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...

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...

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.

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.

I bought a new MacBook Pro 15.4" from Cool Apple Buddy on Thursday. Needless to say I was extremely excited since a significant upgrade to the ageing G4 processor was long overdue. I actually wanted the 17" since I currently own a PowerBook 17" 1.67GHz model, but none are currently available. Unfortunately this was the biggest mistake I made in a long time...

See, the notebook had random hangups. I would do a network copy, XCode install and then tried to launch Firefox - just to see the UI hang indefinitely. I ran AHT and found two errors - 4MOT/1/40000002:LeftUpperFront as well as 4SNS/1/40000000:'TCOP'. Whatever that means. From what I gathered it means a fan is broken and something else too.

Furthermore - the screen does not tilt back far enough to my liking. It is fine if you mount your notebook on those plastic platforms - but not if you work with it on a desk like I do.