Simon de la Court - Blog

Moved to new blog

Simon de la Court — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 12:08:50 +0000

Ukraine

Simon de la Court — Sun, 14 Sep 2008 13:34:46 +0000

Months back now we (Julian, Michel, Wilbert and I) visited Ukraine, a small impression:

Making racket together

Simon de la Court — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 17:12:48 +0000

Yes, with modern flash techniques you can do all kinds of cool things, now Muxicall offers a musical colab app. It is pretty cool and worth trying. So try Muxicall.

UNKLE - More Stories

Simon de la Court — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 12:55:44 +0000

After the smashing War Stories album UNKLE has released a new album called More Stories. The album is again a mixture of electronica, dance and rock, but has a more dance-like sound. Again an amazing album, worth listening and buying.

Music maestro

Simon de la Court — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:48:07 +0000

PMA Camera updates

Simon de la Court — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 08:45:18 +0000

On PMA several companies have launched some gear. Pentax, the first to launch gear launched a K20D and a K200D. The K20D is more like a K10D update, it has a new 14.6 megapixel cmos sensor and claims to be seriously better on noise control. The K100D contains the K10D sensor.

Canon came, they day after Pentax, with the Canon EOS 450D. They have updated the 400D with live view, more megapixels (12), larger viewfinder, slightly redesigned body (larger grip!) and new battery system (including new battery-grip). The camera also features the Digic III processing unit.

And then, Nikon came. Nikon launched the D60, which is a D40x with better sensor cleaning, some improved light measurement. Not much of an update, but it will keep the catching going.

No long awaited 5D right. Canon says no, not now, just wait, they introduce 2 big things every year. So we’ll see what happens on Photokina this september.

The Ninth Floor by Jessica Dimmock

Simon de la Court — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 08:33:15 +0000

The amazing reportage of Jessica Dimmock called The Ninth Floor has been ‘remixed’ into a multimedia project by medistorm. Jessica Dimmock portrays the lives of squatters in an apartment in New York. An amazing piece of work.

Link: http://mediastorm.org/0021.htm
Jessica Dimmock: http://www.jessicadimmock.com/

Website redecoration

Simon de la Court — Sat, 08 Dec 2007 18:57:20 +0000

I redecorated (more like removed a lot of decoration) my website, looks good now imho.. Really clean and nice. Should somewhat validate with W3C (did not really check yet).

Lightroom 1.3

Simon de la Court — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:33:45 +0000

The Adobe Lightroom team seems keep up their productivity and have released a new cool version,

Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III
Canon PowerShot G9
Nikon D3
Nikon D300
Olympus E-3
Olympus SP-560 UZ
Panasonic DMC-L10

Lightroom 1.3 includes corrections for the following issues:

Writing XMP metadata automatically has been corrected for performance issues
Printing with the native resolution option enabled no longer sets the wrong dimension for portrait oriented images
Prior to Camera Raw 4.3 there was the possibility that artifacts in edge transitions could be introduced through the Bayer demosaic and luminance noise reductions algorithms. This has been corrected.
The Canon sRAW format and the Fuji compressed RAF formats are now supported.
Lightroom 1.3 includes the following enhancements:
The import dialog now offers the option to render 1:1 previews as part of the import process
The export dialog layout has been enhanced
A Lightroom Preview Export

Speed improvements for Windows and OS X versions have been reported. The official Adobe servers are kinda having a hard time so I provide my mirrors here:

Windows: http://simondelacourt.nl/dl/LTRM_WWEFG_win_1_3.exe
Mac: http://simondelacourt.nl/dl/LTRM_WWEFG_mac_1_3.dmg

Monopolists to the extreme

Simon de la Court — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 09:43:43 +0000

Big corps like to keep their income secured, Microsoft surely does. The Classmate project provides cheap computers to ‘poor’ countries. These PC’s come pre-installed with a Linux version, something that really fits the ideologic part of this project. But, hey, MS was shocked, they saw that these countries with a major digital potential might be using Linux in the future! So they tried to get those PCs with MS Windows XP, but Mandriva (a linux distribution) succeeded into getting them to run Linux. But, the giant reacts, and somehow gets the Nigerian government to install Windows after the Classmate PCs are installed with Mandriva… That’s some extreme monopoly protection.

Source: Mandrive Blog