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Adobe has released an iPhone app for Photoshop.com, their online editor. There are some cool things that you can do with the app, such as the sketch filter that you see on the left here.

There are also some other filters such as the soft vignette that look neat, but the rainbow filter that modifies all the colors on your image so that it looks like a rainbow is a little odd. I suppose my 5 year old would think it was pretty cool.

Anyway, it looks like a neat app. You can send your images to Photoshop.com, or save them back locally. The app creates a new image at the end of your camera roll, so your original picture is not changed. You can choose to take a picture right from the app too.

It is free, and looks like it is worth playing with a bit. Search the app store for Photoshop.com.

I am starting to get pretty annoyed with my iPhone. It all started after I did the carrier update to get the MMS capabilities. What happens, is that I lose the ability to send and receive calls and messages. I can still get email at least.

My wife tries to call me, and the phone goes right to voice mail. Then she emails me. If I am checking email, then I power down the phone, then power it up again. This works for awhile. If I leave it for a period of time, or charge it (that could be just time) it stops working.

The weirdest is when I try to call out. The phone gives the Calling… screen, but it never makes the call. Weird.

I have tried to reset the phone, by wiping it out from iTunes, and doing a reinstall. That didn’t seem to help.

This is not an isolated incident. I know two other people that have had the same problems. The fix? Get a new phone. I guess I need to make an appointment with the “Geniuses”.

UPDATE (10/08/09 9:00PM): I am installing the 3.1.2 iPhone update, and a “new carrier update”. That makes me nervous. We’ll see what happens.

D90 Manual

I am now using the iPhone app Good Reader. Scott Kelby had posted about this in September, but I hadn’t got around to looking at it until now. This app is a great way to view and manage pdf files. It was really easy to get the pdf files onto my iPhone. You can point to a web url, and it will download as I did with one of the files, or you can set up a file server with one button press on the phone. This is really easy. All you have to do on your computer is connect to the displayed IP address in the finder with the Go/Connect to server… menu option. I then dragged the other items to the finder window, and they transfered over. Very simple. It works well. This is what I have on my iPhone so far.

1. My Nikon D90 camera manual
2. My SB-800 camera manual
3. My SB-900 camera manual
4. 10 By David duChemin (eBook)
5. 10 More by David duChemin (eBook)
6. DLWS participant packet

It works pretty well. You can easily read, zoom, change pages, even navigate directly to a page. I like it. I haven’t used the manuals yet, but I like the idea of having them sitting on my hip within reach.

In two weeks I will be at the DLWS in Traverse City Michigan. I am pretty psyched. I picked the location because it was the only event near my birthday they had, and I picked DLWS when I found that two photographers that I read a lot about, Moose Peterson, and Joe McNally would be there.

So, there were a couple of things that I wanted to get. I have been going back and forth on what to do with my Tamron 17-50 f/2.8. In fact, I blogged about that here. I decided that for the trip, I was going to get the Nikon 17-55 f/2.8. Part of my hesitation is when I might move up to full frame, would I still want this lens? Well, I figure that I will keep the D90 as a backup, so I will either need it as a lens for the D90, or I can sell it for not that much less than I paid for it. Now that I have a paying job again, it seemed like a good time to get it.

This lens, and the Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 that I have, both take 77mm filters, so I got a Tiffen polarizer for them (was going to get the Nikon, but the store didn’t carry it), and a Lee 4×6 .9 graduated soft ND that Moose claims to hand hold. I still don’t get that. We go to the trouble of putting the camera on a tripod, using a cable release, and then hold a filter up to the lens? I’ll have to ask him about that.

Last item was the MB-D80 battery grip. I have wanted this for quite awhile for taking portraits when hand holding. Not sure if I really need it now for the trip, but I figured I would get it.

I ended up at West Photo for this stuff. I had intended to order from B&H, because they had the lens for a fair bit less. The other stuff seems comparable, but the Nikon stuff seems to go for less in New York. Well, as luck would have it, both B&H and Adorama are closed for Succoth for another week. I was nervous that even with paying for two day shipping that by the time they open, and get to my order, there might not be enough time to get it to me.

Anyway, I will probably have more on the gear as I use it. Anyone want a very good condition Tamron 17-50 f/2.8?

The Best Camera is the one you have with you. This is something that Chase Jarvis has been saying for awhile now, as he has been churning out hundreds of pictures from his iPhone. Some of them have pretty cool effects applied to them, and I have often wondered how¬† he got those done “in camera”. I figured he must be bringing them into Photoshop or something like that.

Nope. Maybe at first, but not any more. He has a new site¬†for sharing, and a new¬†application for the iPhone out. Here is the post where he shared it a few days ago. I just got to installing it yesterday. The picture at the top was my first shot. Goes to prove that a few new filters still doesn’t equal an unsuck filter for a crappy photograph. It kinda looks like a mouse on a golf course green, covering a¬†¬†hole…. right…. sort of? It’s actually a mouse pad. I wasn’t very creative last night.

The app is pretty cool. It has several filters that work well, and the ability to share right from that app with flickr, facebook, or the bestcamera site. I wish it had a sharpen filter, and a way to trigger the picture when the device is steadier. I find most of my images on this phone blurry. But, it is worth checking out.

I am so done with anything to do with hard drives.¬† I am starting to want to stop doing anything that deals with creating files that take up lots of space and need to be backed up. (ie photography) But I know this is just “resistance”. (I have been reading “War of Art”, but that is another post coming up)

I gave up and sent the ReadyNAS back to NewEgg. I spent two long nights fighting with something that I thought was a plug and play device.  First, my drives were not recognized. Actually, the first of the three was, no matter which of the three I put in the first slot. Technically, the other two would appear as functioning drives, but on the volumes tab, where you specify drives, raid settings, and volume info, only the first would appear.

I first tried to upgrade the firmware, thinking there might be something flaky going on there. That took everything south. Couldn’t boot. Then tried to do TFTP boot, and a USB boot, but neither worked. It’s packed up and ready to ship to NewEgg. At least they didn’t give me any hassles. I am getting a replcaement, so the saga will continue.

I start today out at Thompson Reuters. I have a new java contract for at least the end of the year. We will see how it goes with me and the project whether it lasts longer.

This marks the end of a great summer. I was able to spend a lot of time with the girls, and I am grateful for the opportunity. I have mixed feeling about starting. I would like to be able to pick Kate up from the bus everyday, and get to spend time playing with them and doing things like going to the zoo. On the other hand, I miss the working with a group aspects of my java jobs, and the sitting down and coming up with a solution to a problem. Maybe I will get to do it again sometime…

Many years ago, I was out at what was then called West Publishing working on some of the back end mainframe code for the Westlaw search engine. Now I am back on a team that is doing some of the conversion to newer technologies.

One of the things that I am psyched about is that this is a team that is practicing Agile methodologies, which should be a lot of fun. I haven’t been on a true Agile team before, and I am looking forward to it.

More like two oops make a not so bad. I brought the removable drive with all my backups to a Geek Squad location inside a BestBuy store. Told them my sob story, and they told me they would fleece me to recover the data. Likely hundreds of dollars. Crap. I didn’t really want to give up on our baby pictures of Kate. The girl said she could plug it in and see what was there. She could see a bunch of home movies, and some empty folders. I was very confused. They must be seeing one of my first formatting/foldering setups I though. I left. Thought I might look for a different recovery place.

I got home, plugged in the drive, and saw what she had seen. Oops. I packed up and brought the wrong drive. Plugged in the second one, and there was the bad one. I decided to look around again. I found a folder called older, looked inside, and saw images from 2002-2007. These are all the point and shoot images that I taken that I thought I had lost. There were still here. I immediately backed them up to a working removable drive.

So… oops. Looks like I have most of the stuff I care about. What don’t I have? I don’t have the “backup” files from Annie’s and my computers from the last few years, and I don’t have all of my ripped music. I can spend several hours sometime to rip the music again, and there wasn’t a whole lot of value on the backups. Probably stuff we would have kept if we knew about it, but not so important that we can’t remember what’s there.

I still might get an estimate on data recovery from someone else. I didn’t do a format, the folders shouldn’t be that munged.

Big, big take away from all of this: Never have just one copy of a file. Even if you think it was just going to be a day or two until your new NAS was up (like me), don’t take that chance. ALWAYS have at least two copies.

I have been building a NAS for quite some time. That’s the problem. It was just taking too long to get going. I had it to the point where I had a Linux box with software raid, and LVM, and ssh going. I was using rsync over ssh from my Macs to get data there. But that just wasn’t good enough. I wanted Samba and NFS running securely with user accounts. I have got them to work before. It just takes some work. I decided that I would move on. Get something that was already working. Open source to the rescue.

I took a look at FreeNas and Openfiler. I thought that FreeNas would be everything I was looking for, then I realized that it couldn’t use LVM, so I would have to make static partitions. Not the worst thing in the world, but….

Openfiler looked to be the ticket. I decided to take it out for a spin. However, it would not recognize the data I had on my old raid array, or my other drive that was a backup of some of the data. I would have to repartition. So, I took one of the new 1TB external drives that I just purchased to hold my RAW picture files, and coppied everything over. Then, after making sure the data was there, I set to work setting up openfiler. This is not the most intuitive setup. And I had an idea of what I was doing, and wanted to do. I was getting frustrated. I could not create a share. It took me a couple of days to figure out that you had to create a folder, then tell openfiler that the folder was a share. As well, you must authenticate over LDAP, or Active Directory. They have a built in LDAP server, so I used that, but it was an extra layer of issues that I didn’t need.

If you are getting the idea that I should have just taken the time to get Samba running, I think that you are right. I was then messing with trying to get a rsync server working. You can’t do rsync over ssh. It won’t start anymore. It used to. It doesn’t now, and doesn’t return any error messages. Now I am frustrated.

So somewhere in this mess, I disconnect the “backup” drive from my Mac. (I had added some other stuff from my computer directly, so that when I when to add the data to the new NAS, I could plug in the removeable drive and just move it locally instead of over the network.) For some reason, the iMac does not think that it should be disconected yet. I was sure I told it to eject, but it must not have, because I got the message that says that I am an idiot for disconnecting a drive that wasn’t first ejected. Well, guess what, the fat32 partition table is hosed. Garbage there. Crap.

I am going to need a trip to the GeekSquad to try to get them to recover the data. I will have to spend more money than if I had bought an extra drive and had two backups. Maybe I need a blueray drive to do my 2nd backup. Anyway, I am screwed. Maybe. We’ll see.

So, I decided enough is enough. I ordered a Netgear ReadyNas NV+ from New Egg. It is a ready to go home/small business NAS that can take up to 4 drives. I will have 3 in a raid 5 configuration. It supports an interesting tech called X-Raid too that I will have to consider. It will let you replace the drives with bigger ones later one at a time, then rebuild when all are replaced. Pretty cool.

The box will do CIFS, NFS, HTTP (WebDav), FTP, and RSYNC. That coveres pretty much all the bases. It will send alerts when errors occur, and automatically rebuild when you put in a new drive. There are other nice things too, such as an iTunes server, and a media server that is auto discovered by media players. You can even set it up to access files remotely through an encrypted channel using netgear sotware you install on your laptop. You can even plug other drives into this box to share them.

I have debated something like this for awhile. What kept me back was the price and the ability to rsync. This device does rsync. This device will be far cheaper than the time is has taken me to putz around with other “solutions”.

I guess I am done for now with the “Building a NAS” series. I just wasn’t worth my time. Sorry.

P.S. It looks like I never did post my bit on getting LVM up. Maybe I will do that sometime.

Now that we have a raid array created, we are going to create some virtual drives. Why virtual drives? Well, we have one large terabyte drive right now, and if we just put folders in there, it can quickly get cumbersome. You have no control on size of those folders, and permissions can be more difficult. And if you try to share this drive, you can’t assign different drive letters in windows to different folders, just one to the drive. One other issue is file system. I am going to use just a basic file system here, but in the past I have created different file systems based on the type of use ie. large video files, small text files, etc. Making those decisions is beyond the scope of this tutorial, and I have decided that for my purposes now, it doesn’t matter that much. You can decided differently.

What we will discuss is using LVM. This enables you to set up virtual drives that can contain different file systems, and that can be grown and shrunk (usually) to fit the space needs of the system. We will look at maintenance of these file systems at a later tutorial. Here we will create a backup, and a pictures virtual drive. We will not use the full terabyte of space, so that we can grow these as needed, or add another for say music at another time.

I will once again be doing this on an ubuntu system, but the use of these tools is fairly standard across linux distributions.
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