Larry’s Things .net

Inspired by the Blumenthal show,  I’m going to look into whether I can replicate the perfect steak. Sources:  “Handbook of Food Science, technology”Muscle tissue consists of 75% water.   Of that,  1% is permanently bound within protein molecules.   10 to 15% of that is ”immobilized” and is located close to the 1% of the bound water .   The other 59% is free water between the extracellular space and is easily lost.A decrease in pH (more acidic), decreases the amount of water binding groups in the muscle tissue, and thus decreases it’s ability to hold water.Muscle tissue contains mostly actin and myosin.From the BBC website (http://www.bbc.co.uk/food/tv_and_radio/perfection/experimental_kitchen_low.shtml), it looks like 55 deg C is the temperature at which myosin shrinks and causes it to lose water.   This seems to be unavoidable, unless you want to eat raw meat.   The other temperature is at the 60-65 deg C range, where collagen begins to break down.   This seems to be the key point as collagen is the tough material that’s apparently holding the muscle tissues together and making it chewy.  So from the Blumenthal show, and the various other sources,  bringing temperatures up quickly will cause water to be expelled (inevitable), but will not give enough time for collagen to break down.   Focusing on the temperatures between 55-60 deg C and giving the meat a long time in that temperature range will allow for enough collagen to break down to give a more tender taste.Update : ok, so I got myself a 12 oz piece of “well aged” steak from St. Lawrence Market.   Cut out the excess fat, lightly seasoned with salt and pepper,  and placed it into a plastic oven bag (along with the cut out fat - for the fatty flavour), and cooked it inside a toaster oven at an average temperature between 60-65 deg C .   Two bimetal spring type oven thermometers were used at the same time to ensure some form of accuracy.  In hindsight, the 2nd thermometer should’ve been a digital thermometer.    This was cooked for around 4.5 hours.   At the end of that time, quite a lot of liquid seemed to have exited the steak and a test cut showed that the steak was thoroughly cooked to a pinkish colour.   The steak was then finished by quickly searing it for 30 seconds on each side, and rested for around 4 minutes.   Texture was ok…  not mouth meltingly good (I’m comparing this to steak served at the Harbour 60 in Toronto) .   The flavour of the steak was ok, most likely due to the aged nature of the beef rather than the cooking method.Overall, I’d say this was a failure.   In hindsight, I might try for 2 hours instead. 

Summary - A decent low priced ($129 CDN) camera, that doesn’t skimp on finished quality.   8.2 megapixel.  3x optical zoom.  2.5″ screen.  2 Years manufacturer warranty (probably in Canada only).    Country of manufacture:  China.  Despite some negative points, overall value is well worth the money.

On the points below, I’ll focus on issues that other reviewers have not mentioned about.   There are plenty of reviews out there with sample pictures from this camera.

The Good Points:

 I don’t know when Fujifilm finally decided on this, but they’ve finally conceded defeat on the xD memory card format and implemented the SD memory card system.

The 2.5 inch viewing screen is not bad actually.   Resolution, colour, and refresh rate seem to quite accurate in representing the pictures+videos.   Replay of 640×480 30fps movies have no delays or jitteryness.

The fast 1600 ASA/ISO mode is nice to have.   Let’s you take pictures in very low light conditions, albeit rather grainy.

One tiny feature that I liked about this was that the battery/memory holder door was spring loaded, so that when slid open, the door springs up.

Battery takes about 100 minutes to fully charge.

The bad points : 

The so-called “image stabilization” that the camera touts to have is really just putting the camera into high speed 1600 ASA and activating the flash - and to Fujifilms’ credit, actually does work to stabilize the image.   But in my opinion… that’s cheating…  at 1600 ASA, even for the supposedly better CCD guts, there’s still noticeable grainyness in the picture.   And the flash then also washes out all the colours into that typical flashed look from a compact camera - giving everybody in the picture that ghostly bluish skin look.

The movie files are limited to a maximum of 2 GB in size.   After which, you have to press the shutter button again to start recording another video.   This is not too bad, as that still gives you around 30 mins of recording time.   The batteries probably won’t last longer than 45-60 mins anyways while recording (unverified).   Zooming is not available *during* recording, but can be used once recording is stopped.

To change from picture to movie mode, you have to select it through the menu system.   This is cumbersome for those who are used to other cameras like the Canon or Sony models, which allows you to change the mode by sliding a switch.

The tripod mount thread is made of plastic!   Man, did they really save that much money by using plastic instead of metal threads?   I guess “your average point&shoot photographer will never use a tripod with the camera, so why make it sturdy?”, would be their line of thinking….

The “manual” mode is quite lackluster.   There’s only 3 things one can control in manual mode:  ISO, exposure compensation, and white balance.   Sorry, you will not be able to independently control the shutter speed or aperture size.

The fuji finepix viewer is the typical crap software one would expect from Japan, unless they outsourced it to India, but then it would only mean that the programming contract was crap to begin with.   Anyways, I digress.    Immediately after installing and running the software, it connects to your camera and shows a thumbnail summary of pictures on your camera.   Your only option is to download the image…  you can’t delete it or modify it straight on the camera.   The menu structure is confusing and nonsensical.

- as with all things linux - documentation is sparse and scattered all over the place.  And don’t give me this “oh, linux is open source and there’s documentation covering everything” crap.   Yeah, that’s when things are working properly, and you’re using a common distro, with older builds of subcomponents.   Once you get something new into the mix, something breaks or you get into the dependency spiral of death.    Anyways, my most recent attempt at self flagellation with linux has been to use the newest version of pam_mount with Fedora 9.   I have to admit that this time, the rpms for pam_mount actually worked and connecting to the AD server was not too bad.   The hell part came when I logged in via gdm with an AD user, and the gnome desktop controls were missing , along with all the gconf permission denied errors.   Logging in via text shell was ok, and mounting to the home directory on a samba server worked ok….   Only thing was the stupid gnome gdm login.   Spent hours looking at various combinations of pam_mount.conf.xml and the smb.conf files, until I finally looked in /tmp .   In /tmp, there were all these gconf* , orbit* , pulse*, virtual* files , and I just needed to delete them in order to log into gnome properly.   yeesh….