Category Archives: Hardware

The Best Camera

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iphoneThe 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.

Sent back the ReadyNAS

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readynasI 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.

New Job

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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.

Two Wrongs Make a Right?

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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.

Data loss means enough is enough

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openfilerI 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.

readynasSo, 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.

Creating LVM Virtual Drives

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driveicons

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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Nikon Camera Clock Battery

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This caught me by surprise. I was reading pixelated image about creating a “Oh Sh!t Kit” and he talked about having replacement clock batteries. For some reason, I had never thought about it. When I pulled the battery out of my old D40, or my current camera, the D90, part of the display is still powered, and the the setting and clock don’t get reset. Obviously there must be another battery.

First thing I did was try to look at the manual. I found a PDF of the D90 manual that you can download here. I found on page 28: 

¬†”The camera clock is powered by an independant, rechargeable power source, which is charged as necessary… two days of charging will power the clock for about 3 months.”

 This sure sounds like it is not user replaceable. So I did some more searching, and found this flicker D90 group discussion about his clock battery dying, and no talk about how to replace it.

I then found this Nikon support entry on replaceing the battery in the D3/D3x. Those cameras use the CR1616 “watch” type battery. That is not a rechargeable type battery. Is the D3 the only Nikon camera that has a field replaceable clock battery?

So good news D90 (other Nikons ???)¬†owners, one less think to pack in the Oh Sh!t Kit, but bad news in that if it does die, you will likely say more than “Oh Sh!t”.

The Traveling Photographers Laptop?

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Apple MacBookPro 13 inch

Apple released some new hardware on Monday. I always get psyched when that happens. Well, sometimes it is just a speed bump, and a “what ever”, but Monday has some interesting things introduced.

The 13″ MacBook, the one with the aluminium case got promoted to a MacBookPro. They get to charge more for the laptops with a “Pro” at the end. 😉 You can compare the the different models¬†at Apple here. It did get firewire 800 and a new non removable battery that Apple claims to get up to 7 hours of life. Wow, that would be cool.

Right now I have a 15″ MacBookPro, and it can feel a little big and heavy to carry around. The 13″ is 4.5lbs, and the 15″ is 5.5lbs. I think mine is a little heavier than that. The question though, is does the 13.3″ screen at 1280×800 and only a NVIDIA GeForce 9400M graphics processor cut it for image editing. Granted, this wouldn’t be designed to be the main image processing machine, but still… how big a trade off is it. We will have to wait and see what people think of the 9400M and running Photoshop/Lightroom/Aperture on it.

So I headed over to the Apple store, and I configured a 13″ MacBookPro with the 2.53Ghz processor (faster one), 4gig of ram (default), and 256Gig of solid state hard drive. Total: $2299.¬†Yes, that’s right, a SSD. Living on the edge. You could get the 128Gig version and get the cost under $2000. I think that a SSD for travel would be a great option. No worry about moving parts, and they are generally a touch faster.

Still, $2000 for a laptop is still kind of expensive, but you could go with the regular 250Gig hard drive and the price is on $1499. Sounds much more palatable, but dang…. I want the SSD…

I won’t be rushing out to get one anyway. First of all, my current laptop keeps going and going and going. It is only a little over two years old, but I bought a refurbished model, so I was a bit behind the tech curve when I got. But the dang thing just works. I have installed Leopard, Aperture 2.1, Photoshop CS3, and it runs just fine. After a couple of years on a windows machine, I was¬†already cursing those laptops. This MacBookPro,¬†still works just fine. Sigh… no good compelling reason to upgrade.¬†

The other reason is that I always buy refurbished. I have an iPod, an iMac, and the MacBookPro that I have purchased refurbished. They have all worked out fabulously. I have saved quite a lot by doing that. So, if I was going to get one, I would wait for the next speed bump, and pick one up from the refurbished site. I wonder if any 13″ models with a SSD will show up there…

New iPhone 3GS

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“S” as in Super phone, or at least “S” as in speed. If you missed the WWDC live, you can check the recaps from the live feeds that Ars Technica and Engadget posted.

The highlights are the speed, and the new hardware bits. I don’t find my iPhone to be too slow; more network bound than anything, but I am sure for the folks playing games that the extra speed will be welcomed.

I think the compass sounds interresting, and the ability of the phone to allow accessories will allow TomTom (they demoed the app) to do turn by turn directions. The biggest hardware piece I think is the new camera. Not the most exciting, but now a 3MPix camera that can autofocus (currently fixed) and do macro, and video. Already I heard someone complaining about only 3MPix. COME ON PEOPLE! How big a sensor do you think is in this thing. More pixels than that just equals more noise!

Anyway, they are also talking longer battery life, all fitting into the same size hardware. The 3G version has dropped to $99, and the new 3GS will be available on June 19 (with the iPhone OS 3.0 available June 17). It will be $199 adn $299 for 16meg and 32 meg versions.

I am continually amazed at the applications that are created for a device such as this. I use apps on my phone (not even games) more than I use the phone capabilities. Build it, and they will come.

They also demoed voice control, but I wasn’t sure if that was a 3GS feature, or a OS 3.0 feature. Either way, voice control over not just dialing, but things like iTunes is pretty cool.

There were lots of cool OS 3.0 features demoed. The google maps service will be empedable into other apps with full pan and zoom, custom annotations, current location and geocoding. The ability for iPhones to talk to each other sounds really cool, but the push notifications are what looks to be a great feature. Not sure how it will effect battery life, but having notification from other apps would be great, although as I add more and more poeple to my twitter friends, I am not sure I want to be notified everytime someone tweets!

Find my phone appears to be only for Mobile Me users, but it allows you to locate a missing phone on a map. You can send it a code to have your phone (even if set to not ring) to make a noise. If you are convinced that your phone is gone, you can even send it a code that will wipe all your data.

I can’t believe it has taken so long to get MMS messages on the iPhone, but they will finally be here. Not on June 17 with the new OS, but sometime this summer when AT&T gets around to getting their support for it. Really? Yikes. I don’t suppose that this or AT&T blowing off tethering support all together is going to set that well in Jobs corner office. That’s right, AT&T has chosen to not implement tethering on it’s network. Shakes head. Sees new carrier in Apples future.

Well, looks like I will be doing a sync and update around June 17, but despite the new camera features, I won’t be in line on the 19th. I don’t want to be stuck in an AT&T contract and find out I can switch carriers 🙂

Update: Looks like Chase Jarvis is getting one for the camera features, but then again, he takes better pictures with his iPhone than I do with my camera… sigh…

Update: Apples guided tour via video: http://www.apple.com/iphone/guidedtour/

Tamron 17-50 f/2.8 Back from Service

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Tamron 17-55 f/2.8 Well, I was quite surprised to see a box from Tamron when I got home yesterday. It was my 17-50 back from service. I was not expecting it so soon. I had recieved a letter from Tamron late last week saying that it would be another 2-3 weeks. That must have just been the standard boiler plate that goes out with every repair notice. It is a little annoying that they can’t look around the room and see how many lenses are in the queue waiting to go out and make a better estimate.

Notice I said I got a letter from Tamron. Yup. Paper. Not email, a paper letter. Weird. I don’t quite get what is going on there. They need a serious upgrade in the software side of the house at Tamron’s repair facility. They need to look at getting more automated communication with their customers.

I did get an email, from the post office for tracking the package. I found it in my junk mail. It must have only showed up a day or two ago, becuase I check it fairly frequently. Outside of my phoning awhile back, the only communication from Tamron was the letter from last week.

Ok, so was it fixed? It looks like it. I had several issues when I sent it in. The front ring where the lens hood attached was really loose when I sent it in. It is just like new now. The barrel, where you adjust the zoom appears to have been tightened as well. It is smooth, but tighter.

Nikkor 50mm f/1.8

The biggest issue I was having was the focusing. It just didn’t seem to nail the focus properly. I wish I had thought to take this same picture before I sent it in to compare. But if you look at the picture of the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 above, you can see the the text in the middle is very sharp. This was in auto focus. It was not anywhere near this sharp before. I need to so some tests with flowers and people still, because that is what appeared to not hit the focus sweet spot before.

So I am giving Tamron service an A for the repair, but for the whole experience, a C. The lens did come back fairly timely (sent May 11, so not super speedy). I am OK with that, but the utter lack of communication is a problem. 

Note to Tamron: customers want to have confidence that thier investment is being looked after. Remember, if you have to send something back, you are starting off with the customer frustrated.

Update: I sent Tamron a letter suggesting they improve their ability to communicate with their customers via automated emails or better/more information online. I got back a reply:

“Thank you for your suggestions. We are actually in the middle of doing some updates to our repair process to make it more automated. This may take some time but we hope to have drastic improvements in the future.”

Nice to see them respond so quickly. Hopfully (for their sake) the improvement will be soon.