In the search for some dark skies, I was off to visit a friend in Moncks Corner who lives near a golf course. Were it not for the nearly full moon, it would have been a good night.
Oh well. At least now I know a good spot to go and try again. It wasn’t a total waste. The full moon is pretty bright so I took advantage of it to see what some moonlight only photos might look like.
With a 10s exposure (f/3.5, ISO 100) it almost looks like day time.
With a little colour adjusting, you can make night into day. Daystars!
Moonlight shadow
cast by the moon
This is a stack of 37 images, 15 s each at f/3.5, ISO 100. The bright star in the center is Sirius and at the top you can see part of Orion. The trees add some interesting elements to the picture.
Going to have to head back out there in a couple of weeks to try again.
Charleston Eats: Golden Cup Cafe
Beef Stew
French Dip sandwich
Need fatter intertubes
I’ve been thinking about getting more bandwidth lately. The 1.5 Mbps DSL from Earthlink has been ok so far. No complaints and I’ve only lost service once or twice since I’ve had it. With Netflix in the house now pushing the issue I decided to look into it.
Earthlink advertises up to 6 Mbps DSL service. In an initial online chat I was told that there were no faster speeds available in my area, which is unfortunate. I might actually have to call to confirm this.
AT&T’s DSL page tells me that DSL isn’t available for my location (WTF?) although I can get U-Verse apparently (maybe they want to phase out DSL?).
Cable internet through Comcast would be the other option.
Galaxy S 2 initial impressions
It’s a big honkin’ phone.
I knew that. I saw the specs. I saw them in the store. Until I started holding it my hand and carrying it around it wasn’t something I really appreciated.
Because of the size, I often end up inadvertently activating things when the palm of my hand touches the screen. Using it two-handed seems to be the best way to use it and avoiding messing things up.
So far I’ve just been getting everything set up: getting apps installed/reinstalled, filling the screens with app shortcuts and widgets and getting things configured.
For some reason Samsung decided not to build the GS2 with a notification LED, which is too bad. I found it very useful on my Cliq.
The only way to wake up the phone seems to be with the power/lock button.
Motion activation features are kind of neat. Flip the phone over to mute incoming calls/music, tilt to zoom.
Played a little bit with voice recognition. Seems to work pretty well so far. 100% accuracy, although I’ve only tried one short sentence. Still, it works. Was never able to use it on my Cliq due to microphone issues.
T-Mobile does include a lot of bloatware, which is unfortunate. Some of it is useful, but there are a few that are of pretty questionable value.
Not sure how battery life is yet. I was tempted by the case with built-in 1500 mAh battery (to supplement the 1850 mAh battery the GS2 comes with), but I had already ordered a spare battery and charger so I figured there wasn’t much point. Like the Cliq, I’m not terribly optimistic.
Visibility of the screen is pretty good in full sunlight. I was pleasantly surprised about that.
Haven’t spent any time playing with the camera yet. Planning to spend the weekend doing that.
The GS2 wakes up and notifies you when it’s fully charged. Not sure I see the point of that, but ok.
The internal 16 GB is set up as three partitions. There’s about 2GB for system storage (apps and such), 11.25 GB as USB storage (acts like a built-in SD card mounted at /mnt/sdcard) and the rest presumably for the OS. If you add in a microSD card, it shows up in the file system mounted at /mnt/sdcard/external_sd. It confused me a little when I went to look for stuff on the SD card and didn’t find it where I expected. There’s 784 MB of RAM used for running things.
Really liking the phone so far. Way better than the Cliq. It’s fast, responsive and has a gorgeous screen. The bluish tint takes a bit of getting used to though.
SGS II Unboxing
I finally bit the bullet and decided to dump the Cliq for a shiny new Samsung Galaxy S II.
The goodies inside the box: Phone, wall wart and cable, SIM card and battery. Interestingly, the antenna for the Near Field Communication (NFC) is integrated into the battery.
Here it is side by side with the Cliq. It’s a big phone, but pretty slim.
Power up!
Apparently I need to go get the data on my old SIM card transferred to the new one. The manual says it will allow me to upgrade to Wi-Fi calling when it becomes available. I could probably pop the old SIM in there I guess. At least the wifi works fine.
Update: After trawling through the T-mobile forums, I discovered there was an update to Androild 2.3.6 available (the phone came with 2.3.5). After a few hours of futzing around and staying up far later than I should have, I got the update downloaded and installed. Then the phone told me that Wi-fi calling was available, but that my SIM card (I put the old one in to test) needed to be updated. Off to the store at some point.