Playing With my New Lens

Not so long ago I got some new toys for my Olympus E-500 camera. One is this Sigma 18-50mm f2.8 lens. I have to say that I love it. I played around with taking some macro shots tonight to see what type of results I could get.

The following shot is of my grandfather's fishing reel:


Here is a 1 to 1 crop of that photo so that you can see the detail in the image:


I am rather impressed so far. After I get some more play time with the lens, I will try to do a better write up on it.

Upgrading to Edgy

I decided to take the plunge this weekend and upgrade our main computer from Dapper to Edgy (Ubuntu Linux). It went fairly smoothly with just a couple of hiccups. I thought I would blog about the hiccups that I ran into in case anyone else runs into similar problems.

1. No more K7 Kernel? Yes, it seems that starting with Edgy, there is no longer a K7 specific kernel. So if you are using a recent AMD processor (or even more importantly any of the dual core processors) you will want to use the generic kernel instead of the i386 kernel. Running the i386 kernel only saw one core of my dual core proc, and switching to the generic kernel opened it back up to both cores


2. No boot screen? After switching to the generic kernel, I didn't get the boot screen and a message with the following error: "usplash: no usable theme found for 640x480". I re-installed the usplash package through synaptic, and it fixed the problem.


3. Picasa slows to a standstill? After upgrading, Picasa would quickly grind to a halt when started. Angie could hardly get anything done in it at all. After some poking around, I noticed that it starts up an explorer.exe process that hogs almost 100% cpu. After some googling, I found a link to this posting in the picasa forum. Following the instructions to add a line to the startup script for picasa fixed that problem.

All seems well now, and I can get back to my regularly scheduled hacking :)