Category Archives: Hardware

Portfolio is iPhone ready

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I now have my portfolio at christopherwardphotography.com iPhone ready. The site is heavy on javascript, and loads a lot of images at once. Makes for a slow 3G iphone experience. And the images were too small once safari scaled them. So I fixed that.

After hearing David mention a lightroom gallery plugin that was made for the iPhone, and trying to show someone that site (no flash on the iPhone), and my own (too slow), I thought I should do something. I don’t have lightroom. I have Aperture, but have never tried the web sites it can create. I just decided to create something on my own.

I wanted it to be simple, and not to use javascript. I also wanted it to look iPhoneish, and look good when the iPhone was vertical or horizontal. Also, just like wptouch that I wrote about yesterday, I wanted it to come up automaticly for iPhone users.

If you go there now with an iPhone you will see the iPhone specific site. If you don’t have an iPhone, this is what it looks like:

iphonealbums iphoneblue

On the left is the first page displaying the albums in vertical mode. The horizontal mode shows all four in a row. On the right is the blue album in horizontal mode. In vertical mode the images are two wide, and you scroll a bit more. Press an image and you see just that image in the browser. I didn’t make pages for each image. Each album has that nav bar at the bottom like the bottom of the first page.

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Access WordPress Blogs with an iPhone/touch

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WPtouch

I got an iPhone recently, and I have to say that I love the thing. I have used more minutes of data plan than I have minutes of talk time. I like checking email/flickr/facebook/rss feeds when I have a minute without using a computer, or without needing a wi-fi connection. I will document some of the other plug-ins that I am using later, but right now I want to talk about WordPress and iPhone/iTouch devices.

I was amazed that I could read my blog on the iPhone. I had to zoom in a bit, but it wasn’t too bad. I was happy. Then I started to wonder about creating a theme that is more suited to the iPhone screen. Then I did what all good programmers do before they start cooding. They Google. Sure enough, I found WPTouch.

If you have an iPhone/iTouch, come back and take a look. You won’t believe it until you see it.

This plugin for wordpress intercepts when an iPhone is accessing your blog, and replaces it with a theme that looks like an iPhone application. Amazing. Using a little javascript, it even has menus, ¬†and the comments work just fine. It does make your site a little generic. It has the ability in the admin screen to adjust the colors, but I haven’t played with it yet. I would like to modify the header, but I’ll leave that for another day.

I installed version 1.7.5 from the plugin repository on wordpress .

So, what if you want to make a post? There’s a plugin for that too. I have installed an application on the iPone called WordPress for iPhone. This app provides a simple interface to allow posting to your blog. There are lots of features available, but some things are left wanting. It would be nice to be able to add pictures from your wordpress gallery, but it looks like you can only add pictures from the iphone. Both your synched photo’s, and your camera. You can save drafts locally, but not edit ones from your site. The editor isn’t the “visual” editor from your site, it is the html editor, so links and images are in tags. I think it will be nice to have though.

So why didn’t I write this post from the iPhone? You type even this many words on that little virtual keyboard and tell me how long it would take you 😉

Late Christmas Present

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I was completely floored this weekend. My father pulled out a BIG yellow box with the letters Nikon on the side.  What was inside the box, I would never have imagined my father to have picked up for me. I must have droned on for longer than I remember when we drove to Cleveland together last year about this lens. I have wanted this lens for the longest time, but it is quite a bit of jingle.

70-200

Nikkor AF-S 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF

The Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 is a monster.¬†¬†Here is a dpreview. (that’s where the image is from) This is an amazing do everything lens. I am psyched to bring this to my studio lighting class. If I get to take more portraits and senior pictures this spring, this will be the lens on my camera.

It is not light, but it does let in a lot of light. It would require a few trips to the gym before you would want to carry this all day at a wedding. But, it is fast in every sense. I love the 2.8 aperture. I love how fast the AF-S ultrasonic motor focuses. I also love¬† that you get VR on top of that. I was shooting indoors at 2.8, and I still got sharp pictures handheld at 1/30. I couldn’t do that with my 17-50mm f/2.8 Tamron. I love VR.

Did I mention that this is sharp. I shot a picture of the door across the room at the hotel in Fargo. On the door was the usual drivel about the room cost, fire escapes, liability, etc. When I zoom in on that writting, it is very readable. It was only a postage stamp size on the picture, but I could still zoom in and read the words. Amazing.

Did I mention how happy I am to have this lens? Woo Hoo. Thanks Dad.

I will try to get some pictures up later from this lens.

SPD missing byte 23 or 25

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21 of 365 So I started putting my parts together. I put the motherboard, memory, and CPU together, and then put the whole thing into the case. Plugged in the power supply, and the hard drives. I then hit the power switch and got the message “SPD missing byte 23 or 25” and then press F1 to continue. Well, it looks like there is not much I can do about it. Found some answers here in this forum. It looks like we can blame the motherboard, the bios, the memory, or the AMD chipset. Narrows it down a bit. Anyway, doesn’t really matter, there is something getting reported that there is a memory error, but it is a red herring. Aparently you can just let your motherboard know that you don’t want to stop on this type of error. Only thing is, this Foxconn motherboard and AMI bios doesn’t give me that option. I can stop on all errors, or ignore keyboard/mouse errors. Well, that doesn’t help. I won’t have this box auto rebooting I guess.

The NAS hardware is here

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Foxconn MotherboardThe new hardware for the NAS arrived yesterday. There is a new motherboard, CPU, and memory. I usually just replace the whole trifecta when one of them needs to be replaced. I will start to assemble it shortly. I am also going to package the process of creating a NAS, mostly the software side into a tutorial. I am also looking¬†into a new plugin¬†that can collect posts together into a ‘series’. Once I get that plugin and the series started, I will be posting more. Just a heads up.

Nikon D90 and the CHA

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I took a SD card (4gig Sandisk Extreme III SDHC) out of my computer, and back into my camera, and I instead of a shot count in the LCD on the top of the camera, I got the letters CHA. What the? I headed to google, and “d90 CHA” brought back a ton of hits. This was not some weird isolated incident. Most were saying it had something to do with the memory card, and that if formated in camera, it would correct it’s self. Since I always format every time I put the card back in, that’s what I tried to do. I usually use the shortcut buttons, but they didn’t work. I then went to the menu, and it the camera seemed to take a long time to format. When it was finished, I still had CHA in the LCD. I took the card out, put it back in, and now the shot count said there were 27 pictures left. Weird. I tried the format again through the menu, and this time it only took a second, and appeared to work. We’ll see how this card holds up. I should mark it so I know which one it is.

Nikon GP-1

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Not sure when this started shipping. Adorama has it listed now. I had been looking for it. It is the GPS accessory that was announced with the D90. That was quite a while ago. Nice to see that it is shipping, but it is double what I hoped the price would be. At $200+ it is a little rich for me. Maybe some other time. Moose has one and wrote about it a few weeks ago. Also, I now have the Eye-Fi that is supposed to capture your location. I am still trying to figure how that works, or get’s enabled.

Eye-Fi is pretty neat.

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So I have had a few minutes to play with my Eye-Fi card now. First off, it is now working. It does appear that they sold a bazilion of these for Christmas and the servers couldn’t handle it. (According to their site) They have aparently recoved, and I was able to get registered. So far I have hooked it up to Gallery2 running on annieandchris.net to recieve the pictures. Pretty cool. I could just snap a picture of the kids, and blamo, it would appear on the website.

A couple of things so far. I have no geotagging data in EXIF. Not sure if that it becuase of my router doesn’t work with their “skynet” or whatever they are doing, or something else. Also, you can’t tell in camera if the picture has been sent or not. I saw in their control panel that you could select to get a SMS or email or something if pictures have been uploaded, so that might work just as well. It would be nice to know when it is safe to delete the images. When the images hit my Gallery2, they get placed in a new folder named with the date. I think I want all Eye-Fi pics to get placed into the same folder. I might have to try hacking the remote script.