blue camera

I was half-thinking of trading in my Nikon Coolpix 2500 compact digicam, as 2 megapixels don’t make it any more. So I braved the Boxing Day sales, and came back with rather more camera than I bargained for.

Henry’s have a special on this week; $299 for the 5 megapixel Sony Cybershot P100. Any colour, as long as it’s blue. The other colours are $500. Go figure.

It’s small, feels solid, handles well, and has a Zeiss lens (ah, how I miss my Yashica T5). The downsides are that it uses Sony’s weird, expensive Memory Sticks, and it doesn’t record sensor size for field-of-view information (ignorable if you’re not a panorama nerd). It doesn’t seem to want to connect to my Gentoo box as a USB storage device, but that could be a config problem on my part.

I also got the quite ridiculous Sandisk 12-in-1 card reader, despite its crappy packaging. It seems to work nicely as both a CF and Memory Stick reader on the Gentoo machine.

Attack of the Dodgy Duracells

My Palm gave up the ghost yesterday, less than a couple of weeks after fitting new batteries. I should have been suspicious of the remarkably cheap Duracell brand batteries I got from the corner shop. They are marked For Original Equipment ONLY.

A set of Duracell brand AAA batteries usually lasts me about two months. I wonder if these were some kind of pirated battery?