Yongnuo wireless remote camera release

I recently purchased a Yongnuo wireless remote control for my Canon 20D off ebay for £20 not expecting an awful lot it has to be said but I've been very pleasantly surprised. Here's a brief rundown of it's features:-

 - 1x Red LED on receiver for Power.

 - 1x Green/Red LED on receiver, Green for half press & Red for full press (visual confirmation).

 - Power switch on receiver.

 - Focus and fire button (half and full press) on receiver that can be used without a battery so no need for both wired and wireless remotes!

 - Single shot, 2 second timer, bulb and continuous shot mode. For bulb and continuous you press and hold the button for 3 seconds and it locks, then just do a half press (focus only) to stop it. The 2 second timer mode is enabled by flicking a switch on the transmitter.

 - Both batteries included.

The remote can be purchased from UK Highland Photography on ebay which is where I got mine.

I also tested the range of the remote using the included batteries (Great Power CR2 Lithium in receiver with a healthy 3.24v) by walking away from it and pressing the shutter button every 5m or so. I got about 55m away before it stopped taking photos which is somewhat short of the 100m range quoted; it's possible a new battery in the transmitter may have helped as I never tested that but it's absolutely fine for what I will be using it for so I'm not that bothered. The only problem was that while walking back towards the camera I was pressing the remote button but it didn't take any photos so there may be a problem with it going out of range and then coming back into range, stay within 50m and you should be fine though.


Overall for £20 I can't recommend this highly enough if you need a wireless remote release!


Disclaimer: I have nothing to do with either Yongnuo or UK Highland Photography and I paid for this out of my own pocket. I'm sharing this info as I couldn't find a review anywhere online.
UPDATE: I've been informed of another review at the DPreview forums here, so much for my Google skills!

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Left handed Canon 350D

 

Watching episode 2 of Channel 4's Picture This I noticed that they mirrored a certain section (at 8.33mins) giving the illusion of a left handed Canon 350D. I'm still waiting for a response back from Renegade Pictures as to whether this was a mistake or done for artistic merit. Sad I know but makes a change from pixel peeping ;-)

Open letter to the CRB

 

My business partner and I have been looking into setting up an Internet Radio station and realised most of our competion is in the states. On behalf of all european net broadcasters I would like to extend our warm welcome for putting most of our competitiors out of business, we never realised the US government would be such a great ally.

Sincerely Yours
Association of European Net Broadcasters

Delkin Sensor Swabs

I recently went digital and one of the things I was most excited about was the thought that I wouldn't have to clone out dust spots anymore, oh how wrong I was! It turns out DSLR's have dust problems on the sensors and while several manufacturers have cleaning systems built into the cameras they don't really work that well, although some are better than others.

I first bought a Canon 400D which does have a sensor cleaner but after taking a test shot to check for dust I saw it not only came from the factory with dust on it but that the cleaning system made almost no difference whatsoever, even after several cleans.

After getting frustrated with the small grip I traded it for a Canon 30D which has no sensor cleaner and also came with free dust! After reading many forums I realised that I would have to put up with a small amount of dust that usually isn't visible at larger apertures and that I would need to invest in some sort of cleaning system.

My local shop only had the Delkin Digital Duster sensor swab refilss for £29.99 which comes with fluid and 14 swabs and is similar in price to the Eclipse ones. I also bought a rocket blower. The rocket blower certainly blew away one large piece of dust and the sensor looked clean to my eyes but a test shot revelaed it was still very dirty so I tried out the swabs and this is what happened.

These are the results from using the Delkin Digital Duster sensor swabs. The shots were taken against the sky with focus set to infinity and the aperture on F36, they where then contrast enchanced by +80 in Photoshop.

You can probably only just see the difference in these small pictures but the after shot is significantly cleaner. To be fair, even beforehand it was very dificult to notice any dust in standard photos as most photos are NOT contrast enchanced or taken at F36, but I did have to do the odd bit of cloning so this will definitely make things easier. The only negative is that the swabs were too wide to fit into the D30 sensor hole and required a firm push and slight tilt to get in which made me VERY nervous! Overall though I highly rcommend these swabs.

Response to the Ofcom Digital dividend Review

The following is a copy of the e-mail I sent to Ofcom about their Digital Dividend Review. With any luck Ofcom will try and steer UK freeview TV in a high quality direction (picture and content) rather than the current lowest common denominator approach.

High definition on Freeview

Summary:-

- The increase in channels on Freeview has lead to the thinning out of advertising revenue.

- The thinning out of advertising revenue has meant TV stations taking fewer risks and turned many into copy cat quiz shows in the evening.

- The increase in channels has also lead to higher compression ratios and thus reduced picture quality.

- There is a balance between having enough TV stations needed to satisfy the diverse needs in our society and having so many that the quality of programmes and picture quality decline. Do we really need seven quiz shows broadcast simultaneously?.

- By allocating enough spectrum from the DDR to High definition Public Service Broadcasts you are in effect helping to prevent dilution of the market and thus keep quality high among TV channels.

- Most OECD countries (even Mexico!) and numerous other countries already have or are planning High Definition OTA broadcasts. The UK would become the “old man” of Europe if we failed to keep up.

- Citizens including myself believe that the UK should be a technology leader rather than a laggard. By adopting HD for at least the PSB’s (Public Service Broadcasters) we are sending a clear message that we are a hi tech country.

- HD OTA broadcasts would help drive the adoption of HD televisions and provide an economic benefit to many UK companies.

As the amount of channels has increased on Freeview then inversely the advertising revenue available to each channel has decreased as viewers are now spread more thinly. As a result of this we are seeing the quality of programming on commercial channels decrease significantly.

The other side effect of increased channels is that because there is only a finite amount of bandwidth the increased compression needed to add the extra channels decreases the picture quality. Programs screened on ITV3 and ITV4 are often rendered un-watchable due to MPEG artifacts and macro blocking as the compression rate is simply far too high (examples below).

While choice is undoubtedly a good thing and the addition of extra channels on free OTA broadcasting allows a greater variety of interests to be served there is clearly a balance between choice and quality, and at the moment it looks like that balance has been exceeded as night time broadcasts offer very little in the way of either diversity or quality.

I say this as Freeview is now plastered with quiz shows in the evening due to some channels turning away from their normal shows and over to broadcasting often highly questionable quiz shows (look at the bottom of this page) that are not only facsimile’s of each other but also bring little social value. Surely the advent of tens of channels on OTA broadcasting was designed to bring variety yet this is simply not happening in the evening. Obviously there is more money in the quiz shows than traditional forms of television which have been funded by advertising. While commercial channels are designed, and have every right, to make a profit they are also in a unique position compared to all other commercial enterprises as they are effectively allowed into people’s living rooms and bedrooms. Thus, there must be some form of balance in what is broadcast on the limited number of free OTA channels. In this case that balance must come from Ofcom and not the free market which is only concerned with the money side of broadcasting.

By allocating some of the spectrum in the digital dividend to High Definition services from PSB’s you will in a sense be steering the market away from channel saturation and thus prevent the finite amount of viewers (and thus advertising revenue) being diluted even more thinly. This is not intervening, but merely steering.

The knock on effect is that commercial channels will have more advertising revenue available and be able to create higher quality shows and start taking more risks again and go beyond the staple viewer funded quiz show format.

While a bigger choice of channels was rated more highly in Ofcom’s research than HD, this was clearly under the assumption that more channels would create more choice and diversity. Unfortunately, the market has shown that an increase in channels does not necessarily lead to greater diversity and thus the social impact that could be made by an increase in channels (and thus variety) simply isn’t happening.

I believe that Ofcom should help steer the market in a different and more sustainable direction by allocating some of the digital dividend to High Definition PSB broadcasts and, hopefully, local television too.

Examples of poor quality pictures due to high compression rates:-

Macro blocking – Seen in fasting moving sequences even on BBC1

Mosquito Noise – Seen on all channels especially ITV3 and ITV4

Pictures taken from an article at http://www.videsignline.com/howto/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=180207350

Differences in NTFS cluster sizes on VMWare hosts

I decided to do some testing to see if changing the NTFS cluster size on a VMWare host would make any difference to the speed of a VMWare guest. Logic would dictate that as the files are very large in size (gigabytes) a larger cluster size would be better.

Unfortunately there are no benchmarks anywhere and people on forums either said to use large 64k clusters because VMWare files are 2GB+ or that it wouldn't really make any difference. No one could point to any actual data or real world testing and VMWare itself doesn't seem to have any recommendations in its white papers on performance tuning (which I found surprising). So before creating a stable production environment I thought I'd run some tests on a new server to see what happens.

I setup a single RAID 5 array with four disks and then created a 40GB boot partition (4K Clusters) onto which I installed a fresh copy of Windows 2003 Enterprise SP1. I then created an extended partition on the rest of the free space and within that created 2 logical 40GB drives, one formatted with the default cluster size of 4K and the other with a 64K cluster size. VMWare was installed on the boot partition and two identical Virtual Machines were placed on the logical drives (J: and K:).

SiSoft Sandra 2005 SR1 was installed inside each VM to benchmark file performance and also installed on the main server itself as a reference.

Setup details:-

Dell PE2900, 1x Quad Core 1.6Ghz Xeon 5310, 4GB 667Mhz FB RAM, PERC 5/i 256MB RAID Controller (256MB Cache with "read ahead normal" & "Write Back" cache settings) Stripe size 64K, 4x 250GB 7.2k SATA disks in RAID 5 configuration.

Host OS setup - Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition with SP1 - NO roles defined - NO Extra services, latest Dell drivers, VMWare Server 1.0.1 build 29996, SiSoft Sandra 2005.2.10.50

Virtual Machine OS setup- Windows 2003 Enterprise Edition SP1 - NO roles defined - NO Extra Services, VMWare tools, SiSoft Sandra 2005.2.10.50

*Notes:- VM Tests were run 3 times and then averaged, ‘average access time’ results varied wildly on the VM's and sometimes didn't appear in SiSoft so you should ignore them.

The Bare metal tests were only run twice (and averaged) and the same results are used on ALL graphs merely as a reference. In general the results were more consistent than the VM tests. They are there solely as a reference point to see the difference between bare metal and a VM.

IMPORTANT: Please remember, the bare metals tests were run without anything else running, are duplicated on all graphs and can only be directly compared to a Virtual Machine in the first graph.

Results as follows:-

* The 4K Cluster ‘buffered write’ seen above is an anomaly, the three results were 240, 351 and 231 so clearly the 2^nd run was way out and should be dismissed.

As you can see straight away there is barely any difference between cluster sizes and overall file system performance holds up incredibly well compared to bare metal, especially ‘sequential writes’. The one area where it does fall down quite a bit is ‘sequential reads’ meaning if your users regularly pull lots or large files off your server there is no substitute for bare metal.

With one VM sitting idle and the other benchmarking there is very little difference in performance. Again, the difference between 4K and 64K clusters is minimal and could quite easily be put down to benchmarking variables.

Again, there is very little difference between the two cluster sizes, the differences are almost too small to be noteworthy. Please note that although performance has dropped off considerably here this is due to the benchmarks we are running and is not indicative of every day usage, these results should ONLY be used to compare cluster size differences.

Conclusion

First off SiSoft Sandra results varied quite a bit between each run so if you did enough runs you would probably find that the results between cluster sizes would be even closer.

In general though I'm amazed at how good VMWare is, seeing as this is a virtualised environment it’s very impressive. Generally speaking the biggest hit comes in buffered writes and sequential reads so I suggest leaving Write cache on your RAID controller to "Write Back" which is faster but less secure in a power cut. If you have a decent UPS which allows your server to shutdown gracefully (and you've tested this!) you should be fine.

So, 64K or 4K cluster size? Well, from the results above I'd give the nod to the default 4K clusters, there's barely anything in it but it does appear fractionally quicker in sequential reads (the important bit) and you also get the nice warm feeling knowing that your defragmenter of choice will be compatible with 4K clusters.

Phone scam update - New numbers - OFCOM complaints needed

From the comments I've received on the last article it looks like I helped a few people out and prevented the scammers getting some of their precious money, so yay and thanks for the comments! Unfortunately the scammers have predictably just started to use more numbers but with the same sort of message, and it also seems they are using 070 numbers which are personal numbers that cost considerably more than 0871 or standard mobile numbers.

I've just tested all of the following numbers and they are still live so please, if you get a chance, call Ofcom and register a complaint with them to get these numbers shut down, it only takes 2 minutes and it's very painless!  They can be contacted on 0845 456 3000 or at www.ofcom.org.uk

0871 208 9406 - Message asking me to call 0871 208 9408

0871 208 9407 - Scam on hold message

0871 208 9408 - Scam on hold message

0871 208 4197 - Scam on hold message

0871 240 9000 - Message claiming the number is no longer available

0709 986 8454 - Rang and then forwarded to voicemail

Have a look at these forums for more info and postings regarding this:-

http://blog.hackingcough.com/2006/08/endemols_getric.htm

http://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/showthread.html?t=299163

Phone Scam in the UK - 0871 208 9407 - Recording of scam message below

I know this isn't strictly computer related but I've just had a message left on my home answer phone from 0871 240 9000 asking me to call a national rate number to pick up a message and I thought I'd share some details here so other people can avoid the scam. 0871 isn't premium rate but it is charged at around 8-10p a minute and the company behind it will be taking a cut of that amount, probably around 2p a minute.

What happens is that you call the number and then get put on hold indefinitely, no one will ever pick up the phone as there's no-one there, they just want you to stay on for as long as possible so they can make as much money as possible, and at 2p a minute that will need to be for a long time!

I called Ofcom on 0845 456 3000 and they knew about this one already, took my details and said they would get the line shutdown. Unfortunately it seems the people/companies behind this use plenty of PO boxes and fake front companies to avoid the authorities catching up with them, although apparently "they are" catching up with them.

Here is the full transcript from the call and remember they keep changing numbers but if it starts 0871 it's almost definitely a scam.

"Hi this is James from the information team, err, this is our second attempt to contact you, you have a message awaiting your collection. To collect your message simple, just call us on 0871 208 9407, thanks" 

They even have fake background office noise to make it sound legitimate! Reading other forums it seems that "James from DPS" and "Paul at the Information team" are also popular ones. If you fancy a listen to what this all sounds like I made a recording that you are free to download (right click and 'save as') and pass on to whoever you want, and if you recognise this person's voice please let me or Ofcom ( 0845 456 3000) know their identity.

MP3 of phone message 

Other links:-

Scroll down to the bottom of this link for user comments

Quality Amstrad Products

You may have seen these phones in the UK version of the Apprentice, basically they're crappy Amstrad video phones that started out life selling at £99 in most of the major electrical retailers like Curry's and Comet. In the last three months I've been laughing when I'm in Tesco's as every time I go in they  get cheaper, and as you can see from the first picture they have gone through quite a few price revisions!

I managed to get these sad snaps of their final selling price before they probably get dumped in a landfill as I doubt you could even give these away! The price's you see here are probably even below cost. Quite frankly this sums up Amstrad's UK consumer appeal, so Alan if you're reading this, you might want to try and go a bit more upmarket, an alien concept I know but you never know ;-)

 

   

Zalman VGA Cooler on 6600GT

I like the quiet life and I like my PC to be quiet. I have a Tagan TG480 PSU which is whisper quiet and 2x 120mm fans connected to a fan controller running at almost the lowest level, the only thing I can hear on my PC is the graphics card cooler so I did some research and found the Zalman cooler to be the best (and quietest) for the 6600GT and would also allow me to use it on the 7950GT I plan to buy in the future.

Here's the original and noisy cooler on the card:-

 

Notice the holes used for the original heatsink in yellow and the standard Nvidia holes marked in blue that are to be used for the Zalman Cooler.

 

 

 

All good so far, and after cleaning the GPU and then applying some Arctic Silver 5 compound (HIGHLY recommended) it was time to fit the Zalman cooler. Unfortunately as you can see the cooler does not fit properly! With the pins fully screwed into the cooler (black arrow) they now do not quite line up with the PCB holes (blue arrow). Moving the pins into the other holes on the cooler for other cards just made it worse, they were definitely in the right cooler holes but they wouldn't fit.

 

 

 

 A quick check on the web and I saw that a couple of other reviewers had had the same problem so here's the fix:-

 

Loosen the pins slightly so there is some play in them (black arrows) and the push them through the holes (blue arrows). Once through you can use some point nose pliers to tighten them back up again 'almost' all the way. They fit very tightly against the PCB after this!

After all this effort I found that the Zalman fan wasn't that quiet and I could still hear it so I used the included fan mate controller and slowed the fan down to it's slowest setting. I thought this would effect the temperature but I was wrong, I still acheived a drop from 53c to 40c and I could no longer hear the fan, mission accomplished!

 

Standard cooler at idle = 53c       Standard noise = Audible even in special sound proof case.

Zalman cooler at idle   = 40c         Zalman cooler = In-audible from around 30cms in the open at fans slowest speed.

Sony's lost sales.....

I was just about to order the new Leftfield compilation "A Final Hit" but I thought I better check who publishes it first, and low and behold it's Sony/BMG. I'd love to buy the album but there's buckley's chance of Sony getting my money so I'm left in a bit of a quandry as I really wanted the CD. Some people who are boycotting Sony have talked about downloading an artists music and then giving their money directly to the artist/band, I've no idea how you could do this in practice apart from writing a cheque (are millionaires really likely to go down the bank to cash a £10 cheque?) and in Leftfields case that may be slightly difficult as they've split up. Another option is to donate the money to charity?

Interestingly this is a quote from the leftfield forum:-
"What's the point in reactivating this forum when Leftfield don't even exist anymore? Well apart from this money-grabbing "greatest hits" CD Sony have got out to milk their fans."

I don't have a problem with an artist or label producing a greatest hits CD but the thought of Sony fleecing Leftfield fans makes my skin crawl, as such I think the only option is for me to buy a few of the old albums containing the tracks I want from eBay. Hopefully I won't get screwed with a DRM'ed disc but we'll see!

As a side note I've seen various posts from people who were just about to buy a Sony item but then due to the whole rootkit snafu and Sony's general attitude towards it's customers have changed their minds and several of these were about to spend thousands of pounds/dollars. Now I know it's only techies and people that care about this stuff that are going to boycott Sony but if we add up the general level of hate towards Sony at the moment I'd say they'll have lost a few million quid this Christmas. While probably only a few percent of their total sale's around this time it does give me a nice warm feeling knowing they missed out on millions and that I was there and did my bit :-)

Some reasons to boycott Sony

I've been involved in the CE and IT business for over 10 years and from what I've seen over that time I can confidently say Sony would love to control the formats of every type of medium out there and thus take a licencing cut of everything. Everything from formats (ATRAC, Betamax etc) to memory cards have been re-invented by Sony so that they get a slice of the pie from everything you buy. That's right, the reason Sony cameras, phones and camcorders only use Memory Stick flash cards is so that they get more of your money. The other formats like SD, MMC and compact flash are better supported, cheaper and faster but obvioulsy Sony won't get your money of you buy them so they had to re-invent the wheel as such to make sure that never happened.

Sony used to make the best products at a particular price point but times are changing and other manufacturers have caught up and sometimes overtaken them. With their new philosophy of making things as difficult as possible for their customers, trying to extract the most amount of money possible and now rootkiting peoples PC's I have vowed never to buy another Sony product or CD again. That means I'm going HD-DVD rather than Blu-ray as I simply don't trust Sony anymore, and neither should you. Interestingly HD-DVD allows managed copy whereas Blu-ray does NOT. You have been warned.

- Sony exec Steve Heckler says Sony will firewall your PC to stop pirating
- Rather than using industry standard memory cards Sony introduces the Memory stick so that it can make money from you after it's sold you a camera, camcorder, laptop, phone etc
- Realisng that it's patents are about to run out on CD's Sony introduces SACD discs as a replacement for high end audio and multi channel audio rather than using DVD audio (DVD-A)
- Sony refuses to introduce a music player that actually plays MP3 files until this year. Up until now you had to covert your entire music collection over to ATRAC
- Sony rootkits your PC and then says "what, what's wrong?"

If you have any more please post your comments.

First post

The first post on what may very well be a long journey.......