New Gadget

As previously stated I recently got my money from Japan. I had previously decided that when this happened I'd shell out and get a digital camera, so yesterday I went to the big electronics store and went looking. After an hour of looking at cameras, I decided upon a Kodak m853. I had narrowed it down between the Kodak or a Nikon that was $100 more expensive. The Kodak can also do some sort of neat panorama effect, but I haven't worked out how to do it properly yet (I get the same building appearing twice in the pictures). The Kodak guy also threw in a bunch of extras, a case, spare battery, a 2 gigabyte memory card, and a tripod (when he said it came with a tripod, I pictured a tiny little thing that would fit on a desk. It's actually a little over a meter tall).

I'm reasonably happy with what I got (although if I'd got anything much better I'd now be thinking about how much it cost. There is no way to win.) and it will be good to not rely on my cell phone as a camera, which was not as good as my Japanese cell phone at taking photos, and had an awkward naming convention that was not easily amenable to automatic renaming. The Kodak's naming convention is 100_xxxx.jpg where xxxx is a four digit number. The only downside is that xxxx appears to be the number of photos ever taken, which will alter the names I use but want affect the general scheme where photos are sorted by date and then by a chronologically increasing number. I wonder if there are any cameras where you can choose the filename convention yourself (are there other people as nit picky about this as I am?)

I am kind of annoyed that the camera does not show up on my computer as a USB storage device. I'm considering getting an SD card reader to compensate for this. I was initially using the special software that came with the camera to transfer the photos, but have since found out that there's a program from apple already on my computer that can do the same thing and also perform follow up tasks (such as run a bash script to rename the pictures) so I'm going to use that from now on I think.

Anyway, that's enough rambling about my new camera. Here's a picture of the new camera.

Edit: After looking at the online manual, I've got the panorama bit working. Here's my room as a panorama.


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