Another pound-o-dice from Chessex

So I went and bought myself another pound of Chessex dice. Unlike last time I just took one photo and I'm just going to write really quickly what I got and maybe make a short comment or two.
D3 = 1 (the white "D6" with round corners and numbers)
D4 = 3 (one translucent purple)
D6 = 18 (one pipped 20mm, 8 pipped 16mm (two are glittery red), 3 pipped 12mm (one is frosted "white"), and 6 standard sized numbered)
D8 = 4 (all of them the same blue speckled colour)
D10 = 23 (four dark grey speckled, three green speckled with gold numbers, three green/yellow speckled with white numbers, three opaque red with blue numbers, two opaque grey with blue numbers, two purple speckled)
D% = 3 (one has purple speckles and numbers, and match the 7-dice set you get with every pound of dice)
D12 = 6 (two dark blue/light blue speckled)
D20 = 31 (eleven of them are brown with some red speckles, seven are half black and half grey, three are half brown and half black, and two are half grey and half green with gold numbers)
My 7-dice set was white with yellow/orange speckles and green numbers
All in all I got 96 dice in this pound.

Funny thing about this pound of dice was that it weighed 490 grams. 1 pound = 453.59 grams.So that's (if I calculated correctly) 1 pound and 1.28 ounces. I can live with that. Even if I also could live with a bit less brown D20s...

I guess after this I'm set for life. So no more pound of dice for me. Although, if I win a lot of money I could get the 30 pound box of dice I saw on Chessex' website. That would be legendary!

What I got in my Chessex Pound-O-Dice

 Yesterday I received my Pound-O-Dice from Chessex, so today I thought I'd take photos of all the dice and write about them. First I got the 7-dice set that's included in all the bags. Mine was the one with black speckles and numbers.

 These are the D4's.
The three in the back row all have the numbers along the edges. The orange looks frosted, and the green looks like a mix of translucent and swirly, and the blue looks like it's marble.
The middle one in the middle row is blue/purple and if you hold it up against a light source you can almost see through it.
The three in the front row don't show the correct colours in this photo. There are two translucent blue and one translucent yellow.


Then we have the D6's. First the numbered ones. The translucent red one in the left photo is 16mm. All the others are the standard 15mm. The red one with a smaller 6 is frosted.

The D6's with pips came in five different sizes. The big blue one is 22mm, the big black one is 18mm, the small white one is 14mm, the small red and purple ones are 12mm and the eight in the middle are the standard 16mm. The pink one is kind of like velvet and the one next to it is a translucent amber colour.

The only interesting looking D8 is the one at the top left of the eight. It's the same blue/purple as the D4 I mentioned earlier.
Oh and the pink one is misprinted. The opposing sides don't add up to 9. Some of the sides add up to 11 and some up to 7.
Edit: After looking closer to the pink one I think it's a countdown dice. Never heard of an 8-sided countdown dice before.

Nothing that exciting among the D10's. The one at the top of the pile is translucent but I can't decide if it's a dark pink or light red. It's pretty either way.
The white with red speckles and numbers looks like it belongs in the 7-dice set that's included. I got one D20 just like it too. You can see that they are factory seconds because of the paint.
Only got four percentile dice, but how often do you have a use for more than one?

Only two D12's. The white one is a millimetre or so bigger and looks almost like a pearl. Also the white one has a different order for its numbers. The opposing sides are still adding up to 13 though so there shouldn't be anything wrong with it.

Last but not least the D20's. Some of them it's hard to tell the difference between the 6 and the 9 because the line underneath is almost worn off.

The two white ones at the bottom are 20-sided D10's. However like the pink D8 the opposing sides do not add up to the correct number.

All together I got exactly 100 dice. Split like this:
D4 = 9
D6 = 33 (17 numbered and 16 pipped)
D8 = 9 (8 regular and 1 countdown)
D10 = 16
D% = 4
D12 = 2
D20 = 18
20-sided D10 = 2
7-dice set

At the same time as I ordered the pound of dice I also ordered a 7-dice set of mini dice (on Amazon.co.uk they are listed as: "Big Cherry Poly Dice Set, MINI, Toxic Purple, 7 Polyhedron Dice"). I took a photo of them with the set that came in the pound of dice to show the size difference. Not only are they a nice colour, they are so cute so I thought I'd include the photo here.

Samyang 14mm F2.8 ED AS IF UMC review

I've had this lens for a few months now but haven't really used it much. So today when I was bored I decided to take my Canon EOS 550D and this lens for a walk and test it out. The result of that walk can be seen in this video:


So now onto the review.
The manual focus is hard to use. Not just because it's a wide angle lens but more so because the distance scale on the lens is way off. The scale goes from 28cm to 3m and then infinity. My lens has infinity somewhere between 70cm and 1m. However if you use live view and zoom in to 10x it's fairly easy to find something far off in the distance to focus on. As long as it's a stationary object it shouldn't be a problem. When you do get the focus right it's very decent photos.
It does have barrel distortion (as seen in the first photo in the video), but other than that I haven't seen anything wrong.
I actually bought this lens to have a wide angle lens so I could photograph stars and possibly make time lapse videos. After about six months I still haven't had a chance to test it with stars. The alternative to buying this lens would've been to buy a lens with autofocus for a lot more money. So all in all I guess I can't complain too much.
In conclusion:
If you rely on autofocus you should not get this lens. It's manual focus only.
If you have more money than I have you could buy a wide angle zoom lens and get close to the 14mm with autofocus.
I will probably not use this lens much. If I get a chance to photograph stars then yes, but other than that I will most likely use my Sigma 30mm f1.4 that's on my camera almost all the time.