If you are following my Twitter stream for the past few months you might’ve noticed that I’ve been sharing a lot of photos which I took with my iPhone 4 using a certain iPhone App.  To be honest it’s like finding again my old passion on Photography which I used to be crazy about.  My first SLR was a Canon EOS 5 with vario lens 28 – 80.  I still have it, but it’s been gathering dust in my attic (shame on me, I know).  But somehow, since Digital cameras started to replace film camera, I got lazier.  Until recently.  iPhone 4 has been rekindling my love with Photography, and I am starting to re-learn what I knew before, as well as learning new techniques, especially in regards to Digital Photography.  Very exciting!

Today I found a nice video tutorial from the folks at Canon, about Lenses (Digital Lenses in particular).  This video tutorial explains about some basics on Lenses Lore :)

Things like:

• Digital Camera Sensor, and the difference with the Film Camera.
• Focal Length, and what are the effects of the variety of the Focal Length to our Photo.
• Lenses Speed.
• Zoom and Prime Lenses, and what are the differences between them.
• Depth of Field!

It’s a very short and basic tutorial but at the same time it covers almost all the important things about how Photographic Lenses work, what are their types, and how these effect our photos.  Enjoy!

What do you do if you have £40,000 in your pocket? Well you can’t buy a house, that’s for sure :) Not in London anyway, not even a tiny flat :( But I’m pretty damn sure that we could do many many things with £40,000. Especially when it’s so close to Christmas!

Ok, I tell you what I would do with £40,000! For a start, I would pay ALL my debt – loans, credit-cards, those 10 quids I owed my mate – ALL of them, and start my life clean again :)

And then with those taken care of …. let’s move on to some Geeky stuff!

Here is my list of ‘some’ of the items that would be in my Geek Shopping List, if I have about £40,000 to spare:

Intel Core i7 Extreme Edition 980X 3.33GHz

NVidia GTX 580 Graphic Cards (2 of course so I can do some SLI Wizardy)

Western Digital 2TB Hard Drive 7200RPM 64MB Cache (5 of them for a total 10TB behemoth)

500GB 3.5″ SATAII Solid State Drive (For a lightning fast OS)

Darkfield Laser Tracking Logitech MX Mouse (Love this mice)

Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard

Samsung 55 Inch 3D LED TV 1080p HD Ready Freeview HD

Denon AVR2311 AV Receiver (3D Ready)

Star Wars Super Deluxe AT-AT – 2 Feet Tall, with Sound Effects and a Speeder Bike inside! (This is Special!)

Champagne Hot Air Ballon Flight For Two – Yes, after I wiped off my drool over those stuff above, and after all the Euphoria has subsided, it’s time to take a break and spend a bit of *time* with you loved one :)  I am going to take my wife, who has been so patiently waiting on the side-line, for a romantic picnic in the sky :)

Those are MY LIST!  Tell me yours?

What about the £40K then?  Well, you need to thank PayPal for that, obviously when you win of course :)  What do you need to do?  Just buy anything online using PayPal (you need to be a PayPal member), and you will be automatically entered into the *weekly* draw.  This promotion will end at midnight the 5th of December 2010 (terms and condition apply).

You don’t have much time.  Hurry Up :)

Sponsored Post

If you have ever been in a long-haul flight (8 hours or more) in Economy Class, you would know that unless you are able to sleep all the way, the only thing that would keep you away from insanity is the so called InFlight Entertainment.  Depending on whom you are flying with, and which route you are taking, the system normally takes in a form of a screen attached in the back of a seat in front of you, or if you are unlucky, it will be a screen that comes down from the ceiling on top of every other rows that you must share with other passengers.  Typically you would be able to watch movies, listen to music or radio channels.  In a more advance unit, you could play some games, using the headset unit (which also function as a phone) as controller.  The movies usually are shown continuous play mode, you don’t usually have control over how the movies run.  So, if you want to watch one movie from the beginning, you need to wait until the current run finished, which also means, that if you want to watch a couple of movies in full, you need to prioritize your ‘playlist’.

At my recent long-haul flight though, I found a new breed of InFlight Entertainment that really blew me away.  This one is from the guys from Emirates.  They call this in-flight system, I.C.E, short of Information, Communication and Entertainment :)

Let’s start with the screen … the screen is a bright 10″ widescreen LCD!  Gone those blurry 5-7″ screen that I saw 3 years ago.  It’s now really a joy to watch movies on that screen.  The screen is really bright with a good contrast and vivid colour.

The next thing and this is for me quite an important one is that they are digital!  What I mean by this is that the media files are all in a digital form, probably stored in an array of hardisks somewhere in the plane, and served by a quite seemingly powerful media server.  The consequence of this is that, gone now the time when we had to schedule our ‘playlist’ perfectly so that we can watch or listen to what we want in a correct order.  Now we can pick anything we want, play it anytime we want, rewind it, fast forward it, or pause it, as you please!  It’s Freedom!  Think about the time when you were in the middle of a good part of a movie but you really needed to wee, well tough, you either had to wait until the end or miss the part.

Another thing that I thought was very cool and geeky was the Flight Information screen.  It used to be just a plain info on the speed, distance to the destination and outside temperature.  And then the upgraded it a bit with a flat map and the position of the plane on the map.  Now they are using something similar to Google Earth to show the position in 3D graphic.  Very cool!

On the communication side, apart from the usual telephony system, the system now featured a USB port where you can plug in your USB key and view Pictures and Documents that you have in your key.

And, more importantly maybe for ‘road warriors’, each seat has it’s own electricity plug!  Luxury :)

Again, I’m talking about Economy Class, here, not First or Business Class!

I managed to take some video of the ICE system, unfortunately it’s a bit blurry, I’m not sure why, but possibly because I was too close to the screen, and I was using just my Sony Ericsson phone to take the video, in a nervous mode, fretting that the stewardess would caught me doing it :)

So, apology for the bad quality, but I think you get the point, I hope :)

Part 1 is for the Information and Communication

Part 2 is for the Entertainment

Sadly, the new system seemed only being installed on particular type of Aeroplane and on a limited leg of journeys.  Because on the return flight, I was back with that crappy 7″

Disclaimer: I’m not an employee of Emirates, nor I’m in any affiliation with them. I’m just a happy customer :)

Yes, I’m a Geek, and the Matrix is there in my list of Top Geek Movies of all time (I haven’t actually made the list yet, but it’s a good idea).

This one, is there along with Starwars and Batman Lego.  Simply Genius!