Connor Bevans

Yes, my readers, I present to you an incredible leak, from an anonymous employee at some sort of smartphone development firm. He wasn’t able to provide me with an image of the phone, but this logo (which is definitely not photoshopped) provides me with sufficient evidence that the president will be using a device entitled the “BarackBerry”, which is secured through only the highest standards of encryption, while still giving him the same great function of his old phone. Apparently, however, another company may be developing their own phone for the president, called the “iBama”, though the source seems quite sketchy.

BlackBerry logo vector found at:
Brands of the World

In the digital age traditional 35mm film has almost completely died out, and we’ve lost an incredible format. This summer I took a two week program on black and white film photography. While I already knew all about camera stuff and how incredible photography was, I had never experimented with film. I was born in the digital age, I hadn’t even loaded a roll into a camera until the program. In the digital age everything goes quickly, and we spend a lot of our time staring at an LCD screen until our eyes hurt. Film just doesn’t work like that. Getting one good print takes a lot more skill and a lot more time, but I also enjoy it more.

What makes it more fun? The physicality of it. Picking up the undeveloped photo paper in a darkroom with only an orange safety light and carrying it over to the chemistry and watching your photo magically appear out of nowhere. Little things that in Photoshop may have been instant or not even done at all become so much more incredible to perform. For instance, when you make a print you load your neg into an enlarger, which uses a lens to project the image onto photo paper. There’s a special tool for focusing this lens called the “Grain Focuser”. What this tool does is it reflects the light into your eye, basically making you see a super zoomed in version of the print. It was tricky at first to get it right, but once I got it, there was an incredible feeling of accomplishment, and it was worth it.

Black and white is also amazing, often we rely on great colours to make a fantastic photograph, by removing this part of our photos, we need to compensate with the other half to make a great photo. I ended up focusing a lot more on composition than anything else. Contrast in black and white film is also fantastic, and crisp, though beginner’s prints often turn out muddy due to their poor exposures. Black and white gave me great detail when I got my exposure right, and ended up just being an awesome format to work with.

There’s definite downsides to film, and for me, it’s really a bit of a novelty, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t a great format to work in, so, every once in awhile, I’ll probably be posting a few shots in Black and White film to my Flickr, so stay tuned.

Thanks to Nokia, I was able to get my hands on their latest Nokia N95 8GB smartphone. Let’s get down to this thing they call, um, what is it again? Oh yeah, a review.

Media and Look

Well, I’m sure you’ve seen a few shots of the phone before, but it comes in Silver and Black and is about 4 inches long, 2 inches wide, and insanely thick. Like, literal Candy Bar thick, not Candy Bar phone thick, approximately .82 inches thick. That’s no joke, people. The phone’s a slider, which takes a bit off the length, but the huge phone is made up for by a nice 2.5 inch screen.The built-in speakers are quite impressive for a phone, but still aren’t anything amazing. It works in landscape and portrait mode, but you have to actually have to slide the slider one of it’s two ways to make it change mode. For landscape, slide out the multimedia tab which includes basic media controls, and for portrait, slide out the keypad tab. It includes two cameras, a 5 megapixel camera with flash which takes great pictures which are generally the quality of a point and shoot camera from a few years back. There’s also a front-facing camera which is about 2 megapixels. Another nice thing is the face that it actually has a 3.5 mm stereo jack included right on the side.

Feel, Operating System, and Technical Specs

The N95 runs Symbian OS, and can use great apps like Qik for live video from your phone, twibble for mobile twitter, or Fring for all of your IM and VOIP on the go. However, I’ve experienced a few problems with the phone. For one, it locks up occasionally. It will freeze and sometimes it just needs to load something, and other times it entirely stops working and forces me to pull out the battery. Overall, the OS looks and feels nice though, and the apps are welcome and work great. The system has a great big 128MB of ram, which definitely packs a punch and aids in it’s impressive gaming section. It comes with integrated GPS, however I haven’t been able to connect to it, because of Rogers’ network. It uses 3G, which definitely makes a huge difference in speed.

Conclusion and the (Inevitable) Comparison to the iPhone

So, where do we go from here. We’ve found out it’s a nice phone. We’ve found out it has 3G, GPS, multimedia, and downloadable apps. Sounds like a product that’s recently been announced? Yes, as expected, I’ve come to the comparison between it and the iPhone. The iPhone 2 has all of the features and more that the N95 has, and more, at a lower price. The only real reason to get an N95 over the iPhone is if you really care about the camera in your phone, and have some sort of love for really thick objects. I have a digital SLR, if I use the camera in my phone, it’s for quick little action shots at times where I wasn’t carrying around my camera, or was really bored. The N95 isn’t next generation for mobile phones other than the fact that it’s got good specs, 3G, GPS, and a great camera. It doesn’t have something comparable to multi-touch or the amazing web browser  of the iPhone. It doesn’t step up it’s game. And now, there’s been rumored replacements for great camera phones, for instance Sony’s apparent 8 megapixel camera. It’s got custom apps, the iPhone has the App Store, a single place to get all of these apps. It’s got multimedia, the iPhone has the classic and loved iPod interface. It’s got 3G and GPS, so does the iPhone. The iPhone has twice the RAM the N95 has. The iPhone is better in almost every aspect. The iPhone, unfortunately, leaves the N95 in the dust. However, I’m excited to see what Nokia pulls out their sleeves to try and compete with the iPhone now.

So, I decided it was time to join the pack (albeit a bit late) and do my own iWant list. Here we go:

• Camcorder. Not sure what type, thinking of a Canon XL1 maybe, has to have some form of higher quality mic input though.
• MIDI Keyboard. Well, necessarily MIDI, but some sort of thing I could use to control Logic with, thinking 2-4 octaves (16-32 keys), and like, $50-125.
• Microphone for Camcorder. Most likely will be an SM58, however, maybe something else.
• MarsEdit: So you can have more wonderful blog posts like this!
• iPhone/N95: Okay, might not get this one for awhile, but whatever, it goes on here anyways. Let’s hope that I can upgrade from my current phone to either one in September!
• New Camera - D60, switching to Nikon! Also:
• Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 lens
• SB-600 Flash with diffuser
• 18-200 VR Lens (won’t be getting this for awhile, it comes with a 18-55 VR)
• Crazy In The Future: MacBook Pro: I want to go portable!

Nope, not that I remember at least. Why did this guy take my post? I don’t know. He doesn’t have a contact page, so I looked him up, and I’ll be contacting him. Most likely by email. His info:

  Ine Ikegami (webmaster@rayzedblog.com)  

    4050 Goosetown Drive     Asheville     North Carolina,28801     US 

Tel. +1.8285820079  

Oh, and here’s what he took: Mine, and his. The link back to me isn’t even correct. Bastard Somewhat less than likable person.

UPDATE: Alright, his email doesn’t work. Its not even real, I get a delivery notification error. So what do I do? Maybe I’ll phone him, maybe not. The info is probably fake for that too though.

I found this one just a few nights ago, and I loved it instantly. It’s www.game-ism.com, and it’s awesome. It’s an example of what a blogger should really attempt to be. His posts are the right length, well thought out, and give you the sense that he’s really put time into this. Example: TF2 vs. Vanilla FPS. Not only does he give us a full post, he provides diagrams to support his theories. His posts are very much devoted into looking deeper into games. Not just their mechanics, but also their story line, and the symbolism in the games. They’re long posts, but they’re entertaining posts.

 Example. He knows he overanalyzed, but both him and his audience don’t care. Why? Because that’s the fun of the post. It takes apart the song by someone who knows a lot about the game, not someone who’s never played it but  graduated with honors from Oxford after finishing a doctoral study on the combination of story and song. While the person who has a doctorate might be more knowledgeable in symbolism and general story, he probably won’t know as much about the characters and story of the game. But anyways, the blog is great. Check it out, guys.

Now, people have advised to get the Xbox 360, at least for someone who has one. But why? Because of the downloadable content. I am currently playing the game on my PS3. Why? Because that way I could get it as soon as possible. The reason I don’t really care about not having the downloadable content is the fact that there’s already so much content in the game. It’s fairly likely that I won’t finish the game for quite awhile, maybe even a year or so, and by that time, there will be another game to take it’s place. However, there is one downside of getting it for PS3 (personally). System updates. Some reason Sony has decided to make all of the updates for the PS3 force you to go into the system menu and download some huge ass file and install it. Though this isn’t really Rockstar’s fault, it still sucks that I have to take like, 10 minutes to update my PS3, and when you’re waiting to play GTA IV Multiplayer, those 10 minutes seem like an hour. The only reason to have the PS3 instead is the fact that the load times are a faster, often almost instantaneous is what I found. I have to say, though, I don’t think it’s possible for this game not to be enjoyable, I mean, this is probably Game of The Year material, and we’re less than half way through 2008. Alright, I’ve got to go, Roman is calling me…

Just a quick note to say I hate Rogers Internet. Why? They’re throttling bandwidth to bittorrent. I conducted a few tests to see how well they were doing it too:

1.  Juno - 3192 seeders, 390 leechers - Averaging less than 20kbps down - Averaging around 20 kbps up
2. Scrubs Season 1 - 43 Seeders, 83 leechers - Averaging around 25kbps down - Averaging around 50kbps up
3. Ubuntu 7.10 - 131 Seeders, 8 leechers - Extreme variatons from 10-100kbps down - Averaging around 15kbps up

This raises the question. What’s with Ubuntu? Are they somehow filtering our downloads on torrents? Would that not mean that they’re actually looking at what we’re doing on the internet? Even if it’s a bot which is looking, that means that they have access to everything we’re doing on the internet. I’m not sure what to do about this. I’ll be calling them soon to ask, and I’ll hopefully have a recording of it. I know that there’s ways around this, but they require doing a bunch of stuff to your router firewall/ports, and I’m really not going to give up. I don’t even use bittorrent much, but when I do I really don’t want to be reminded that they’re either a. looking at my data or b. throttling all of it. If you’re thinking of changing, Steve Saylor, suggested Cogeco.

PS - If I stay on rogers, I might be buying the Extreme Plus package, 18mbps down is pretty good - Though this package seems to have disappeared off of the website…Hmm…

Okay, instead of writing a post about why I love Earth Day, I’ll give a post on why I hate it. Earth Day is a superficial method of making people think that they’re making a difference, while still doing relatively little. Oh, and yes, it’s just for a day. Not a year. That’s the thing about it, we should just be doing this one day, or one week, or one hour; We should be doing this every day, every week, every hour.

And we shouldn’t have to have some sort of gain for us to do this, because the real gain is our planet being healthier. Look at what happened on Earth Hour; We saved a ton of energy in just one hour. Now imagine if we were doing that at around 20-50% the level, all the time. We’d save at least enough energy to power over 459 million homes if just Toronto did Earth hour 24/7 for a year at 20% of the effectiveness of Earth Hour. Now imagine if the whole world did that. We’d be doing a great service to our lord, Mrs. Earthsberg, and a great service to ourselves. 

So, if you’re going to Earth Day, why not make it an Earth Year? It doesn’t take that much effort.

Over the past year few months I’ve improved as a photographer immensely. Though not only in my actual image capturing, in my editing abilities as well. Aperture and Photoshop help, but many of the adjustments I make could be done in GIMP, just not as easily or as quickly. Example  of a shot I would have taken a few months ago. Example of a shot I’ve taken within the last week or so. Clearly, there’s been a lot of improvement. I’ve begun to take more time into framing, and choosing a specific ISO. I still generally use AF, just because most of the time it’s correct, but at least when it’s wrong I’m fast enough at MF that I can get it focused in a few seconds. Overall, I can gladly and truthfully say, I am a much better photographer than I used to be.

PS - I’d like to thank Michael for letting me use his D40x at podcamp, there was only a 50mm prime lens on it, which made me have to really think about how I’m going to take a shot.