If a pizza is sliced in the forest…

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Poorly-cut pizza

If nobody’s eating the pizza but you, it doesn’t matter how you cut it.  No one will complain about the relative sizes of the slices, and no one will criticize their shapes.  You don’t even have to make the first cut (or any cut) go through the centre.  I missed a creative opportunity here, but the fact of this unusual freedom only really occurred to me as I was finishing the slicing.

I didn’t eat it all at one meal, which in practical terms could have been limiting if, for aesthetic reasons, I’d wanted to make (for example) one 13° sliver and a single 347° Pac-Man.  Still, where it could have been ludicrously nonuniform, my work was merely haphazard.  Mediocre, in fact.

Live and learn.  But when will be the next such unconstrained pizza?  I can’t buy one just to cut up in a consciously erratic fashion.  I wouldn’t devote resources to something so ridiculous.

Panasonic DMC-LX3 firmware update with Linux

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Well, I took a chance just now.  I saw today that there’s a firmware update (v2.1) available for my camera, a Panasonic DMC-LX3.  I saw mention of better white balance performance, which looked useful, so I wanted to go for it.  I hesitated some microseconds, though, because there were downloads for Windows and for Mac, and I run Linux.  I reasoned that Mac is not Windows, and Linux is not Windows, and that in the end I needed a .bin file extracted onto an SD card (not an executable file running on my computer with the camera connected to the computer), and so I should just follow the Mac instructions.

I take no responsibility for anything you may do to your computer or camera should you happen to come across this (yeah, right) and decide to do as I did, but it turned out well for me.  I charged my battery, extracted the .bin file from the .zip file in the “Mac” download (using Ark), put the file onto the SD card, and followed the instructions on Panasonic’s website.  Mere seconds later my firmware claims to be v2.1, and my camera offers me exposure bracketing up to +/-3eV.  I have yet to see whether I like my pictures better or not…