iCal does not like Outlook in South Africa

I had this problem since long ago when I started using Mac OS X 10.2 - iCal imports .ics files from Outlook just fine - however the entry always gets saved with the wrong time. In specific - it is always moved out by 2 hours. Needless to say this can be detrimental to punctuality. Here is how I fixed the issue...

The first attempt was to google for the issue. However it seemed that I was the only one in the world with this particular problem. Cul de sac.

So I started investigating myself. The fact that the appointments are out by exactly 2 hours implied to me it has something to do with timezone issues, since in South Africa we are at GMT+0200 - also known as SAST. So I opened up the .ics file in TextWrangler and started analyzing it.

Full Article

Spammers making me laugh!?

For the first time in my life since I got SPAM (and I have received literally tens of thousand junk mail in my lifetime), I had a laugh at the wit of one of the spammers...

Blue Pill
Blue Pill
Full Article

MacBook Pro 15.4" Returned (continued)

Cool Apple Buddy gave me a refund for the notebook - even though they said they could not reproduce the error. I guess the screen shots I presented helped my case.

Now it is just the frustrating wait for South Africa's resellers to get stock...

SLR Myths

I am no expert in the optical branch of physics, but I am very confident that I am correct in stating that a very common myth among amateur/novice photographers is just that - a myth.

The myth I am talking about is something I regularly hear when on wedding assignments or functions. You get this one bloke who knows it all (the speaker), and the impressed audience. The bloke tells his admirers that the reason an SLR is so much better than a compact (non-SLR) camera, is because of the lenses. That you cannot compare say a Canon 70-200mm F2.8L lens with anything on a compact camera.

The myth I believe is that this is simply not true. There is no optical law (or practical constraints) AFAIK that governs big lenses to be better optically than small lenses. In general they tend to be simply due to the nature of economics - professional people tend to buy (expensive) SLR's (which usually happen to be 35mm or larger format), whereas your average snap shooter typically settle for the (less expensive, more manageable) compact cameras. Obviously professional photographers need the best quality so most R&D goes into the design of great SLR lenses. Candid snap shooters are not as fussed about picture quality than pro's - therefore less consideration is paid to the lenses used in those cameras. So I do believe a small lens can be made to the same quality standards than a larger lens.

Full Article

Formatting a Nokia 9300

I recently upgraded from a Nokia 9300 to a Nokia 9300i - so after I transferred all my data I wanted to give my phone to my wife. Obviously not wanting her to see all my naughty appointments, I needed to format it. It was not intuitive... But finally I figured it out:

  • Take out battery for 10 seconds
  • Reinsert and open device
  • At blue NOKIA text, press and hold Ctrl+Chr+Shift+F until the Format dialog is displayed
  • Select Format.

Your device will now be reset to factory conditions.