Buying a Nexus 7

This morning I bought a Google Nexus 7 tablet. The annoying thing is that Google charge you £10 postage, and don't let you choose any cheaper postage options. So although they advertise the tablet at £159, it is actually about £170 with the postage included (for the 8GB version). The 16GB version can be ordered for £200 with free postage from other online retailers (like ebuyer), so it is only £30 for the extra memory. Still, £30 for 8GB more memory seems too expensive to me. You could buy a 64GB USB memory stick and a USB OTG connector cable for less.

I then spent quite a bit of the morning trying to determine if the Nexus supports USB3. I couldn't find specs anywhere, or anyone saying that it was USB3. The only relevant discussion I could find was where someone asked if it was worth buying a USB3 hard drive caddy to use for connecting an external HD to the Nexus. The answer was no, it's not worth it.

So, I assume that the Nexus 7 does support USB3, since the answer was not "It doesn't support USB3". That it wasn't worth using USB3 was only that one person's opinion, so I decided to look at purchasing a USB3 OTG cable and hub. After all, I need to purchase a hub and OTG cable anyway, so might as well get the latest tech even if it has no current benefit.

But I couldn't find any USB3 OTG (or USB superspeed OTG) cables. I guess that either there aren't any, or all USB OTG cables are USB3 compatible. So I just bought a standard USB OTG cable. I also bought a USB3 hub from ebay. And I might buy a USB3 to SATA kit. I'm not sure if it will be worth it to replace my current USB2 / eSATA enclosure though.

Before lunch I tried taking a UV photo using both of my Vivitar 283s (and a third one arrived today).

The memory card also had some older UV photos that I hadn't copied to my computer yet.

The one above shows a flower in visible light top left, then UV top right. Below are both the images converted to grayscale to make the differences more obvious. There doesn't appear to be a hidden UV pattern on the flower, but it reflects much less UV light (so appears darker) than it does in visible light.

The photos below show my glasses. The top one is the glasses that I wear normally, and the bottom one is my spare pair. Although I bought them from the same place, and both pairs are very similar, the ones that I wear seem to be much better at blocking UV. They could have a more effective anti-UV coating. Or the reduced UV tranmission could be due to them being covered in greasy smears. (My glasses are really hard to clean).

Here is a video of raindrops running down the window I recorded a few weeks ago. It is recorded in portrait orientation, so it is sideways.

And here is a photo I took a few weeks ago:

It shows the only way I could get my markins ball head to mount on my gorillapod. There is a 1/4" female to female adapter (maybe not meant to be an adapter, but that's what I'm using it as) connected to the gorillapod. Screwed into the top of that is a Manfrotto spigot that has a 1/4" male end screwed into the adapter, and then the 3/8" end is screwed into the bottom of the ball head.

The three screws you see by the foot of the gorillapod are 1/4" to 3/8" thread adapters. These are hollow, with a 1/4" thread on the inside, and a 3/8" thread on the outside. So you screw them onto a 1/4" thread to convert it into a 3/8" thread. My gorillapod has a 1/4" thread, while the Markins ball head screws down onto a 3/8" thread. So it should just be a case of using one of these adapters on the gorillapod thread, then the Markins ball head should screw on okay.

But none of these adapters work with the Markins ball head. The head screws onto them a little way, but then gets stuck. I don't know why, as the Markins screws onto the 3/8" thread of my tripod just fine. The adapters do work for my cheapo ball head though (upside down in the image). So if I want to be able to use a ball head on both my tripod and the gorillapod, I am going to have to start using my cheapo ball head. And indeed, that is what I have been doing.

In the afternoon today I tried to learn a bit of Ukrainian Cyrillic and did some gardening. It was very nice and warm and sunny.

In the evening I wrote this blog post and did some sculpey with Billy.