Nadege Patisserie Review: Light Honey Mousse Cake

I have recently come to love the cakes from this cake store: Nadege Patisserie.  Their cakes are a balance between the right level of sweetness and a complexity in the taste.  In this cake, there are several layers, a saffron creme brulee top layer, over a light honey mousse and blueberry coulis with a shortbread base.  The light honey mousse was a very bland mousse with hint of honey sweetness, and the saffron brulee top adds a complex taste.  The blueberry coulis is the sweetest component with a slightly acidic aftertaste.  All the components worked really well together, giving a very balanced and interesting cake.  

My personal favourite from the store was their vanilla panna cotta cake: Marie Antoinette.  But I would still highly recommend this interesting cake, especially for people who want to try something interesting. 

7/10

Iron Ring

Its a much delayed post.  In fact, it has been close to 2/3 weeks since I have received my ring.    It is amazing how all the work I have done in the past 4 years is represented by one small ring, but truth be told, this ring embodies even more.  

Lets be brutally honest, not many people will recognize the value of the Iron Ring, in fact, this ring itself is representative of something that engineers should abide by whether or not they have the ring.   Its true.  The importance of the ring lies not in the ring itself, but rather it signifies the understanding that the "material will always fail us".  As engineers, we know that it is always inevitable that things will fail: power outage, collapsing bridges, broken communication, plane crashes, etc.  The importance is to understand that things will fail, and ensure that we minimize the factors that can cause it to fail, and to understand and take action to prevent future occurrences.  As time past, it is easy to forget that, and this ring is here to remind you.  

If you let it be a ring, it will always be just a ring. Remember the meaning, and this will be much more - an embodiment of responsibilities, of commitment.   Truth be told, I don't know which I will be, only time will tell. 

Iron Ring.  A symbol of responsibility. 

Soma Chocolatier Review: Old School Chocolate

This was one of the most interesting chocolates I have come by recently. It is an old school chocolate bar from soma chocolatier. This was relatively expensive, coming in at a 90g bar for $9. But it was refreshingly good.

The taste was like dark chocolateexcept with an additional earthiness from the cocao nibs used. It was a complex flavour with a very earthy bitter taste followed with bursts of sugariness when you bit into one of the cane sugar crystals. The taste was spot on without being oversweet or being too bitter.

The texture is, in my opinion, where it shines. It was like a crunchy cookie instead of the usual gooey mouth sticking mess that comes with a chocolate bar. This mainly comes from the lack of use of milk or dairy products to smooth out the texture.

Abeit the cost, the unique earthy taste of cocao nibs with a refreshing crunchy texture made this a worthy guilty pleasure. 8/10 :)

cocao nibs and cane sugar bar

Tech Explore: Camera Phone Focus

There was a very interesting topic that came up today when I had my meeting my thesis supervisor and group. Taking a picture from a modern smartphone shows that the phone will attempt to focus on objects. 

How exactly did the camera phone "focus"?  

With further research it turns out that until recently, most camera phones would employ a "fixed focus system", but in the recent years, higher end phones used newer camera modules which integrate auto-focus systems within the small camera modules.  

Fixed Focus Systems

 A fixed focus lens is basically one where the focus distance is decided during manufacturing, and there is no way of changing the focus.  However, this means that things could be "out of focus" pretty easily.  This system instead attempts to keep a large range of the image in the picture relatively in focus, or achieving a large depth of field.  the illustration below shows how aperture and depth of field are related, In addition to the aperture indicated, the size of the sensor also affects the "depth of field".

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Picture indicating how aperture and depth of field and other optical parameters affect the depth of field. 

By created fixed focus lens with a large depth of field, it was possible to produce cheap camera modules that were relatively sharp for everyday use. However, these systems were rarely used in recent day high end cameras - autofocus was introduced in iphone 3gs, and continues to be used in high end smartphones.  The wiki article goes deeper into some specifics of fixed focus lens in camera phones. 

Auto Focus Systems

High end phones employ camera modules which have a built in auto focus system (Link to Samsung camera module pr info). Here is an article which highlights mems for AF systems, but also explains the different sub categories of auto-focus systems. It boils down to two main methodologies which are used to change AF for camera phones

1. Lens Modification AF
   • This involves a lens which would change refractive index or other properties to change focus. 
   • This method tends to be much more costly to manufacture, and are limited in resolution, as such it is rarely used in the cameraphone market. 
2. Lens Motion AF
   • This involves the movement of the lens with high precision using a motor to change the focus. 
   • The most prevalent is to use a voice coil motor(VCM) or a piezo motor, but there are starting to be mems based focus systems like the DigitalOptics Module
   • VCM motors tend to draw a relatively large amount of power in comparison to mems, which helps explains the larger power consumption of taking continuous videos on a camera phone.

Final Thoughts

• Focus systems are independent of camera sensors, which was confusing when i started researching into this.  The camera modules typically use another manufacturer's camera sensor and integrate it with their own focus, lens, and stabilization system. 
• There is a huge field to improving camera abilities in terms of camera phones, where the size and usage restrictions push for innovation. 
• Smartphone SDK's tend to support only auto-focusing onto an area, instead of truly supporting a manual focus, which leads to a question of how some camera applications can employ "manual focus".  Are there some tricks to enabling manual focus abilities on android?  (Link to android camera SDK) 
• Apps like SynthCam show some really cool innovation in enabling multi-point focusing and DSLR like depth of field effects