What did I do?

Well, I started a chain of events in motion...

A few days ago I ordered a secondhand Olympus E-PM1. That arrived pretty swiftly and of course that's when all the fun started. It arrived with no lens cap, no filter, no neck strap and no lens hood. Not even a filter to protect the front element.

It's a nifty little thing with a high ISO of 12,800 - way higher than I was expecting. I have been able to download images onto a Windows computer but as there is no raw processing software, I'm a little limited right now.

The good - it works really well. I have yet to take a night sky image that I really like but that's just a matter of perseverance. It's light and small. So small in fact that it's not going to look obvious.

The bad - it really eats up the battery. I suspect I might have to get a couple of extra batteries. Olympus Viewer 3 is not compatible with my Mac as my Mac is 9 years old. I had been thinking of getting a new battery for my Mac since it has been misbehaving and I believe that misbehaviour is due to the 9 year old battery being several thousand cycles past its prime.

My tablet is not going to be sent for warranty repair. I just don't feel it's worth sending my tablet off. Sure - for $10 I could get a replacement tablet but to be honest, it's not up to photography or anything remotely worthwhile. I suspect I'll probably end up using my RCA tablet for target practice in rather the manner of the now famous Death of a Virgin video I did some years ago with a less than satisfactory cellphone.
The question is now whether I should get a way better tablet or a battery for my Macbook. I'm definitely at a point where almost all the technology I have is 10 years old and beginning to show signs of age. Don't get me wrong - my Macbook works perfectly well when it's plugged in now that it has got past the silly stage with the screen going black every time I took a breath.

My aim with the new camera is to take pictures like the following sky picture but sharper in the corners. This lack of sharpness was caused by a less than stellar lens - the Tamron 17-35 f2.8. The corners were described by one critic as "softer than last night's mashed potatoes".

I had a little go with my Olympus and got a reasonable night sky photo. I need to work more on this. I'm finding when I overexpose, I get purple blotches but that's not particularly important. That's just a response of the sensor to chronic overexposure. The photo is nice and sharp though.

Interestingly, the tree leaves aren't that sharp. That could have been due to a breeze though. What I'm more interested by is the sky though. The stars are really showing well. I need to do more practice with this camera. I certainly need to be able to work with the RAW files.

This is a straight out of camera JPEG with the 14-42 lens set at 14mm. It's not too bad. I'll have to do more testing and work out how to get the best out of it. So far I have discovered at least one camera software bug. When I get the connecting cable - it uses a small USB connector that I do not possess so I had to order one from China - I'll be able to use the one Olympus app that did download - the one that allows me to update the camera and lens firmware automatically.

Things are definitely progressing. I might well have to upgrade my computer though. I certainly do not want to go over to Windows. I really detest the glitchy nature of the Windows operating system. Each version seems to be a giant step backward from the previous. I looked into a Chromebook but there's so little difference between Chromebooks and tablets there seems singularly little purpose in having one.

Regarding tablets, I found that just about every existing tablet has a micro USB charging port. That's what failed on my latest RCA tablet. I did have an RCA tablet before but that just didn't have enough memory to be remotely useful. My Nexus 7 was pretty good but the USB socket worked loose and though I could cope with it, the software onboard corrupted itself rendering the tablet non-functional. My Nexus 4 phone (purchased in April of 2013) developed a loose USB charging port too. I had to switch over to using a cordless charger. It charges as long as I hold the USB cord in place so I went cordless instead. My Nexus 7 didn't have that luxury.

I'm slowly trying to dig myself out of a technological black hole. I was dead right that a Mac would last far longer than a Windows laptop. I'd have been through between 3 and 5 Windows laptops in the time I have owned my Macbook and it still works. The alternative (which looks attractive) is a Windows laptop running Linux.

More interestingly, my night sky photo taken with the Tamron lens was taken at 1600ISO and f2.8 for 30 seconds on a Canon XT. My (overexposed) photo with my Olympus at 128000ISO and f5.6 and 40 seconds. That's -2 stops on aperture, +3 stops on ISO and +0.25 stops on exposure. So, it's just over a stop overexposed. I'll play with it a bit more.

Reading around, it seems that some photographers have used F4 with 800ISO to get great night sky images. I've read others that swear by 3200ISO and F2.8 with 30 seconds as being the only way to get a great photo. Given such a wide variance I have to assume other factors are at play than exposure. It might be that there's a wider variation of ISO sensitivity between cameras than there really should be. It could be the ISO standard isn't being adhered to all that strongly. It could be a problem with location - maybe my area of night sky isn't clear enough. I know a few miles away, the best I could achieve was this.

As I've said, there's plenty room for experimentation and practice. Since the daily portion of my current job ends for the summer in a few weeks, perhaps I can head off for a few days to a dark sky area to do some real experimentation.

I cannot reccomend RCA tablets

In December I bought an RCA tablet. It was the 7 inch Voyager 2 Pro and was purchased in December from Walmart. No fault of Walmart what subsequently transpired.

The tablet came with a keyboard case. The keyboard was a delight to use. The problems with the tablet were minimal. It was fast, had sufficient storage and worked well. The keyboard was at a very strange angle. With the keyboard level, reading the screen was somewhat hard due to its narrow viewing angle. A few apps wouldn't work on it. The screen was low resolution and didn't have a great color gamut.

Then on the 20th of March, the USB charger port worked loose. It had been getting gradually sloppier and sloppier. It stopped charging the tablet totally. As it was under manufacturer warranty, I contacted RCA. They responded - eventually - with a series of very confusing emails. It transpired they wanted me to spend $10 to ship their incompetently constructed hardware back to them. They promised to ship me back - not a new purple tablet but a reconditioned black tablet. Basically they would be shipping me a tablet somebody else had rejected or had failed to keep their payments up on.

So, because RCA is incompetent in their construction, they want me to pay $10 to ship their junk back to them. No - no way. I am not throwing $10 of good money away after $50 wasted on trash.

That set me thinking. I spent $90 on a Nook Color. That let me down, embarrasingly, in public. At a time when they were going on eBay for $75 I listed it and got the princely sum of $26 for it. Way under the going rate. I took it just to get shot of the bloody thing.

Then I bought a $50 RCA 7 inch tablet with 8GB storage. That was so worthless I threw it in the closet and spent $100 on a reconditioned Nexus 7. That worked reasonably well but stopped working about 12 months later. I did the factory reset which was when I discovered the factory image was missing. It had bricked itself!

Looking around I found lots of people that allegedly fixed tablets. None would reflash my Nexus 7. I don't have a good enough internet connection out in the sticks to download the gigabytes of data needed to fix it. It went in the closet.

So, next was the latest RCA disaster area. By now I have spent $290 on tablets and regained $26. Basically I have spent the $269 of an iPad mini and had nothing but frustration.

It is looking increasingly as though Android tablets of whatever price are just throwaway devices. As soon as they go wrong, throw them away. It's not as simple as that though. All data stored on them can be restored after deletion. With villains so easily undeleting data, the only way to ensure data security is to destroy the device.

So, I could spend $10 more on my RCA junk AND run the risk of somebody stealing my data. I don't think I'll bite on that one!

Whre to go from here? Well, there are 3 options:
1. Fix my laptop (it probably needs a new battery) and say "stuff tablets".
2. Buy a new junk tablet and hope it will last longer.
3. Stretch my finances, say "stuff it" and buy an iPad mini.

From my experience, it seems the weak point on the Android junk is the USB charger. All of my tablets and my phone have USB charging ports. All the USB ports have failed. My phone is now charged solely via a cordless charging pad. My Nexus 7 USB was getting very loose. The latest RCA tablet has probably got broken solder connections. This is why Apple uses their Lightning connector.

The reason why we have crappy USB connectors is because the EU wanted a standard power connector to reduce electronic waste. It actually causes more electronic waste because when the flimsy USB connector fails, the device is thrown away. It's just too expensive to repair them.

This leaves me blogging with just my phone and a bluetooth keyboard. It's not a happy state of affairs. I am not happy! Given that my Nexus 4 Android phone is complaining of memory issues, I  suspect it is not long for the road either.

Clearly I'm going to have to go forward from here. The solution might be an iPad mini and simply replace my phone when it dies - probably with a flip phone. Each time I buy a smartphone, I swear I will go back to a flip phone. Give that nobod ever calls me, that might well be the way forward. As far as the tablet, I'm not sure that I wouldn't be better just fixing my laptop and not bothering with a tabet. Perhaps just get a cheap Chromebook.

Competition Time!

For a bit of fun, my local camera club announced a competition last month. The closing date for entries is tomorrow. That being said - I left it late to do my entries so late that I've not been able to give them the attention due.

For the first two weeks I just procrastinated. Well, what with an exhausting job and countless ailments caught off the urchins at work, I've not had a sweet and rosy time. Indeed, I have barely been able to attend to my main project of building my home.

Anyway, the competition was a combinations competition. The first photo was of a book, an envelope and a pen. I spiced it up a little! The second was a sign, a lamp and a phone - that was by far the easiest. The last was a box, a kitchen sink and a pair of shoes. There were of course many more items on the list including a squirrel. I could have shot a squirrel and put the corpse in a photo easily but I'd rather not kill for frivolous things.

 

 

 

 

 

Well, hope you enjoyed the photos. I've been rather preoccupied with various things of late. Of course, despite having had a tax refund, I've been a good little boy and have not actually spent any of it. I'd kinda like to get a secondhand mirrorless camera in order to take better night sky photos. I'd like to get my Macbook working again and I'd like to get a replacement for my two defunct tablets. That's all going to cost money however and money is in short supply and about to become incredibly short supply due to work ending in a little over a month.