Fun with the Canon EF f/1.8 50mm Prime Lens
As a Christmas gift, I received the Canon EF f/1.8 50mm lens for my XSi. This is an awesome lens for several reasons, not least of which is the fact that it sells for under $100, making it essentially dirt cheap as far as lenses go. The reason that Canon can make a lens with an aperture this large for so little is that it is a prime lens, so it has few parts. The lens is known for having fantastic optical quality, even compared with much pricier lenses, at the cost of relatively poor build quality (it has a plastic housing that apparently doesn’t hold up well to wear and tear).
After messing around with it for a couple of days, I am very happy with it. At 1.8, the depth of field is ridiculous—for example, it is very easy to get the wrong part of a face in focus. The lens has a bit of trouble focusing, particularly in low light, and the motor is fairly noisy. Going for the $350 f/1.4 USM lens would probably fix these problems. I also definitely noticed the lack of IS as compared with the kit lens, but as this thing is so fast I really can’t complain about that. In fact, any criticism of this lens can be more or less rebutted by recalling the absurdly low price.
Using notify-send to Slack Off Efficiently
I’ve been working on a big project in MPI and the execution times on my code are annoyingly long (on the order of minutes). I like to keep my work in a separate workspace from my browser to minimize distractions, but then when I set my code running and head over to visit reddit or something I often don’t notice when my code finishes. Today it occurred to me that this would be a good use for libnotify. There is a command-line utility called notify-send (you should have it if you have a recent version of Ubuntu; not sure about other distros) which gives a simple interface to libnotify, so I whipped up a tiny script to call it:
#!/bin/bash EVAL_STRING="notify-send -u normal -t 5000 -i info \"Task completed\" \"$@\"" eval $@; eval $EVAL_STRING
I put it in a folder which is in my path, and now I just do
$ notify ./takes_forever
and I know as soon as it’s done. OK, back to work.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 16
Wilson Peak
This is the second-to-last last entry for the summer. The week before school started, I went on an ambitious hike to some fourteeners known as the Wilson group. We had initially intended to hike all three in a day, but as it turned out we only managed to do one: Wilson Peak. You may have seen a picture of this mountain before:
Not depicted: me at the top.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 15
San Gorgonio Mountain
My last day of work this summer was August 14th, and I planned to drive home the following day. Unfortunately, I still hadn’t hiked the last Saint, San Gorgonio Mountain. This is the highest mountain in Southern California and I certainly couldn’t leave without bagging it. So, I packed everything from my summer accommodations the night of the 14th and woke up at 3am on the 15th to do my hike. I had been unable to get a permit for my desired trail, Vivian Creek, so I instead had one for the longer South Fork trail. This trail is about 11 miles long (each way) but has the nice feature that the top section can be done as a loop so I didn’t have to retrace my steps the whole way. I got on the trail at about 6:00 and, hiking quickly, gained the summit at about by 11:00 traveling up the Dollar Lake fork of the trail.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 14
More Pictures from the Beach
Here I have included a picture from a late July sunset on the beach. A few days later, I went up to Lower Trestles with my friend Kevin to check out the big waves that were the result of a nice southern swell.
Gmail: Please Bold the Hidden Labels Button when there are Unread Messages
I love Gmail. It does everything I could possibly want an email client (web or desktop) to do. All of my non-junk email accounts are Gmail or are forwarded to Gmail accounts. That said, occasionally something occurs to me that would make my Gmail experience a little bit better. Sometimes these crop up as Labs features, which I think is great, and is part of why I enjoy using Gmail so much.
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Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 13
The City and Experiments with HDR
I was in San Diego to watch Harry Potter last night (terrible, by the way) and I took the opportunity to check out downtown and Coronado. I’ve included a couple of pictures I took from Harbor Island.
Then today I spent more time taking pictures on the beach. I’ve been trying out some HDR techniques; you can see the results below.
Summer ‘09 in Pics vol. 12
Beach, Surfing, and a New Camera
For the past couple days I’ve been heading down to the beach to take pictures of the sunset with my new Canon EOS Rebel XSi. I’ve really been having fun with this camera, and I’m learning a lot (especially how to estimate settings—I’ve been trying to force myself to use full manual controls for most of my pictures, and my eyeballing skills have much improved). I also got the chance to try surfing this evening, but I didn’t get any pictures of that.