ProocamSXC67 - A Cheaper Alternative To Canon's FA-DC67A

I love it when I get a great bargain.

The official Canon filter adapter FA-DC67A for my SX530 HS costs something like RM120 here in Malaysia. No doubt, it must be of high quality and reliability. But it's a bit way off my budget.

So off I when searching for a third-party alternative at Lazada Malaysia. And this is the cheapest that I could find, and eventually bought: the Proocam SXC67 adapter. A piece of metal ring (well it felt and sounded metallic) with 67mm diameter that costs me RM34.44. It would have been around RM40, but I got it off the recent Lazada 2018 Raya sale, and hence the cheaper price. Quite sturdy and well built in my opinion.

Good Old XVID

There is this problem that I have with my 7 year old Panasonic Viera LCD TV - it just can't play certain MP4 movies. The video and audio CODECs (usually H264 for video and AAC for audio) are all compatible with what the TV supports, but it just won't play.

The problem, after much digging, is that this particular Panasonic TV model only supports playing video files that are in certain video standard resolution - 360p or 720p resolution, for example. It took me many attempts, but one workaround is to convert the video CODEC into XVID/DIVX. The size of the output file may be larger, but hey, it works.

I use ffmpeg to do the audio and video codec conversion. And this is the command that I use:

Google's goo.gl - Slowly Fading Away

Looks like another product by Google is going the way of the Dodo. The official announcement by Google can be found here. I have since moved my only goo.gl link to Bitly. Good thing I didn't have many as it would be a nightmare to move them off goo.gl, one-by-one.

My Opinion On My New 32-bead LED Lamp

Should I get the 16-bead, 32-bead, 36-bead, 49-bead or the 64-bead LED lamp for my still-life and wildlife macro photography? Will the lighting be adequate? There's only one way to find out - just go out (or online), buy one, test it out and see how it performs. And that was exactly what I did last week. Shown in the picture above is the lamp that I bought - a 32-bead rechargeable LED lamp from Lazada Malaysia. It arrived last Friday, 6 days after placing my order. Not too bad, considering that the item was shipped overseas from Hong Kong, China. The price: about US$10 (including shipping charges) which is quite reasonable since I didn't want to spend too much on something that I know nothing of.

My Opinion

So did it meet my needs? Well, not exactly.

Getting More Sales - My First Google+ Collection

Sitting quietly and waiting for things to happen, I don't believe that is a prudent strategy. When it comes to sales, marketing and advertising I think this is what they say: More Publicity = More Sales.

Followup: Undelivered Registered Postal Letter

This is a followup to my previous blog post.

Undelivered Registered Postal Letter

Above is the tracking log of a registered postal mail that was supposed to be delivered to my home. To say the least, it didn't come after waiting for something like 2 weeks. I collected it from the General Post Office (GPO) in the end, which is not a problem since I was given the tracking number by the sender. I was told by the officer at the counter that the letter arrived at the GPO on 8th February 2018. But as can seen from the log above this is just not true.

Test Image Upload To PicasaWeb Via Raven+

There has been some problems with uploading images to PicasaWeb via Raven+ since January 23rd 2018. A peek into Raven+'s log says this:

[ZUploadContentPrePublishHandler] Failed to upload file 1 of 1 (F:\Temp\TEST_RAVEN.JPG)
[EXCEPTION][ZUploadContentPrePublishHandler] ZBlogAppException [Failed to upload file 'TEST_RAVEN.JPG'.([500, 'Internal Server Error', 'Internal error, try again later'])].

What does it mean? I am absolutely clueless.

Well anyway it seems to be fixed now - some 2 days later. I just managed to upload this picture a moment ago.

I'm not too sure what happened. I didn't change anything on my side, that's for sure. No official announcement from Google either.

Arrogance like Microsoft some 20 years ago? Or IBM some 30 to 40 years ago? Who knows?

Selfie On The Roof

Cool. Real cool. But mind your steps mister. We want you back alive. That's a 3 storey drop there.

Big Flock Of Birds

© Chuah TC 2017 - Buy this picture

It was not too long ago that I complained about the absence of Asian Glossy Starling visiting my backyard. I do see them but they were always overhead, flying pass my house and me.

Well, something changed. There are lots of them now. And I mean lots of them, something like 30 to 40 of them sometimes around my house at any one time; out front, out back, on the trees and on the electrical and telephone wires. The noise that they create sometimes can be quite deafening.