Category: Techie

Our new camera arrived yesterday. It’s a Casio Exilim EX-S2, and oooh it’s gorgeous.

We already have a perfectly good digital camera (an Olympus C3000), but it’s chunky, and we carry it around in a padded pouch. It has served us extremely well for the last two years, and will continue to do so. The pictures it takes are crisp, with vivid colours even under poor lighting conditions. It does great close-ups.

But we were finding that when it comes time to take Alex out on an adventure, it’s yet another bag to lug around. Alex is too tall to fit in the backpack any more, and so we usually bring the pushchair along. So we have a boy, a pushchair, a little backpack with supplies, and a camera bag. The camera bag does fit in the supplies bag, but taking snapshots becomes so much less spontaneous when you have to pull the pack off your back, open it, take out the camera bag, open it, take out the camera, switch it on, and…oh, he’s doing something else now.

The Exilim is the size of a credit card, only thicker. It’s pocketable. It turns on and is ready to take pictures in about a second. It has a fixed focus lens, so there’s very little shutter delay. And it has a 2 megapixel resolution, which means the images come in at up to 1600 x 1200. It is thoroughly sweet.

The photos it takes aren’t as good as those of the Olympus. But we got it as a snapshot camera, not as a high-end solution. And it takes some wonderful snapshots. It seems to do better with lots of light than it does indoors, but even indoors and without a flash it’s pretty good, provided you can keep the camera steady. (And this is not as easy as you might think. Its small size works against it in this regard.)

Overall, it promises to be a great addition to our photographic arsenal.

After a few suggestions from a friend I eventually found the solution to importing mail from Mozilla into Outlook. It’s a grotesque and hacky travesty of application compatibility, but there you go.

The full instructions are on Google NewsGroups here. In summary, you have to install Eudora 5.x. Eudora can import from Mozilla. Then you use Outlook Express (6) to import from Eudora. (OE says it can only import from versions up to 3, but it lies. 5 works fine, too.) Finally, you use Outlook to import from Outlook Express. (Outlook says that it can import directly from Eudora up to version 4, but it seems to make an incorrect assumption about the location of your Eudora mail store, and won’t allow you to change the import directory.)

You also have to watch the import from Mozilla to Eudora closely, because it seems to occasionally merge huge bundles of messages into a single one. (Open up each folder in Eudora, and look for messages with unusually large file sizes.) At least the bug seems to be consistent: running the import twice in a row will consistently merge the same messages. To get around this, I spent some time shuffling the affected messages around in Mozilla (putting them into different folders), and then re-importing.

Note that you also have to tell Mozilla to Compress its folders (from the File menu). It seems that when you move messages between folders in Mozilla, it just updates the mailbox indexes, not the mailbox files themselves. And it’s the mailbox files that Eudora imports. Compressing the folders forces Mozilla to physically move the messages, and re-index everything.

End-to-end time: about two hours this evening, plus an hour or so scouring the net to find out how to do it in the first place. Thanks, Mozilla. Don’t expect to see me back again.

Okay, so having decided that I would like to change my mail program from Mozilla to Outlook, I now find that it’s not possible to migrate my mail messages. It works fine the other way round, but apparently Mozilla developers/advocates seem offended at the very thought that anyone would want to switch away from their program, while at the same time Microsoft must think it’s beneath them to import from the lizard.

Duh.

In my last post I pointed to Joel Spolsky’s article about this very matter:

“The mature approach to strategy is not to try to force things on potential customers. If somebody isn’t even your customer yet, trying to lock them in just isn’t a good idea. When you have 100% market share, come talk to me about lock-in. Until then, if you try to lock them in now, it’s too early, and if any customer catches you in the act, you’ll just wind up locking them out. Nobody wants to switch to a product that is going to eliminate their freedom in the future.”

Email has been around for decades. Email is the only application that everyone on the internet uses. How stupid is it for two of the biggest email software developers not to be able to read each other’s files?

The second release of the Opera 7 beta (beta2) has been out for a couple of weeks now, but I only noticed it on Tuesday. It fixes a whole heap of bugs and partially implemented features, and even adds a few new ones, like the integrated password manager. It’s faster (slightly), and it crashes muchless. Joy!

If you’re running Windows, download it and give it a try. It’s free, it’s fast, and it’s a refreshingly superior product to Internet Explorer.

While I had my PC’s guts hanging out anyway, I decided to go ahead with yet Quiet PC modification: a silent video card heatsink. I have an ATI Radeon 7200, which comes with an on-board heatsink and fan. The new heatsink is a huge thing of copper and aluminium that replaces both of these. Without a fan, it is obviously going to be quieter than the old cooling solution.

I had thought my PC was quiet before…. Wow.