Mozilla Sunbird is making progress to their next release by doing a few release candidates. The most recent one – RC2 – was released yesterday and can be found here
I have been using Sunbird for a few months now and I enjoy having a proper calendar but the inability to sync iCal files to my iPaq is really getting the better of me. I hope if I do go ahead and buy a Mac I can get Apple’s iCal to sync with my iPaq and still see the same files via Sunbird and keep serving it up off my Apache machine – sounds like a bit much to hope for really
Mozilla Sunbird making progress
by R.I. Pienaar on 12. Jan, 2005 in Usefull Things
Mac Mini
by R.I. Pienaar on 12. Jan, 2005 in Front Page
Everyone by now knows about the Mac Mini. I think I will be placing an order for one on Friday, I am having some trouble deciding on the configuration though. I know I need more than 256 Mb RAM, but I wonder if they would be as user serviceable as other Mac’s – I suspect not.
The Apple Store charges £50 for the upgrade to 512 which is a bit mad really. I also do not know if it will be worth getting the faster model for the extra money. I do not need a new/another computer. It is more a matter of wanting to properly evaluate the Mac OS X and so forth so therefore I am aiming at affordability really.
Eventually I see this machine sitting near my TV and plugged into it with a wireless keyboard/mouse. Will use it for a media player etc, I recently pushed the configuration of my main desktop way up so I am not expecting to use this for a day to day machine, but it would make a very sexy media center pc especially since it has no fans.
I am leaning towards the smaller CPU version with wifi, bluetooth and 512Mb RAM this should set me back £480 which is a steal really.
Sigma 18-125mm F3.5-5.6 DC
by R.I. Pienaar on 12. Jan, 2005 in Photography Equipment
I recently bought a Sigma 18-125mm F3.5-5.6 DC lens. It cost me just over £200 which is dirt cheap for a good range Zoom lens.

My initial reaction to the lens is favorable – though I have not used it much – it is a good zoom range and the optics seem to perform well. I did notice some barrel distortion and vignetting but this is to be expected on a low budget lens. The vignetting is easily fixed in the Photoshop RAW plugin.
I do not really have a good sample to post that was taken with the lens, the weather has been bad here for some time and I have been spending some time off work and off life in general being incredibly lazy at home.
Nikon D70 Firmware Upgrade
by R.I. Pienaar on 12. Jan, 2005 in Photography Equipment
Nikon announced a new version of the “B” firmware for the D70 digital SLR. The fix is pretty small and not something I have noticed:
When the mode dial was set to an exposure mode (P, S, A, or M) and II selected for the Color mode setting in the Custom item of the Optimize image menu, and then an option other than Custom (such as Portrait) selected from the Optimize image menu, JPEG images captured after this procedure were recognized as having the Adobe RGB color space when opened in applications with a color-management function such as Adobe Photoshop. This problem has been corrected.
The firmware can be downloaded for Windows users here and for Mac users here.
