SCNView may change your point of view

Ugh… SceneKit is both promising and frustrating.  It appears to be a very stereotypical case of “version 1” syndrome – nice idea, flaky implementation and very skimpy documentation. So amongst the many strange, undocumented foibles it has, one in particular is quite egregious.  When you add an SCNNode to your SCNView-rendered scene, containing an SCNCamera, the… Read more

New iMac’s SD card slot

I find it odd that I haven’t seen or heard a single comment about the latest model iMac’s SD card slot being on the back, buried amongst the inaccessible ports.  People complained quite vocally about it being merely on the side.

Call of Duty: Black Ops

In a word: clusterfuck. I really enjoyed Modern Warfare.  It’s one of my favourite FPS’s of all time.  It was fun, challenging, had an interesting storyline… it was “realistic” but not to the point of losing the whole point of the game – to be a game, a form of entertainment.  Alas, Black Ops is… Read more

Yosemite management: surprisingly, not buttholes

Marisa & I had booked, nearly two months ago, a campsite in Yosemite for this weekend. We’d been looking forward to it greatly. And then this Hantavirus “outbreak” is announced, and gets worse over the weekend – more deaths, more confirmed cases, more suspect areas of the park – and, well shit. After much consternation,… Read more

The effect of a circular polarising filter

Stanford Dish with polarising filter switched to "on"

I’ve had a circular polarising filter on my 55-300 since I got it, since it came with one.  It also came with a UV filter, which I’ve never used.  I also bought a circular polarising filter for my 18-55, on the assumption that the filter made everything unequivocally better.  But then I started to pay… Read more

Pleasantly surprised by Sony

A few weeks back I went on a white-water rafting trip, taking with my Sony Cyber-Shot DSC-TX10.  It worked pretty well the whole trip, but at the end of the day I discovered that there was a crack in the case, with a small chunk missing.  Well shit.  I’d babied it the whole day, being… Read more