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Wednesday I wrote about choosing the right camera.  Today I wanted to write about choosing lenses for your dSLR.  Just looking at the entire range of lenses available for a Canon EOS camera there are lenses from $89 all the way up to $8,000.  You might see two lenses that go from 28-105mm, but one is $200 and one is $1,200.  What’s the reason for the difference?  I hope to demystify all of this with some knowledge I wish I’d posessed when I first entered the world of dSLRs.

I recently heard that Cuba had created their own Linux distribution, Nova.  Like many other countries with a rocky relationship with the USA (Russia, China, Iran), Cuba is wary of running their entire computer infrastructure on software developed in the USA.  As someone of Cuban ancestry, this development piqued my interested and I decided to check it out.  (I figured such a specialist distro would never be on the cover of LXF).  According to its distrowatch page, it is a mix of Gentoo, Sabayon, and Ututo.  We’ll see if they chose all of the negative aspects of those distros and thus created Satan’s Distro or if they took all that was good and created what Gentoo has the potential to be.  So I launch it up in VirtualBox.

What should I buy?

I often see many people asking online how to choose the right camera.  They are bombarded with all the megapixels and various features on offer and they have no idea what to get.  And usually the retailers (Best Buy, Frys, etc) try and get you to buy more camera than you need.  So what should you buy?  I’ll try and guide you with this blog post.

It’s been pretty ridiculous recently with Steele claiming to bring Urban cred to the Republican party. I think they feel like they have to have a black guy too. It’s just odd that suddenly after Obama’s President, they have a black chairman.

Well, I know that eventually Hulu will pull this clip.  But until they do, enjoy the extremely creative editing of the The Colbert Report’s team in this rap battle between Colbert and Republican Chairman Michael Steele.

Mysql database got corrupted so for a while there, the entire blog was out of operation.  Fixed it and we’re back.

The more I’ve been learning about Lightroom 2 (technically now at 2.3), the more I’ve been liking it!  First of all, I learned that - thanks to new camera profiles (also available in the latest camera raw software) - I can get my photos to start from where Canon’s own RAW software would have started.  I never realized it was a better choice than photoshop because I liked the photoshop workflow so much.  But now that I’ve played with the camera profiles in Lightroom, I realize that I’ve been selling my images short.

I first wrote about Knoppix in my original blog in Oct of 2004.  I mentioned how awesome it was to be able to test out a live version of a Linux distro.  It’s been a really long time since I last checked out Knoppix.  Since it was bloated with KDE 3.x and slow to boot I used Damn Small Linux whenever I needed a LiveCD environment.  Now that Knoppix 6 is the distro in this month’s Linux Format Magazine, I’m checking it out.  It boots into Adriane.  This is some strange speech synthesis program that launches different command line programs.  (It also reads out loud what all the options are)  Turns out if you want to go to a graphical desktop you ened to type “Knoppix” at the boot menu.  So I scroll down to “graphical programs” then “start lxde”.  Wow!  LXDE is truly a lightweight desktop environment.  It loads up a LOT faster than Knoppix and KDE used to.  The menu loads up very quickly and the programs also load up quickly despite running off of the DVD.  The default browser is Iceweasel (Debian’s rebranding of Firefox).  The internet works perfectly fine.