I discovered Customize2 the other day and have been messing with it. It lets you build more complex themes than merely using SummerBoard alone, though it does interact with SummerBoard. SSH and DropCopy are your friends for this sort of stuff.

I’ve spent a lot time tweaking a theme of my own. It’s called zerotheme. I did it all on the iTouch itself via a terminal app I’ve installed. I’ve tried using the Customize Web App to build and share it, but after 4 failed attempts (zerolight - zerolightV4) it’s clear that the web-app is currently horribly broken. Any new theme you create ends up as empty folders when shared and downloaded by others - as 28 people told me! Still it works perfectly when built on my iTouch.

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I’ve avoided this little gem of an app for ages. It’s available to jailbroken iPod Touches and iPhones. I never got the pun until recently - Apple call their launcher SpringBoard, SummerBoard enhances it. Doh. Most of the themes I’d seen were pretty poor, with garish backgrounds and ugly icons. However there’s a few good ones, mostly by Louie Mantia often based on icons by David Lanham.

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I was thinking about the guitars I’ve owned since I started playing back in 1987. There’s been a lot! I think, 21. Bear in mind that mostly, I’ve only owned one at a time, two at the most more recently, so there was a good stretch where I never owned a guitar for longer than a year! Updated.
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My custom ordered James Tyler Studio Elite HD is done, and is now with the UK distributor. It’ll be with me next week. It’s the first Orange Shmear Studio Elite, a special order I put in for my guitar. More details here.

Note to Zee: this is boring, don’t bother reading.

I’ve been noticing that my photos on flickr all appear a little soft. A tiny, teeny, weeny, bit soft. This, even after switching to shooting in RAW mode. I experimented a fair bit, taking photographs of batteries no less, to see if my camera had focus issues. All was fine. I checked out my photos in iPhoto, all were crisp and sharp. Then I compared an unscaled flickr export (a plugin for iPhoto that exports to flickr) with a scaled one. Bingo, the scaled one was softer than the unscaled.

However, there is a beta of flickr export 3, which lets you choose the quality of the export. So, some more tests followed, and thankfully I found that at maximum quality, the scaled exports are just as sharp as the unscaled exports. Yay. Of course, this also gives me an excuse to post yet another photo of Rafi.

I’ve had the 40D for a few days now, and have taken it out a couple of times over the weekend (Saturday, Sunday) sampling images from the nice cheap EF50 lens, and my more expensive, mid-range, 28-135 IS. I’ve enjoyed using it very much, to the extent that I am actively trying to become a better photographer rather than a happy snapper.

In terms of image quality, the 40D is better than the 10D. Not massively so, it has to be said. But that’s because the camera body is only part of the equation, with the lenses (which haven’t changed) having a very significant affect on the resultant pictures. Images seem more detailed, a more colourful, a little sharper. However, the biggest leap is in performance. High iso noise for example, when in JPEG mode with NR on, gives very pleasing images in comparison to the 10D. Auto focus speed is very rapid, as is the cycle time between pictures, and power on is near instantaneous.

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