We all know the stories about how vacationing smartphone users became the victim of high roaming charges, resulting in monthly bills sometimes exceeding €1000. To put an end to this, the EU has come up with a rule stating that carriers can no longer charge more than €50 per month for roaming, and are obliged to warn the user before reaching this limit. That all sounds nice and consumer friendly, but I recently tested this, and received an “interesting” monthly bill from T-Mobile.
Tag: vacation
Fixing Photo Creation Dates
You know how it is on vacation. You take your camera, shoot pictures, and when you get home you see that you forgot to set the date/time on your camera. Even worse: your wife also took a camera with her, and she actually read the manual and set the time correctly. So now you have two sets of photos with mismatching date/times. Now what?
It turns out that there is actually a pretty simple trick to solve this, and you don’t even haven to install exiftool or do funny command line voodo. If you have iPhoto and a mouse, here’s what you do:
How to share Garmin routes with your friends
I’ve been struggling to get routes into my Garmin Zūmo® in such a way that it matches the plans of the original author, while at the same time setting the Garmin to “recalculate” so that when I take a wrong turn, it will send me back to the track. After reading a lot on the Garmin forums, and experimenting with this on my two recent road trips (one to Eifel and one to Sauerland in Germany) I can say I have found a way to do this. It’s a bit of work, but it will make your trip a lot more trouble-free. Here’s the recipe.
Needed:
– Nice motorcycle route in a GPX or GDB file
– Garmin BaseCamp (BaseCamp 3.0.1.0 for OSX at time of writing)
– Garmin Zūmo® (model 660 at time of writing)
Why you want a Polarizer Filter
I recently bought a 50mm lens with a circular polarizer. I though I’d share some quick examples to show what a polarizer filter does for your photo’s.
The polarization effect is probably one of the few (if not only) effect which you can not reproduce in photoshop or any other image processing program. Most applications try by increasing saturation, which is nowhere near the effect of a real polarizer.
By rotating the filter, you have the luxury of choosing how much effect you want to have, anywhere between 0% and 100%. The shots below give you an idea what the range of the effect is:
Shooting 16:9 with a 4:3 Camera
If you have a Canon Ixus 80IS, like me, and you shoot video for your widescreen television at home (like me), you may want to try out this little trick.
The Canon Ixus is a 4:3 camera. The video that comes out of it is almost square shaped. When you try to make a 16:9 video, you can stretch it, or crop it. Cropping is far better, but you need some “headroom” to do that. If you made a closeup, chances are that you do not have enough room to crop to a 16:9 format.
I solved this by making this little chart, which I placed on a memorycard and put in my camera. By previewing the image on the camera’s display, you know where the “16:9 limit” is. I put two pieces of half-translucent tape on the camera, so I can tell what fit’s inside the 16:9 frame. I also included the other formats, like 3:2, and 2.39:1, should you want to make wide-screen theater movies 🙂
Then, I load up the movie in iMovie, and it will be cropped perfectly. Suppose you missed the 16:9 frame or want to re-center your shot, you can always press the “crop” button in your project to tell iMovie which piece of the image you want.
New York online…
We have returned from our trip to New York. Actually, we’ve been staying in Weehawken, New Jersey to visit Manhattan. Today I maxed out my upload limit for this month to put the pictures online. You can see them at my 32hq account (because Flickr hurts my eyes).
Enjoy the pictures. When the monthly upload limit expires I’ll upload some more, so maybe it’s wise to subscribe to my photo feed.
1 week Gran Canaria
Last week in Gran Canaria, I…