Michael Kratz

After flying Internationally with QANTAS into Asia in 2005 and being extremely disappointed with the quality of their cabin, the aircraft (an old B767) and available entertainment, last year in 2008 I decided to try Singapore Airlines. In January I flew with Singapore Airlines to the Philippines and Singapore. I was lucky enough to score a sector on the shiny new A380 (9V-SKA) from Sydney to Singapore.
 

Singapore A380 9V-SKA at Changi Terminal 3

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Apple are really good at building new and innovative products, with new and innovative features!

But somehow, with everything they do, they always miss out on some of the simplest, most logical features or tools. This goes right across their product line: OS X, hardware, Apple TV, etc. Read more

I’ve been wanting to invest in a large LCD TV for a while now. However what has stopped me from purchasing one, is the looming release of LED backlit models.

Right now, much to my disappointment, all LCD TVs currently available in Australia are powered by CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluroescent) backlights. The issue with these is that they’re 100% on, 100% of the time. So when something black is displayed on the TV, the pixels need to ‘cover’ the backlight and try not to allow light to shine through. Invariably, some light always does end up shining through. This is why the contrast ratio on typical LCD TV’s sucks. Enter LED backlighting… Read more

I shoot photos on my Nikon D50 camera in the Adobe RGB colour space. This colour space has a wider gamut than sRGB, which is what all Digital cameras tend to default to these days. Using Adobe RGB allows my camera to record more colour than it ordinarily would if I were using sRGB.

The only annoying issue with using Adobe RGB, is that anyone looking at or using my photos in a non-colour space aware browser, program or printer will see a ‘pastey’, flat photo, becuase these ‘dumb’ programs simply assume that the image is sRGB. So whenever I upload photos to the web or send them off to other people, I need to convert them to sRGB. Read more

Discovery is yet again on-orbit (STS-120). Space walks are happening, and bits and pieces are getting shuffled around and added to the International Space Station. I’ve always enjoyed watching bits and pieces of the various shuttle missions on NASA TV, but the thing that has become annoying lately is the lack of a decent high resolution/bit rate NASA TV stream.

The streams from the NASA TV site are rather dismal and don’t come anywhere near the kind of quality one could potentially obtain over a broadband connection. It annoyed me so much, I went hunting for better quality…. Read more

I’ve been quite annoyed for a while that Apple haven’t added full support for most of the recent Nokia phones, including the E70 that I currently use.

I got even more annoyed not long ago, when, with the release of OS 10.4.9, Apple added support for the E61, yet overlooked support for the E70! These two phones are extremely similar, and both run the same version and configuration of Symbian. I was very disappointed. Until now… Read more