This is a long way of saying Thank You to F for the Olloclip, the ideal gadget for someone who loves both their iPhone and photography. Literally only available a couple of weeks before Christmas (for iPhone 5 at least), it still arrived before the 25th.

For those that don’t know, the Olloclip is an attachment for the iPhone’s camera. It looks like this:

It sits over the iPhone’s camera. It has three lenses on two sides. On one side there’s the fish-eye adapter, on the other is a wide-angle. If you unscrew the the wide-angle it becomes a macro adapter.

In the end it was the reliability that did it. Over the last few months my trusty 300D has been coming up with odd errors, refusing to recognise memory cards and generally getting cantankerous. Luckily I have always been able to coax it back to life but in the end the thought of travelling somewhere and have it fail became more painful than the anticipated hole in my bank account.

• Welcome back, Palm – “After years in a persistent vegetative state, Palm has come roaring back with a gadget that’s going to prove hard to beat in 2009.” Not sure it’s that good, but competition for Apple and RIM is always going to be a good thing.
• The UK government’s plans to retain email data and rate online content will cost too much, destroy business, liberty and must be stopped – start making placards – The title pretty much says it all (though the rest of the article is also worth reading).
• ‘No God’ campaign draws complaint – “Organisation Christian Voice has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority saying they break rules on substantiation and truthfulness.” Sometimes I read the headlines in my RSS feed and think it must be in NewsBiscuit or The Onion…

• eBayer invites buyers to rip him off – It does seem that eBay has become a victim of its own success. Having said that, some of the ways that they’re trying to tackle fraudulent users are clearly bonkers.
• Japan MPs moot halt to executions – Hopefully this will move from “moot” to law, and then from temporary to permanent.
• Designing What’s Right for Consumers – Is it really so hard to design consumer electronics? The manufacturers say it is. Everyone else seems to disagree.
• WordPress 2.3.3 – I’ve upgraded to the current version of WordPress. As ever, if you spot anything amiss please let me know!

Introduction

It took me over a year to decide to buy a SliMP3 player. I am not normally that indecisive but I just couldn’t figure out why it cost so much. I mean, what does it do? It streams MP3 music across an Ethernet network and connects to the phono sockets on your hi-fi system. How hard can that be? There must be something cheaper or better than the Slim Devices machine! It took me all that time to research the subject and come to the conclusion that there wasn’t. I still think it’s a lot of money for what it does, but I also still think that it’s pretty much unique.

Introduction

‘The Penguin Says,’ as you know by now, is a Linux application review site. However, since high-tech toys such as PDA’s are likely to be of interest to many readers I thought I’d add a review. Don’t worry, I shall be keeping an eye on using it with a Linux PC.

So, what is the Psion Series 5? It’s one of the new breed of ‘super’ PDA’s; a full 32-bit computer with megabytes of memory and real applications. The main competition would be any machine based in Windows CE. Being a Linux user I do have a bit of an anti-Microsoft bias, though that is not why I bought a Psion. There are two reason:

Introduction

Oddly, the main reason I’m writing this review is that I feel that the Minolta Dual Scan II has been harshly treated in the media. Most magazines seem to skip over this, the entry level, model and move on to the Scan Elite. On photo.net all are singing the praises of expensive Nikons and Canons, and complain about the lack of ICE on this model.

In a sense they are right, but everything is a compromise. Here’s why the Dual Scan II is a compromise that works for me.