I used to wear a watch all the time, probably since I was around 18 years old. My first watch was some tacky gold-plate Seiko that I took a fancy too around that age, but over the years I slowly upgraded to more stylish options. That changed around the time I purchased my first iPhone though, when I suddenly stopped wearing one. I guess at the time I figured wearing a watch was a bit redundant since my phone could show the time with just a single click of a button. But last year I started noticing other guys wearing watches again, and I thought it looked sort of cool. I looked around my apartment ...

Anyone who uses an iPhone knows that under normal usage the battery rarely lasts a full day. When I’m at home relaxing, the battery life issue is not really that big a deal since I can simply plug my phone into the USB charger half-way through the day and top the battery up to full, usually in an hour or so. But unfortunately when I’m traveling (which is quite often as most people know), plugging my phone into an outlet isn’t always an option . Sometimes when I’m working from coffee shops it simply isn’t possible to find a plug. Occasionally an airplane will have a USB port in the chair ...

Another year is almost upon us, and I thought a final post was in order. It was definitely an interesting year for me, the highlight (at a personal level) probably being a third surgery on my eye socket (which I was told four years ago wasn’t possible). But I also did a fair bit of traveling, and I thought a little photo-finish finale was in order for 2012. Las Vegas Las Vegas Samantha in Cape Town, South Africa Penguins near Cape Town, South Africa Cape Town, South Africa Table Mountain, Cape Town, South Africa Sunset, Cape Town, South Africa The moon rising over Cape Town, South Africa Me ...

A while ago Epson asked me if I’d like to take their relatively new Epson Stylus Pro 3880 printer for a spin. Since I’m obviously into photography and the printer can easily accommodate colour prints, I thought it would be fun to test it out to see what it could do. First of all, I should say that this is a BIG printer. When the courier arrived to drop it off you could tell he was having a hard time moving it. Once it was in my apartment, it basically blocked the entire front door. Being a typical bachelor I of course left it blocking the door for the majority of the evening, but eventually ...

A few months ago, Darren Barefoot put up a proposal on his blog asking for west-coast bloggers to review a few Brother printers. Since I love getting my hands on new technology, and have never really used a color laser printer before, I signed up for the challenge. Brother Printer for Review A few weeks later the Brother HL-4050 CDN Printer arrived at my office place. First of all, let me just say that nothing could have prepared me for not only how big the box was, but also how insanely heavy it was. I seriously had a hard time moving it from the front door over to the spare desk next to me. That’s ...

A while ago I posted about my recent purchase of the Agent 18 Eco-Shield product. I received it via FedEx the other day and have had it on my iPhone ever since. I thought I’d give a quick review of the product. Agent 18 Eco-Shield First, I have to say that my primary motivation for purchasing the product was that it is supposed to be made entirely from recycled plastic. The product is indeed made of plastic, and fits my iPhone 3G perfectly (the last case I bought didn’t fit properly at all). Unfortunately, while I love the case, I have to say I was extremely disappointed with how much packaging ...

Well, this is interesting. I gave a few individuals an alpha version of the Viper Cache plugin I’ve been working on. It has just been reviewed on Anieto2k, one of the largest plugin sites. The author compared it against all the WordPress plugins available today for caching. The full write-up is available here. The article looks like it is in Spanish so you’ll just have to settle for the pictures. Based on a few guesses in the translation, it looks like Viper Cache is the lowest in memory out of all four, and allows around 1330 pages per second on the test machine compared to the second place ...

Yesterday, after dropping Boris off at his place so that he could get ready to go to Spain, I went down to Broadway Camera to see if I could play around with a Canon EOS 40D camera. I had called the day before to see if I could actually purchase one, but unfortunately they said they were already completely sold out. So imagine my surprise when, after asking if they had any in stock (which was basically a rhetorical question for me), they said “yeah, we have one here.” Unfortunately for me it was the box that contained the kit-lens, when I really wanted to just purchase the body only. The lens ...

Last night Jason and I stopped in briefly at the Apple store here in San Francisco, California, so that we could mess around with a new iPhone. Of course, the store was completely packed, and most people were simply there to do the exact same thing we were doing. Like most Apple stores, the one in San Francisco is currently sold out of iPhones. After waiting only a few short minutes, I picked up an iPhone and started messing around with it. Right away, I liked how small and comfortable it felt in my hand. The user interface is pretty revolutionary, and it’s really intuitive how to use it. At ...

I got my first roll back of Ilford XP2 back from development. My overall impression of it is pretty good – the grain is pretty light for ISO 400 (at least my memory of what ISO 400 was). It’s not as contrasty as I normally like, and I bumped the contrast up slightly before posting them, but it’s not that bad. The dynamic range is pretty decent, and the only shots that it struggled with were taken outside in the sun. All in all, I’m impressed enough that I’ll give it another go. Kris Krug snapped a few of these, so check out the actual flickr site for more info. ...