hiidenkonttibeta

Some of these entries are just notes to myself – but written hoping that they may be entertaining or informational for others as well. This is one such note.

Palet de Chèvre, a French camembert cheese made of goat’s milk is good stuff. Goat’s milk tastes in it clearly, but not overwhelmingly strongly.

When I want cheese made of goat’s milk again (probably next year, I don’t eat the stuff constantly) I may be able to remember that I wrote an entry about a good one here.

There’s other camera phones than Nokia’s S60-based ones. After using these for three years or so I got interested in seeing how the others are doing. So I borrowed a random S40 camera phone with CIF resolution camera (352×288) – a year old model. All recent models seem to have at least VGA resolution. Here’s some results:

The scaled-down 1Mpix photos don’t look so lo-fi compared to these. They’re all shot in “high quality” mode. The phone also had a night mode – here’s comparison shots for normal and night modes. The difference isn’t as big as in 7610:

As a side note, when did “VGA” become 640×480 resolution? The original 0x13h mode VGA was 320×200 with 256 colours, anything better was called Super VGA (or XGA). It might be silly to call 640×480 Super anything in modern display technology, but it’s also a bit questionable to re-define old technical definitions.

The night mode of the camera in 7610 actually has quite a big effect at night. With 7650 it was more like a way to shoot a tiny bit sharper pictures during the day. Here’s a few samples with normal and night mode images side by side:

Apparently this is done by simply extending the exposure time in the night mode. As a side effect the images are shaken more easily, as can be seen from the second night mode image. Here’s one more photo to show just that the exposure time is a bit longer than a very short fraction of a second:

Of course I should have shot the same photo without night mode. Silly me.

This weekend we made our almost-yearly “ruskaretki” (“Fall foliage”見) to Kittilä. Usually we’ve been there too late in the Fall and all the leaves have already fallen off – this year there was leaves but they weren’t especially colourful:

The place is Aakenustunturi, it’s easy to reach and it’s pretty nice. This year there was a lot of cold wind and we only walked to the top, spent some time there and walked back. There’s a cottage and a place for fire on the other side, but the amount of cars on the nearby parking lot hinted at a possibility for a big crowd there.

I didn’t mind the lack of brightly coloured leaves so much, the trip itself was fun enough. It always is, but this time was especially wonderful since that certain nice and pretty girl was there, and the world looks more colourful with her ;-)

There were six people and two cars – the two of us switched cars whenever we stopped, and we inconspicuously spent 2/3 of the trip in Opel Vectra and the rest in Skoda. But I assure that the company wasn’t the reason for these tactics…

Woohoo! At last the long wait is over: remastered Iron Maiden albums are on sale, 2 CD’s for 20€ in the shop I visited (went there looking for Forever Autumn by Lake of Tears, but they didn’t have it – no shop seems to have it..).

I got The Number of the Beast and Powerslave. The third album on my Iron Maiden TOP-3 -list, Piece of Mind, I already had on CD. It’s hard to put them in order. PoM has been my long-time favourite, but that may be because I haven’t listened to TNotB and Powerslave enough (lately, that is – I had them on vinyl years ago).

I attended another Poison Door event yesterday (Saturday). It was live music this time, with four Finnish bands playing goth rock/pop and such. The event was called The Fall: synkeiden sävelten syysjuhla.

The first band on the stage was UltraNoir, who played nice melancholic pop:

The second band was The Shadow Dance, which enjoys some kind of cult status in Finland. And they are good! Very nice and danceable goth rock, definitely worth checking out:

The third band was The Candles Burning Blue, which I found rather boring:

The fourth would have been Suruaika, but I got too tired and bored and left in the middle of The Candles… set. According to a friend of mine not seeing Suruaika wasn’t a great loss. Well, at least there was two very enjoyable sets.