This was the year of weddings apparently since three friends of mine got married and a few more got engaged. In July Sheng (one of the TSF family) got married which meant a TSF reunion. Ana, June, Steven, Kevin and Andrew all flew over to Dutchland for the wedding (for pics click here). It was one crazy week for me picking up and dropping off the TSF crew but it was very nice seeing them again and ofcourse spending time with my sweetheart Ana. We even managed to squeeze in a trip to Cologne and saw the yearly fireworks “Köln Lighter”. Cologne pics click here. The week after I went to London to visit the UK office of TOPdesk which was a nice experience. London is a beautiful city and I managed to get some nice nightshots while I was there. London pics click here.

In August I turned 30 leaving behind the twenties I wasn’t planning on celebrating it but my parents arranged for a surprise birthday party with friends and family I haven’t seen in a while. Loved it and had a very enjoyable evening. September was the wedding of Rezi & Marc and in October the wedding of Yip Wing & Naomi. I’ve known Rezi, Yip & Naomi since highschool, so that would be roughly half my life. I had a blast on both weddings and am very happy for them.

The last week of October I went on holiday to San Francisco with Ana. We met up with June and had a blast in SF. I love SF and definitely want to go back again in the future since there’s quite a few things to see in and around SF. If you want to see the pics click here.

Gadgets wise the last seven months I’ve spent quite a bit of money. Hey I can’t help it, I’m a gadget nerd. I got myself a Macro lens the 100L from Canon. I love this lens to use for Macro’s and tele shots. Though I must admit on a crop DSLR like my Canon 500D it is a bit too long inside for normal use. Can’t wait to use it on a full frame but that will have to wait until Canon releases a 5D mark III. I also replaced my trusty old Canon Ixus 800IS point and shoot for the Canon Powershot S95. For the times I don’t want or can’t bring my DSLR along. Which is weekdays when I head to clients for work, then I can use the S95 to take pics when I’m on the road. I also got myself a new phone to replace my Nokia E72, which is still a very good phone but I started to find the lack of app support for Symbian getting annoying. So after years and years of Nokia Symbian phones I got myself the HTC Desire Z with Android. Wow, it really showed me how much catching up Nokia has to do with their Symbian OS compared to Android and iOS from Apple. But then again, I didn’t really check out the newer Nokia models with touch screens so I can’t really say if there had been an improvement. The last gadget I got myself was something I didn’t think I would get, an iPod Nano 6th Gen. Or should I say iPod Nano G6? It’s definitely Fly like a G6

Since it’s been a long while that I updated my website I decided to change the theme, hope you like it. The picture right above the menu’s in the header is one that I made. I’ll try to update it every now and then with new pics that I shot. Well that’s it for now, once again Merry Christmas! Enjoy the holiday’s and I’ll leave you with a Christmas song.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=xFrsdOwVZcs

Anyway, I went and looked around at the laptops when this little baby caught my eyes. I was kind of looking for a new laptop which I can use for lightroom and would be much more portable for vacations and stuff. My good old trused Asus M6Ne is roughly 6 year old and had trouble with lightroom where cpu usage shot up to 100% and stayed there when I was post processing raw images.

Like I said, I was looking around at the 13 inch laptops and I already had this model in mind and the Asus U30 (new ones with the new i3, i5 or i7 cores from intel). But since they only had the older versions I started checkin out the HP DV3-2350ed. I liked the specs: i5 Core, integrated graphics AND dedicated graphics ATI 4550, 13 inch, 500GB harddisk etc etc etc … but the price wasn’t that nice € 999,- but since MediaMarkt was having that  offer I decided to see if I could get it with a nice discount. It had to be cheaper than € 780,- since that was the cheapest I could get it for online. I was lucky and together with 3 other people we managed to get a discount of 22,3% making it cheaper then the cheapest online price I could find at that time. So I ended up with a new laptop and I’ve been using it ever since. Battery life is great and I can work on it roughly 3 to 4 hours on one charge.

I do need to still get used to some of the things that are different in Windows 7 compared to Windows XP and since the HP DV3-2350ed comes with Windows 7 Home Premium. Ever since I tried the Windows 7 Beta on my Asus laptop (read here) I’ve been very impressed with it and have been waiting untill laptops started shipping with Windows 7 and meeting the demands I had for them. Because HELL NO I was NOT going to get a laptop with Windows Vista. Granted Vista seems to be good after SP2 came out but I didn’t want the hassle. I know since my gf Ana has a laptop with Vista and she has had a lot of issues with Vista. In short, I am happy with my new portable laptop and hopefully it will keep me company as long as my good old truted Asus M6Ne did because 6 years is a LOOOOONG time in the world of computers. The only thing I need to do is find a nice ghost image program for Windows 7 so I can make a nice image which I can restore shoud I ever want a fresh install. Or I need to check what kind of features Windows 7 Home Premium has concerning back ups. Yep, there’s still a lot to explore in Windows 7 for me. Time to start Windows nerding again …

As you can see the E72 isn’t that much different looking compared to its predecessor, the E71. Though ithad gotten a few nice upgrades in certain areas and works and handles a lot nicer than the E71. Main differences:

E71 vs. E72
3,2MP vs. 5MP
S60 3rd edition FP1 vs. S60 3rd edition FP2
normal d-pad vs. optical d-pad
2,5mm jack vs. 3,5mm jack
369MHz CPU vs. 600MHz CPU

E72 specific:
flash light, usb charging and come more things I can’t be bothered to mention

Anyway, since I’ve been using de E72 for a week my old E71 became my business phone. I swapped the simcard from my business phone (HTC Touch Pro T-mobile branded) asap into my E71. I can to everything with the E71 except for proper navigation. That’s what my Touch Pro had become to me for now haha. An PND (Personal Navigation Device) with Windows Mobile Battery life of the E72 has been amazing, but then again I can’t really say anything usefull since I’ve only had it for a week but it lasted 5 days on initial charge and I was playing around with it quite a lot and also using itas my mp3 player. So it this is what I can expect from battery life I will really like the E72. Because my E71 battery has been getting less throughout the year, only lasting me 2 or 3 days max with an average of 3 hours mp3 listening and some texting, calling per day.

There are a few changes that I have to get used to on my E72, the optical trackpad works surprisingly well but it’s still something I need to get used to and most of all, the menu’s have been rearranged. So I have to find my way again on the E72. Mail for Exchange works for synching my work e-mail but the only thing that’s not working properly is that it only gets a part of the e-mail and won’t download the full message. The same thing happens with the E71 but when you read the e-mail it will automatically download the remainder of the e-mail. Whereas the E72 won’t and doesn’t seem to have that option. Which kind of sucks. Hopefully Nokia will fix this problem in the next firmware. Or it might be an issues with how Mail for Exchange interacts with Zarafa (which we use instead of Microsoft Exhange).

Don’t know how long I’ll be using this phone but I know I’ll be happy with it for the coming year. Knowing myself I might buy an eventually follow up for the E72 when it’s going to be announced and released but I am guessing that will take another year or two. The E71 has been on the market for about 2 year by now so if the release schedule of the E72 can be used as an indication it will be end 2011 or early 2012 before an E73 is on the market. In the meantime I’ll be content and happy with my E72.

Enter the dilemma of getting a new point & shoot, prosumer or step up into the world of dslr camera’s. Well since I was thinking that prosumers were to big and if I wanted to get serious I would reach it’s limitations those fell off pretty quickly. So that left the point & shoots and dslr’s. In the beginning I didn’t look at dslr’s because I was thinking that I wouldn’t want to be carrying around a big ass camera and lenses etc. So I only looked at the compact super zooms. After looking around on my website of choice (dpreview) I had a short list of two cams. The Panasonic TZ7 and the Canon Ixus SX200IS and after reading the Compact Camera Group Test Group 6: ‘Compact superzoom’ cameras I still was in doubt. The TZ7 had a bit better IQ but I really like the Canon manuals and the fact I could use my older batteries form my old Canon.

In the end I was like, you know what. I’m gonna read up on dslr’s and then I had another list to think about. The shortlist of dslr’s were the Nikon D5000, Nikon D90, Canon 5D Mark II and the Canon 500D. Since Nikon D90 & Canon 5D Mark II were/are a bit out of my budget range for now and I need to start learning more about aperture, shutterspeed, iso, stops etc and manual shooting I decided to only look at the Nikon D5000 and the Canon 500D. After looking around in various stores and holding and handling both camera’s I finally decided to get a Canon 500D with the basic 17-55mm kitlens.

After using it for about 1 1/2 month I must say I haven’t got any regrets of getting a dslr since I’ve been being able to get some shots that I would not have been able to make with a point and shoot. Ok maybe with the Canon SX200IS since it has limited manual control but even then I think the IQ would not have been like the pics I have now. Now I just need to sign up for the Canon workshop so I can ask a few things about the camera. But yeah I really love the cam and I really want to make photography a serious hobby of mine. And this all started because there was this one young dude called Andrew Ho who I met in China and had a dslr. He got a lot of the TSF crew hooked on using a dslr and now only Sheng hasn’t got one. But the peer pressure might catch up on him and he’ll be ending up with a dslr too. Only time will tell but in the meantime I’ll be happily snapping pics with my 500D. Time to start stepping up my game with the camera, see you at my next post.

Vista has been plagued with the legacy of a negative reputation, this is because Microsoft changed the driver model and quite a few things at once. Most heard issues with Vista is the memory usage, resource hog, drivers that don’t work which means hardware not working, UAC popping up everytime etc etc etc etc. I am glad to say that Windows 7 is running quite smoothly and that almost all my hardware was recognized imediately. The only two things that I can’t seem to get working at the moment are the Intel Wireless 2200gb card and my pci modem. Other than that Windows 7 runs pretty smoothly. I really need to get my wireless card working and find a way to see if and how the CPU throttling is. Because I have the feeling that my CPU is running full clock speed, but that could be a figment of my imagination.

As a Windows XP user I really have to get used to how Windows 7 works, specially the control panel, administrative tools etc. But it is getting there, I am very pleased with the beta. Resource wise it takes about 400 – 450MB of RAM and it only runs about 40 processes and responds pretty snappy. But …. it’s a beta so not everything works properly (read not all software works). So I can’t fully use it like I would want to. But at least I can fiddle with it and get used to how it works. Yes I know, I am a geek, so sue me. Anyway here are a few screenshots of Windows 7 on my laptop. If you want to testrun Windows 7 beta this is the place to go: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/

UPDATE:
I managed to get the Intel 2200bg wireless card working by downloading the 12.2.2.0_Gen_SW drivers and manually updating the driver in Windows 7 beta. You need to use the Windows XP drivers, the Vista drivers DO NOT work!!! That is why I couldn’t get my wireless working before. Only thing to do is to find the modem drivers and I am set to go. Now I can really start using Win7 beta as a replacement for XP to see how it works. That means installing software today. O_o Oh well, a geeks work is never done.

UPDATE 2:
Damn, the CPU isn’t throttling dynamically. It keeps running at max clockspeed (in my case 1,7GHz, Dothan Pentium-M). This is quite disappointing to be honest. I was hoping Win7 would be able to use speedstep to dynamically alternate the CPU clockspeed to conserve power and so that my fan won’t be on most of the time. But then again, I was kind of expecting speedstep not to work since the fan keeps blowing most of the time when working in Win7. Time to google for an solution, which hopefully can be found. Oh and before people start thinking about changing the power settings in Win7. I already did switch to Power Saver mode and fiddled around in those settings. But alas to no avail. So if someone knows something or has a solution please post here. Other than that, Win7 seems to be working properly.

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Anyway, I love this phone. Qwerty in a small package, metal casing, all the funtionality I want and might need. Man the only thing that might be an upgrade is something like the SonyEricsson X1 aka Xperia but then with symbian instead of WM (Windows Mobile). For the people that remember, I also have a HTC Tytn which I still use but less frequently. I liked the HTC Tytn basically because it gave me a touchscreen and qwerty keypad. I needed a PDA with phone capabilities, but I dislike WM because it’s not really made with the thought of it being used as a phone. As a PDA it works very well, I used to browse, mail, use word and navigate (Tomtom) with it but as a phone it’s not as intuitive imho. The UI (User Interface) is something that can be drastically improved, look at the various software that has been made to make WM more usable as a phone. Two examples of these are HTC Touchflow & SBP Mobile Shell. Specially all the software from SPB made WM that much better in terms of usability. Microsoft GET you act together and start thinking of USABILITY!!! And not just on frigging eye candy!!! Hope this will get better with WM7 but I’m highly doubting it, but who knows. Microsoft might surprise me, which I really hope they do at the end of next year when WM7 should be released.

WM is kind of a mixed bag in imho and has it pros and definately it’s cons, just like Symbian for that matter I think. But anyway both have their merits and I will probably won’t be using my HTC Tytn anymore but as a back up should something happen to my E71 (which I doubt, but you never know).

After fiddling around and customizing my E71 I must say that I am really impressed with what Nokia pulled off with the follow up of the E60 & E61i (the previous candybar qwerty business smartphones from Nokia). The only thing I need to do and find is proper navigation software, because Tomtom stopped releasing their sofware after version 6 for symbian and to get that working with the internal GPS will involve quite some tweaking and fiddling around. Which I’m not gonna do, also because the maps for version 6 are probably outdated which would mean I might end up in the middle of nowhere. Guess I will have to take a look at Rout66, Navigon and all the other players on the market that sell their software for the E71.

Let’s see how long it will take before I get myself a new phone. But untill that time, I’m gonna enjoy using this phone.

For those not into all the mobile phone stuff I’ll tell you. The 6300 is the only phone which isn’t a “smartphone”. The other three models are all loaded with the symbian software which makes them “smart”. With smartphone I mean a phone which can edit and make office documents (word, power point, excell) and can use software like TomTom. It was quite a hard decision but in the end I took a look at what I really was using on my phone and the 6300 can do all that.

I’m quite happy with my new phone and I think I’m going to be using this one for some time. For all the other stuff that a smartphone can do I still have my other HTC Tytn. Anyway, I really like the new models that Nokia is releasing the last few months and coming months. Finally they are doing something about the design of their phones. And finally they are making some smaller stylish phones.

The reason I decided to buy the Tytn instead of the Loox N560 was the fact that I changed my mind on having a built in GPS receiver in a PDA and wanted a PDA with a keyboard to input text messages en e-mails. And I must say I’m not dissapointed with the Tytn, sure I’m still in the process of coming to grips with the interface and actually having a PDA. But I’m starting to like it more and more.

I bought the Tytn in combination with a one year T-Mobile contract and also took a PIT contract, which is € 9,50 extra per month for unlimited use of mobile internet through UMTS of GPRS. That sounds good doesn’t it? Unlimited internet on your mobile phone but here’s the catch. The speed is capped at 64Kb/sec downstream and 16Kb/sec upstream. It’s not that I really care that I’m capped, because I can be on-line any time I want for a mere € 9,50 extra which is sweet.

Anyway, finally I can use something which is much more suited as an organizer/agenda than my Nokia 6230. No disrespect to my 6320 but it’s not really suited for extensive use as an agenda. So I’m using my old 6230 as my primary phone for calls and the Tytn as my agenda/organizer and on the road inet, e-mail client. The T-Mobile contract which I took is also nice, I can save up all of my credit and use it all around the world. So I’m gonna be using my new number when I’m in gonna be in Beijing next year and leave my old number at home.

Well, that’s enough bla bla bla, c ya with the next update. Some pics of the old meets the new …

I’ve been looking for one for a long time and after a lot of thought I decided to buy this one because I really like the Canon design and because the competitor (the Panasonic Lumix FX01) didn’t have a nice grip to it. Aside from other aspects. Been using it for about a month or so and the pictures it takes are very nice. Tha latest picture gallery was made with this camera. Anyway, I’ve written a Dutch review so if you want to read it you can find it here:

Canon Ixus 800IS review

Well that’s it for now.