My Quake-like console in KDE

Recently I switched to KDE and still wanted to use the Quake-like console. Previously in GNOME I used Guake but it seems not working well in KDE. When I type "exit" in the last console session, Guake window disappears as it should be. But when I press F12, Guake window appears again but without any consoles. There is no use clicking on the New Tab button either.

I managed to switch to Yakuake. Yakuake uses Konsole. It took me a while to tweak the color scheme of Konsole. It looks much better now.

My color scheme is modified from Dark Pastels scheme available in default in Yakuake. My customized color scheme can be downloaded from here. Droid Sans 10 font is used in the console.

My KDE font setup

When switching from GNOME to KDE, I found that the look and feel of KDE is always worse than GNOME. After a while playing with several desktop settings, I realized that the most important thing that must be configured correctly at the first place is Font. No matter how fancy the desktop decoration is, if  it comes with bad font rendered, it looks bad all the time. This is because text is everywhere, and the natural thing we do when seeing the desktop is to read. Web browsing, files management, programming, etc., a lot of things requires font to be correctly and nicely rendered. 

I used to think KDE renders font worse than GNOME. I'm still not sure about it. But in KDE, it is possible to set fonts so that they are rendered almost similarly to GNOME. Here are my settings base on Droid fonts.

Anti-aliasing with system-wide settings (System Settings) renders very ugly. I had to enable KDE's anti-aliasing, with RGB sub-pixel rendering and Full hint. 

The text is now clean, clear, and very pleasant to read. 

Canon 5D vs. Canon 40D and Canon 60D - A qualitative comparison

Canon 5D vs. Canon 60D
I made this comparison while on a trip and I would say this comparison is not entirely fair because the setting on the two cameras are not the same.  First, lenses were different. A Canon 50mm f/1.8 lens was mounted on the 5D and a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 was used on the 60D so that both cameras had the same field of view. Second, the 5D shot in RAW mode while the 60D shot in JPG mode. Also, ISO was set to the lowest possible value on each camera, the 5D set to 50 and the 60D set to 100. The width of both images were scaled down to 2400 pixels in GIMP for convenient web uploading. This image size still allows us to see the difference in image quality in the two setups.

Canon 5D + Canon 50mm f/1.8, aperture f/7.1, shutter 1/100s, ISO 50 

Canon 60D + Sigma 30mm f/1.4, aperture f/7.1, shutter 1/60s, ISO 100

Surprisingly, the 5D outperforms the 60D significantly, not to mention that the 60D sensor resolution is 6 megapixels more than the 5D's. The details on the image by the 5D are sharper. The tree leaves are still visible, while on the 60D they are mostly smeared. The 100% crop shows the difference clearly.

Canon 5D

Canon 60D

Update: 
The comparison above is not fair since the image taken with Canon 60D is in JPG format.