No, a 40D is not a guitar. It’s a DSLR. And I bought it today (technically speaking: yesterday). It will replace my 350D (which I will keep as a backup camera), but boy-oh-boy: it’s a different world altogether. I like the new machine. It has the same processor as my Powershot G9 (a Digic III) and that produces very nice images. The 40D has a bit more megapixels (10 instead of 8) and it has a ton of extra features compared to the 350D. One that I missed from the start: spot-metering. And ISO-settings in 1/3-stops (so 100->125->160->200 and not 100->200). There’s a lot more, but these are the two I missed most when I switched from Fuji S2 Pro to Canon 350D.

No spectacular pictures yet, just a bunch of testing-testing-1-2-testing….

I’m not sure how long my fingers and my patience will survive, but I’ve started an attempt to play the guitar. An electric guitar, that is. Because I don’t know whether I really like to play it (I like to listen to it though) I didn’t go off and buy a guitar, but lend one from my brother in law. We’ll see how things go.

The main idea behind this is that I want to do something with music again. When I was young (so much younger than today) I played the piano, which I liked very much. But a piano is not really an instrument that you are likely to take to a party and play some music. Since I like guitarmusic (not rockmusic, but the more musical variants) and I know some people playing the guitar actively, I thought that was a sensible choice.

I forgot to connect the power to the DVD-drive in the server, so later this week I’ll have to open it again.

Apart from that, I think the server is indeed a lot more responsive. Let me know what your experience is.

Update: well, I had to do it just a minute after posting, since the SATA drive stopped responding. Seems like the motherboard SATA works a bit different than the Promise SATA controller

Today I exchanged the server hardware with the hardware leftover from my desktop upgrade. So the CPU is now a dual 3GHz (AMD 64-bits) instead of a single 1GHz 32-bits processor. And the memory has been expanded from 512MB to 4GB. Response of the weblog and the gallery should be a lot faster.

On the downside, the 80GB IDE disk stopped working, so I need to check what I’m missing now. As far as I know it was the old disk holding the gallery images, but they were moved to the SATA disk some time ago.

To do: upgrade from Ubuntu 32-bits to 64-bits and reconfigure X to use the new videocard (the troublesome ATI, instead of the ancient NVidia V7700 GeForce2 card).

I’m addicted to HD. I bought even more BluRay-movies. Constantine, Wanted (A MUST SEE!), The Bourne Trilogy (can’t get enough of Bourne) and because of the sheer audio quality (as I read in a review on the net) Celine Dion’s A New Day, which indeed is so real that you can actually imagine that you were there at the concert.

BluRay is a new format, and you can see that the studio’s are still experimenting with the possibilities. Some use the same boring menu over and over again, others (the Pirates of the Caribbean movies) think people like to wait for the menu-buttons to appear, while others don’t include a disc-menu but only a popup-menu (not known on the DVD format). It’s confusing, but on the other hand, it makes the experience per movie even more exciting. What have they done with this movie, are there any nice features I can switch on (picture-in-picture extras are very nice), etcetera.

It’s addicting. I can’t recall I’ve spent as much money on DVD’s in such a short amount of time as I did now on BD’s. And because of the picture and audio quality, the rerun value is much higher than with DVD. You see more details, hear new background noises, or you need to watch it a third (or more) time because you keep getting stunned by the overall experience!

One advice: get decent equipment. Your surround speakers must be full-range (mine do 38/35-32.000Hz). Your subwoofer must be able to produce very low (below 30Hz, mine does a whopping 20Hz) frequencies. And of course, your TV needs to be FullHD (HD Ready 1080p as it’s now called). Don’t forget to invite your neighbors from time to time, so they know where that rumble they sometimes hear comes from…

I bought a BluRay burner. Great. The discs can hold 25 or 50GB of data, depending on whether you buy a single-layer or dual-layer disc, just like you have with DVD’s. You cannot burn BDMV’s, since modern settop-players don’t allow BDMV to be played from BD-R or BD-RE’s (just the crippled BDAV).
On Ubuntu you can’t play BluRay discs because of the stupid closed-source protection mechanism. And to top it all of, the software that comes with the burner (Cyberlink) doesn’t run under Virtual Machines (the way I use Windows) after the mandatory update (because I want to play BluRay content)….

So, I now have a 160 euro backup device, with 50GB discs that cost me about 16-20 euro’s, whereas I could have bought a DVD-DL burner for about 25 euro, and buy blank DVD’s costing close to nothing (60-80 eurocents, so about 4 euros per 50GB).

BluRay is the new way of screwing customers (as apposed to Blu being the new Black)…

I’ve put the NAD AV-receiver and DVD-player on Marktplaats. Within 30 minutes somebody called me to buy them, so let’s see if he really buys it. Tonight I’ll know more.

Yesterday I bought a Gigabit switch and a BluRay rewriter. The switch was mainly necessary because of the NAS-disk. Accessing it from several computers via 100Mbit makes the drive feel sluggish. Now on Gbit, it’s a lot faster. Of course the actual read and write times didn’t change, but browsing it and (dis)connecting it is faster.

After my last system upgrade, I found that I still had a PATA DVD-burner and the new motherboard only has 1 PATA connection (for two drives). Since I have two PATA drives in the system, I had to buy another burner. Instead of being el-cheapo and buying one for about 20-25 euro, I bought a BluRay-rewriter. The LG GGW-H20L. It’s not an easy task to play BluRay movies under Ubuntu, but creating them (since I own Nero Linux) is easy. The drive was recognized by Ubuntu and by Nero, and in no time I burned my first (rewritable) disc.

Recently I saw that my Technorati search did not display anything anymore, but forgot to look into it. It seems that my Technorati account had been on-hold or something, since I logged in into Technorati, and now it is fixed without changing anything on my side/site.

I guess with audio/video-equipment it’s just like with computers: when you upgrade this bit, you end up upgrading that bit too, and sooner than you know it: all of it has undergone major surgery. I told you I bought a new tv and a BluRay-player to go with it. My “old” AV-receiver is a decent one (NAD T753), but it doesn’t play the new HD-audio formats found on BluRay. So I looked around, checked my bankaccount, and now I have an Onkyo TX-SR606. Plays Dolby TrueHD and DTS Master Audio like a charm. And it’s much easier to setup and control than the NAD receiver is.

Tomorrow I have a listening session with a friend. He has exceptional ears (and Martin Logan electrostats to go with it), so we’ll see what he thinks of the system I now have.