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The camera of Nokia E90 communicator is “3.2 megapixel”. Here is a cut of an image, made with this camera at best light conditions possible (even sunshine, not too bright). Close your eyes, photographers: you may get sick.

Such quality is not just ashaming; I’m now happy that I’m not working at Nokia any more

Manufacturers increase the number of megapixels, which sales well, but that does not make image any better. Sure, the file size grows, carrying these junk pixels. I always resize these “phone pictures” down at least 2 times (= 4 times file size decrease), often more, before I dare to show them. And the phone does not offer neither option to use lower resolution¹, nor any software to resize the captured image. As I feel plain stupid uploading 1MB picture worth of at most 200KB to any web site, I have always to scale it on some other computer. This is called “Mobile life”, “My world with me”, “Always connected” or something like that.

I know that I should pay extra for better camera quality and I’m not objecting to this; what I do not like is the unnecessary pixels which I can’t disable. Next time I may be purposedly looking for a camera with fewer pixels!

Update: ¹ I was wrong on this. Camera offers 5 resolutions, smallest 640×480 with file size about 40kB. Finding this menu was not intuitive for me, but one can blame my lack of intuition here.

I rebooted my home computer after a long uptime and suddenly the screen is terribly flickering. Reason? “I did not do anything” I installed software updates, added and removed users, but never mangled with the screen, as it was already tuned once and forever.

My Xorg.conf file has only one mode line, the one which works fine at 85Hz. Gnome graphical menu item for “screen resolution” gives only one resolution option… at 60Hz. What the heck?

The GDM screen was at fine refresh rate, but after I log in, it drops to that unbearable 60Hz. This at least gave me a hint that this may have something to do with Gnome. Search in .gconf directory of my home reveals two files:

.gconf/desktop/gnome/screen/default/0/%gconf.xml
.gconf/desktop/gnome/screen/[my host name]/0/%gconf.xml

which differ in one line:

<entry name=”rate” mtime=”1152558455″ type=”int” value=”85“>

Value 85 was different in the [my host name]-version, showing 60!

As a first attempt, I just change that value from 60 to 85; I did not actually hope that it will work… but it does. Now my refresh rate is as it was.

My questions to the audience:

• Where did this poor refresh rate come from? Was it some upgraded package, which decided to change my monitor settings? (I have Ubuntu 7.10 and Gnome 2.20.1)
• How is a user supposed to solve such problem?

We managed to get out for an almost real snowbiking on a weekend. Suomusjärvi - Karjaa, about 60 km on gravel roads.

One forest road was not cleaned of the snow, and we had to drag bikes for several kilometers. What a joy! That was the first - and I’m afraid the only - day in this winter when I enjoyed the snow.

All other roads were either clean asphalt, or covered with smooth ice. Good for the one who had both studded tires! I’m so much missing the real winter; well now I’ll have at least one memory of it.