mine has at least eight, so I think it exists in at least two versions as all those with four shades seem to be white ones while the new ones are coloured.

My second cool item was a darkfield mouse for the laptop as i have glass tables and shiny surfaces to work on and my current wireless microsoft mouse doesn’t work on those, so I end up using mousepads or with cramped fingers from repeated mousing to things; Turns out that logitech has the darkfield system which enables mousing on glass. Turns out that it works excellent and I’m mousing with the Anywhere MX while writing this on a reflective table without problems (also tried my jeans, the carpet and the bedsheets. All work perfect. I was a bit concerned when I inserted the batteries at first and nothing happened; no bright laser or blue or red glow. Turns out the thing is completely invisible cause even my digital cameras can’t see the darkfield (yeah on reflection, I see where they got the inspiration for the name) and it does work excellently. Also nice is the fact that you can keep the receiver plugged in and switch off the mouse itself and the fact that it has an amazingly smooth scrollwheel that you can give a spin to get to the end of documents in a single go. The wight and form is just perfect for me and it even comes with it’s own storage pouch like a real rodent would love to have. I’m having a hard time not to pat it on its back a few times before it goes to sleep in there.

We discovered a great company in the  UK called betweenthesheets where they make custom bed dressings in all kinds of different materials. Leather, polyurethane, silk, satin, bamboo, latex and any colour or colour combination you can wish for. They even make custom designs on request and deliver worldwide. We fell in love with a black and purple set which was shown on the website. The great part of it is that the duvet cover is custom colours, so you can pick and mix the colours and materials.  We had been looking for satin sheets for a while, but none could be found in normal stores. Since the guest bed where we wanted to use the sheets is located in the cinema room, we also wanted them to be of a subdued colour as white reflects the light from the big screen.  In addition, Rhiana has managed to spill her milk and cookies on the bed before, so having something with a water-resistant surface was even better.  Betweenthesheets created a custom sheet with purple satin on one side and black polyurethane on the other. The silk is very sensual to lie in and the PU is excellent in repelling water or oils. Thus far, the sheets have resisted ice cream, smarties, lush massage bars and someone grabbing hold of the side and pulling herself up on them with sticky hands. And best of all, it only takes a wipe down with a wet sponge to keep the glossy PU clean. For complete cleaning, the sheets can be washed at 40°C as well. The PU is very resilient and made from the same made from the same material as PU clothing with a very strong and flexible backing. Even the satin is very sturdy and feels very heavy and luxurious. Shipping is very affordable and the Parcelforce tracking system means you always know where your package is. We’ve ordered there two times and both times, the package was sent in about a week time with excellent customer service.

ilse, Rhiana and me went to the beach yesterday and it was an excellent place to try out my camera gear.

Some lessons I have learned:

• Remember that every canon setting (p, Tv, Av) remembers it’s own setting and that changing picture size in one mode doesn’t set it for all modes.
• Partial averaging is a bad idea when your subject is wearing a black jacket.
• Changing the autofocus setting for continuous AF is don with the AF button on the right of the 1000D and not in a menu (and i wasted minutes looking for it there)
• Always remember to set the white balance back to automatic after having used it on manual mode
• AI focus = let the camera choose focus mode; AI servo = keep the subject in focus by tracking it
• Put one lens and a flash on and stick to it, cause kids run around too fast to keep up.
• Seagulls are bloody hard to track with a 250mm

Well, since we were expecting company, I started cleaning out the basement which has the look of a shipping base since all the stuff for the renovations and my bike upgrades comes in there. As i was doing so, I came across an old fire detector (We replaced those with a more advanced system by Bosh with central monitoring and double failsafe outgoing communication lines (Yes, as former telecom engineer, I like redundancy in all systems.) I’m also a paranoid bastard who’ll think ways around systems to see if they can be outsmarted. In this context, I also had to look to see if the old detector had fissionables in them since they can always come in handy when it comes to practical jokes (Note to Daphné, the resident counter-terrorism expert and lizardly-shoed one, it was unfortunately one of the newer type with optical detection). On a side-note the metal parts were unexpectedly sharp so It’ll be nine-finger typing on Monday. I really do wonder why all sharp things seem to have it in for my pinkie. (it’s Pinky and the Brain, yes Pinky and the Brain, one is a genius, the other’s insaaane…). So as I was opening up the stuff, my iPod (well, one of the pink backup iPods actually : ) switches over to the theme from mission impossible. I wonder how much Apple is starting to know about me to make such good predictions. By the way, trying to make left-handed images with a dslr of a finger on the right hand is nearly impossible if you’re right-handed and working with little light. On retrospect, maybe normal people would have grabbed a bandage instead of the right lens to get it in focus. Fortunately I had some disinfectant nearby from the time a got that Tribal tattoo on my shoulder. So no problems there. (just kidding, I know my mum reads this stuff too. Hi mum. how about that Canon 70-200 F 2.8 L IS and 7D body for Christmas or that CBF 125/varader 125? Oh and our daughter is really out to get the rear doors open of the VW golf. The VW Scirocco has no rear doors. Coincidence? I think not. Tell dad to get the one with the 170bhp diesel or 210bhp gasoline and DSG transmission. Shadowblue or Salsared, preferably with the VW Dynaudio Excite speaker upgrade package. Mann gönnt sich ja sonst nichts.

I recently bought a ring flash add on for my canon speedlite; it’s actually a big plastic circle which channels the light from the speedlite and distributes the light around the lines. It’s very big and costs about one stop of light, but that still means a lot more power than a regular ring flash, and also a lot cheaper. The two disadvantages that I found were that it blocks the red focus pattern transmitted by the speedlite and that it does not allow firing of a secondary speedlite in slave mode. It does provide a very cost-effective method of macro and ring flash photography though.

The following comparison shots were made when I came home with the new add-on. Notice the “what the heck has he bought now-look on the model : )

Straight regular speedlite

Speedlite sent trough the ring flash

You can find more info for it here.

well, that didn’t take long. the electronic measuring and filter system has broken down already. After only two refills, the display went dead when trying to reset it. I’ve opened it up to see what is inside and it’s the battery which went dead. So either this thing is pulling way too much power from the batteries or Brita is putting cells low on power in there. Fortunately, they can be replaced without destroying the sensor. everything clips into place.

A friend had his phone stolen and I had the same model as he wanted, so i sold mine and bought an LG KP500 cookie since I wanted a cheap smartphone. I do love it as it has handwriting recognition, an acceptable camera (no flash or focus unfortunately) but a memory card slot at the side so I can quickly get it out and copy stuff from the card onto the pc and put music on the card. most smartphones have the card buried away underneath the battery so that it has to be taken apart, so this was a big selling point to me.

The supplied pc suite software is mediocre at best as it keeps crashing on my windows vista pc, but I did manage to get the contacts and important settings onto it after a few tries.  USB connection speed is very slow at best, so having the removable memory card really solves all this.

The email settings were a bit more difficult to set up so here they are for those using hotmail or gmail via a belgian base account. (Thanks to P. Suhas from the microsoft mobile support helpdesk for the settings and quick reply to help request)

and the BASE GPRS EMAIL settings are

I got a new set of gloves from chainreactioncycles. it’s the Dakine Cross-x glove. They fit perfectly and are very cool due to the mesh fabric, but the smell is truly awful. I’m going to put these in front of a fan for a while until the nasty chemical odour has worn off cause my hands smell as if I’ve been working on a toxic spill. There is a nice soft fabric on the thumb to swipe away the sweat and I really love that in this hot weather.

And for the really rainy days, I got the oakley OTG visor which goes over my glasses when it rains. I also took the fire lens which looks really cool and actually improves contrast. There are large vent openings, but I have my doubts about how well the oakley OTG will survive usage with the soft foam. It’s really flexible though, so it feels very safe. Downside of the fact that it is an OTG is that it is incredibly big and looks somewhat ridiculous under a mountain bike helmet. Still it’ll keep my glasses from fogging up in the winter when it snows.

And finaly my long-desired Giro ionos helmet. It’s so cool that you even get a cap to wear under it during colder days. I must say that you really feel the wind trough the vents, but my hair is a bit too long to really get the full effect, so I’ll be trying a shorter haircut next time. It has huge vents and carbon inserts, but I can’t really say that it is lighter than my very cheap giro indicator. On the top right picture, the extra insulation is inserted to show you how it looks. There is also an extra set of inside paddings provided so that you can replace everything when it wears out. it is anti-bacterial silver and with the best fit I’ve ever seen. In short, I love it, but on rainy days, I’ll take the indicator helmet, cause all the water seeps down my glasses with the Ionos. You can’t beat ir for comfort and coolness though. Still, the indicator is a lot more value for money at only a fifth of the price.

Well, we bought a croozer for two since I couldn’t take my daughter along on the mountainbike.

And she really loves the way she can see everything from in there. Together with a book and a teddybear to keep her occupied when the road gets boring, it makes for a perfect combination. my top speed is reduced from 33 to 20-something though and you really feel the added weight when pedalling and on the brakes. There is a special cover against the rain and a second cover to protect her from debris coming of the wheels. There is a lot of room for luggage in the back as well.