Category Archives: Hardware

Merry Eye-Fi Christmas

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Merry Christmas to anyone that wants to be wished a Merry Christmas. This morning I opened a present to find an Eye-Fi explore card.Sweet. These things look pretty cool. I wish I could tell you how cool it is to wirelessly transfer images to my computer, but alas, it is not working.

The 2gig card comes with a reader and the software on the card. That is pretty smart. No disk required. I installed the software on my Mac laptop, and tried to go to the Eye-Fi manager app, which directs you to their website login. Problem is, I haven’t registered yet. I searched everywhere on their site, but can’t figure out how to register. It is supposed to send me their automaticly, where I would register and be good to go. Unfortunatly that is not how it is working.

I tired another mac as well, but the same thing happened. I looked on their forum, and found a thread that was suggesting that I may have to send the card back because it may have been registered to someone else already. That would be silly if they have no way to reset their cards or their online database. Hopefully once customer service is at their stations again, someone there can get this straightened out.

The NAS is still down

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I got my Western Digital green 1TB drives the other day. That didn’t work. I got a new power supply, thinking that the new drives just took more power than the old clunker could muster. No luck. Still dead. Not sure what the issue is at the moment. I need more time to troubleshoot. The system takes forever to boot, whether it is the existing system disk, or a CD of Ubuntu. It sits there just after a boot logo for a long time. With the drives in, it never gets further. Without them, it eventually continues. I can’t figure out where it gets stalled. What could be causing this?

2 Terrabytes of Backup Goodness. Maybe.

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It doesn’t do much good to have any amount of backup if you can’t use it. Right now, the NAS, where I intended to put them appears dead. Not sure what happened. I powered down, put the new drives in, powered up with the newest Ubuntu server disk, and it dies on the install. Now it won’t start up at all. I get the Ubuntu graphic, then a blinking cursor. I am going to have to pull everything out, and put back pieces until it starts up. Just what I wanted to do.

New Flash and Drives

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Not a flash drive. A SB800 flash, and two Western Digital 1TB green drives. These should be arriving today via UPS.

I am excited to get the SB800. I have a SB400 right now, but I am looking forward to trying out the new flash wirelessly. That will be cool. Also, the head turns better, there is a pop up bounce card and it will be much easier to gel than the SB400.

The drives were needed. I discovered the other day that both of the raid 1 drives in my NAS were failing. It would appear that the cron job to run smartmon wasn’t working, and I didn’t get an email that the drives were failing. Yikes. Almost all of the properties were saying “old age”. The drives are only 1.5 years old too. I think part of the problem is that they never spin down. I need to figure out how to get that to happen. I don’t really need instantaneous access from my NAS, and it does sit idle (except for the drives unfortunately) most of the time.

More on the new toys as I get to use them…

D90 Movies

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I took a couple of movies the last couple of days with the D90. Since you do it from live view, and focus from there first, I was also trying that out. I must say, it kinda sucked. I was indoors and was using f/2.8, but the focus was the slowest thing ever! I was pretty disappointed. I will have to try it outside sometime to see if it is better with more light, but so far, I am not impressed.

There were several times that I would try to focus and it would miss completely. I would then go out of live view, focus, then pop back in. It would still move around a bit, but would find it eventually. Then when you take a picture, it doesn’t happen right away. The mirror flips back, then the picture happens normally, then the mirror flips up again. Slow. Not a way to take pictures of kids.

The movies turned out OK, when I got the focus right. It would probably be easier with a smaller f-stop, but that is all I could work with indoors. It is nice to have something that takes video though.

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The R-Strap

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Technically it is the RS-2 Black Rapid strap, and I now have one. It is my birthday today – all online marketers take note for next year and send me lots of 2 for 1/2 price coupons please. Annie picked me up one, and it does seem pretty great. Annie tried asking about it at the local camera stores, and not one person had any idea what she was talking about. Why is it that people who work at brick and mortar stores don’t ever go online? Anyway, the camera just sits at your side, out of the way. I haven’t yet gone on a walk to take pictures, but it seems to wear well. Check out the video on their site to see more.

I have space again.

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I have spent most of my photography time the last two weeks or so recovering from running out of space on my iMac. I got a warning from Aperture during an upload that I was in danger of corrupting my library. Scary.

What I did first was to go through and delete images that were crap. I have been lazy – space is cheap right? I had not ditched pictures that were extremely underexposed, or out of focus, or had people heads chopped off. I went through most of the pictures of the 2007/2008 and got rid of them. That was time consuming.

Next was to migrate my referenced images to external drives. I decided to reformat my two FreeAgent 320G drives to HFS+ and move all my images that are stored as reference over. It took longer than I thought. I couldn’t find a way to do it other than to “Relocate Masters” one project at a time. I couldn’t select more than that.

After a couple of days of doing that, I was able to copy all the images to drive #2. I then created two new vaults, and put the first on drive #1, and the second on drive #2. I now have complete duplicates of my images and my library on two separate drives. Drive #2 is off site at work.

I haven’t done any big uploads since to know if that process will be any slower, now that the images are on a USB connected external drive. We’ll see.

No room at the inn

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I was uploading pictures to my iMac from my camera when I got a warning from Aperture that my computer was running out of space and that if I didn’t do something immediately to advert catastrophe, my library would be corrupted. Well, ok, the message wasn’t that dire, but I was still out of space.

I just don’t have the room on my iMac to hold all the data I want there. I was storing it there, then time machine was making a copy on it’s external drive, then I had two other external drives that I would sync with my pictures (not often enough) and finally I would send my pictures to the NAS so they would be available to anyone on the network. Well, this just isn’t working anymore, and frankly, creates too many copies of my images.

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T-Mobile selling the G1

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I saw my first add for T-Mobile’s G1 yesterday. The Google Android based phone has it’s own site now. On T-Mobile’s site you can currently buy one for $179 after a $200 rebate. (How do you give a rebate for your own hardware?) Last week Google officially liberated the source code. Here are some other pre release opinions. So now that it is live, how does it compare to the iPhone? Well, it sacrifices some size to a real keyboard that would be helpful to those that text a lot I am sure. Inclusion of a microSD is a great plus, but it appears to be limited to 8gig. The phone is still sim locked, and doesn’t appear to have a sync application. This is interesting. It is dependent on, and expects you to use Gmail and other Google apps. I am not sure I like this. I haven’t drunk the Google cool aid yet. I have a gmail account, but I still like desktop apps. If I could get my address book, calendar and mail to sync with Google’s offerings, then maybe it would work. Maybe I just need to give into the idea of cloud computing more. I think I will stand back and see how the next few months play out. The platform being more open than Apple’s should allow developers to create some interesting things. It will be worth watching.

D90 Auto Focus Area Mode

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I was getting frustrated for a little while. I couldn’t figure out how to change the auto focus area mode. Every time I would go to take a picture, the D90 would pick one (or more) of the focus points and focus for me. With 11 focus points, it was doing a pretty good job, but I knew it had to have the ability to let you pick the point you wanted.

The other day, I found it. It is in Custom Setting Menu, a1. Great, but that is way to buried. I wanted this camera so that I didn’t have to dive into menus to do the things I change often. After reading the manual front to back, (That sucker is pretty long!) I now have two ways to change it easily. The first is that you can assign the Fn button on the front of the camera to this setting. That way I just press the button, and turn the command dial. Nice. But, the function button is a little hard to press, and sometimes I am looking at the LCD at the back.

Next up, I was just playing with this: My Menu. This is great, and even better than the D40’s. You can pick any item you want, put them in any order you want, and they all show up at the same level without any submenus. Right now I have

  • a1 AF-area mode
  • a7 Live view autofocus
  • ISO sensitivity settings
  • d3 ISO display and adjustment
  • a3 Built-in AF-assist illumninator
  • d10 Exposure delay mode

There is room for 2 more on the screen without scrolling. I will see what I am actually using soon, so this list may change.