Financial & Travel Musings

In days gone by it was very easy to get “memory” for your camera it was all 35mm film so the only real choice was in the brand in regular shops.

These days though chances are you’ve gone digital and have a wealth of choice to make to find something that will both fit and work in your camera. There’s the old-timer compact flash which is still used in the very latest professional cameras because of it’s speed. Then there’s a whole range of SD cards and it’s far from obvious if these will work in your camera because some cameras only support up to 1GB (rarely indicated), others up to 2GB and then there’s the high capacity versions starting at 4GB and running up to 16GB at the moment which will actually work in some “normal” cameras too even if they don’t have the SDHC tag on them.

So watch what you’re lifting in the shop!

Popularity: 29% [?]

With the resolution on even quite modestly priced digital cameras going up seemingly by the day it’s now possible to retouch photos pretty much the same way as the professionals do.

Older cameras couldn’t really zoom in close enough with the image to allow the fine changing of individual pixels without it being noticed on prints produced from the cameras but these days 8mp cameras are commonplace and at that level of resolution there’s quite a lot you can do on the original without it being noticeable on any prints produced. Fortunately the price of the technology that you need to make the adjustments to the images has also crashed in price so, if you’re into photography, it’s viable to consider buying one of the digital airbrush devices and start playing around with it.

I’ve got one myself and have barely touched the surface of what’s possible. Whilst you can do some of the retouching via a mouse to really make the most of the software available you really need to look at graphics pads which are quite simply fantastic and that’s even at the beginner level – a few months use of it and you’ll not know how you did without it.

Popularity: 62% [?]

One of the really big changes in computers over the years has been the amount of memory that’s available and the technology that it uses.

The very first computer used clockwork (really: it was built in 1850) but in modern times things began with vacuum tubes before moving on to magnetic drums, then tapes and finally the magnetic discs that we still use today. Actual internal memory went through a similar cycle moving from clockwork to vacuum tubes to magnetic drums then magnetic cores and then on to solid-state or integrated circuits as we’d call them today.

That continual change and improvement in the technology meant that the need to limit memory has all but disappeared. As recently as 1976 for instance it was commonplace to have 11 users sharing all of 48k of memory yet within a few years a single personal computer had a great deal more memory and these days even 2GB of memory rarely seems enough yet that’s 87,000 times the amount that eleven users shared just over 30 years earlier.

Popularity: 50% [?]