For the last year or so, I’ve been contemplating what my next stages in my pursuit of photographic excellence will look like. I’m not quite ready to take the route Terry was able to go, and Diana has been going for a while – I just can’t plunk down the $500-$1000 I’d need to get a decent DSLR rig, so I have to make do with what I have.
My primary camera is an Olympus C770, about as good a camera as you can get without going DSLR (well, it was when I bought it two years ago). I like the large lens area, optical 10x zoom, and expandability. I knew all along that one of the weaknesses in the small handheld cameras (and, in fact, with many DSLRs as well), is the built-in flash is too ‘hot’ for most low-light indoor photography. 
Subjects come out over-exposed and washed out. I knew this was going to be an issue, and one of the things that attracted me to the C770 was the inclusion of a ‘hot shoe’ – a mount point for an external electronic flash.
I finally found a combination flash, cable, and bracket mount on eBay and picked up the whole shebang last week. I was a little cautious because it seemed quite the overkill arrangement for such a small camera, but I’d also seen the great shots that had been done with a bounceflash on my father in laws Nikon 990 a few years ago. He had also accessorized the (then) rather small-lensed and small-bodied camera with a bracket and flash, and came up with quite nice pictures with proper lighting.
After assembling the whole thing and testing it out, I cast about looking for for a subject. Zach was lounging about playing on the Gamecube… ahh, a stationary target. It was night time, so the light was low, though Zach was sitting under a set of fairly ‘hot’ halogen lights, but I was able to take a good set of comparison pictures:
The left hand shot is using the internal flash built into the camera. It is ‘okay’, but suffers from the washed outtedness that derives from the small hot light source. The picture on the right is using the bounce flash against our white ceiling. There’s also a fairly good redeye system in the flash that I’m looking forward to experimenting with.
So far, I’m pretty happy with the results. The rig is a little bulky, but I’m fairly sure I can break it down into my camera bag. I’ll do more experimenting shortly. Onward!
In which our hero succumbs…
Oh fine. I finally broke down and did it. I realized that I had a couple places where I was posting sort of “wishy” lists. Movies I was looking for, other toys. But, ya know, there’s a perfectly good site for managing wishlists for DVDs and books.
So, without further delay, I give you… my Amazon.com wishlist. Clicky on the graphic to view in all it’s geekiness. Do with it what you will.
All hail the FSM!
When I aquired clipper as my primary work machine, i needed to do something to really make it my own. I’d always wanted to do some sort of 
custom artwork on the cover of my laptops, usually to proclaim I’M NOT RUNNING WINDOWS. Well, that won’t work for this particular machine (it is, in fact, running windows), so I needed something else. The answer came to me in while getting a nice evolve plaque for the van. Why not something similar for the laptop?
So on went an FSM plaque, and I went on with my wanderings around coffee shops, customer sites, and the like. The problem? No one got it. I think the Flying Spaghetti Monster sect is just too obscure, too geek-centric for anyone outside the true elite of geekdom to get it.
Well, that is, until today.
Today I walked into Panera Bread and set up in my usual way. The place is pretty busy, it being around lunchtime, and I ended up taking one of the tall round tables. As I hauled out the laptop and parked my backpack in a chair, a passer-by went “Oo, the flying spaghetti monster! Cool!” I turned, expecting to find someone of the geek ilk, but it was in fact the middle aged nondescript woman and her friend who had just gotten up from said table. “Wow!”, said I “most people don’t recognize it.” “Oh sure, one of my kids just did a report on it.” “Well great!” and they wandered off.
I somewhat feel vindicated. Maybe the word is getting out.
All hail USB rechargers!
Gosh, the fellow who figured out that USB devices had enough oomph on the bus to recharge the plethora of mobile geek devices we carry around should get some sort of award. With these gadgets, I’ve lowered the number of small chargers and other hardware I need to haul around with me when travelling. Here’s a couple basics…
My bluetooth headphones have a small Mini-B style plug where the microphone normally plugs in. Pop out the mic, and plug in your Type-A to Mini-B cable in, and voila! It recharges! Conveniently, this cable is the same one I use to download images from my Olympus C770 camera, so there’s the first ‘combination of functions’ solution.
By far the most useful item is charge and sync cable for my Treo. 
First, it allows hot-syncing between the Treo and clipper. I’m forever losing sync cables and getting lost in the maze of wiring on my desk. This cable not only syncs, but it -retracts- into a the size of a keyfob. No tangling! It lives happily in my backpack pocket. That alone would be handy, but it also charges the Treo from the USB port. Yep, no more carrying another charger around, I just need this one cable. Hooray! As I type, the Treo is sitting on the desk next to me happily vampiring off some of clippers’ spare wattage.
What am I missing? Not a lot. I’d like a decent USB based charger for the battery in my camera, but that is probably not too likely, alas. As it is, I’ve been able to limit my power supply portage to just the laptop brick, which is fine by me. Besides, on cold nights, that brick makes a dandy foot warmer.
Overheard on IRC
<Xilet> everytime you uninstall sendmail, an angel gets its wings.
Slashdot promotes windows!
Ads are ads are ads. They generate revenue, they are the lifeblood of many websites. On most days, I can tolerate them.
But when a website I’ve been using for a decade, a site that is truly the core of much of the Linux community, for all its faults, supports an ad so blatantly sensationalistic, with no bylines, no disclaimers, and in fact nothing to say this IS in fact an ad, I find my bile rising.
This ad appeared on this mornings reload of Slashdot.org. It ran big bold headlines “LONDON STOCK EXCHANGE CHOOSES WINDOWS OVER LINUX FOR RELIABILITY!” and stopped at the frame shown here. The implication is “Windows is more reliable than Linux in server environments. You should run Windows Server 2003 if you want to succeed.”
This really isn’t the place to go into whether Windows or Linux is more appropriate in the data center – that’s been hashed, rehashed, and argued ad nauseum. What bothers me is seeing this sort of IN YOUR FACE advertising on a site that really is against all that this ad represents – the blind marching toward the All Savior of Microsoft, only they can run our data center! Only they can run stable servers!
Ads are ads, as I said. But Slashdot, shouldn’t this bother you, even a smidgen?
When the geekery works!
About 2 months ago, I picked up the Blueant X5 headphones, and had high hopes of them being my primary audio interface to my machines. Unfortunately the Treo fell down pretty hard as my primary music player, but I’ve managed to shift over to other sources, and today I had my first “okay, that worked really well” moment.
As most folks know, clipper is my primary platform now, and, despite it being saddled with WindowsXP, has been doing pretty well by me. One of it’s drawbacks was that it did not have a bluetooth adapter in it. I played around with a USB BT dongle, but was very frustrated with the support stack for it. I eventually picked up a card specifically for the Dell D620, and installed it. Ahh, much better – built in bluetooth and no dongle.
A little fiddling, a call or two to Blueant, and I had the headphones configured properly for basic stereo music listening. This has been very pleasant, as I can listen comfortably without dealing with cables or plugs or the like. The only drawback has been that the microphone arrangement has a very low sensitivity, so it hasn’t worked well using X-lite. Despite this, getting 8+ hours of listening time on a usb-charged battery really does go a long way to making them useable.
Today, I was sitting in a hotel lobby (a comfortable environment for me), doing my work on my laptop, availing myself of the free wireless, listening to music, when a call came in on my Treo. The X5 headphones happily switched into ‘handsfree’ mode, and trilled a little “You have a call” sound. I touched the button on the side of the headphones, and lo! I was talking to my wife. The call went along, and when we were done, I touched the button on the headphones again, and RadioParadise was once again in my ears. At no point did I touch my cell phone.
It’s nice when technology actually works. Now if I could have my laptop always streaming audio, and function for 8+ hours on a charge, and have ubiquitous network access, and NOT feel like I’m holding a small fusion reactor on my lap, all would be perfect!
Redhat geekery and, of course, swag!
Got to attend a Redhat presentation today on virtualization. They were pushing a lot of very interesting stuff, and while the marketing drivel was in fact kept to a minimum, they did pitch RHEL5 pretty hard, as well as their relationship with Intel.
Of course, the important stuff is the SWAG! Today’s haul was a 256meg stainless pen drive – all in all, one of the better bits I’ve seen at presentations. It’s stocked with all the presentation data, so that’s nice, and it’s sort of pretty.
I have to admit, part of the goal of this was successful with me. The stuff going on with Xen and RHEL is pretty impressive, including cluster management and ‘paravirtualization’ (basically environments that realize they’re virtualized, and can be managed easily via standard API’s). Moving forward on platform design for my clients and for my own hosting stuff, I’ll take RHEL into serious consideration (and not just because they said at the meeting here that RHEL5 will be Yum based, not up2date).
The drawback is that the Xen stuff doesn’t really support Windows as virtual guests. For that I’ll need to focus on VMware. (The other option is naturally Microsoft Virtual Whatever, which, in my experience, has been frighteningly unstable and buggy. I can’t boot my Kubuntu CD into it (installation locks up), and I’ve had serious keyboard issues even trying to configure the installer. I’ll hold off on a full rant against this until I’ve tried vmware, but at the moment, I’m unimpressed with Virtual PC.
A quick bracelet
Oddly enough, Zach is the one who asked for this. I just finished stocking up my chainmail box so i could start doing some more interesting work using aluminum rings, and using anodized rings for color. Zach asked if I could make him a quick bracelet, so I whipped this one up in about 20 minutes.
Working with aluminum (as opposed to the steel I normally use) is on the one hand refreshing. It’s much softer and lighter. On the other hand, it’s not particularly strong, so anything that takes tension will deform pretty easily. It’s okay for jewelry, but I’m not going to make armor with it.
After finishing this piece, I decided to post a picture of it, and thought “what the hey”, and posted pictures of all the other pieces I’ve done for people. They’re now up on Flickr in a full set.
Can lightning strike twice?
About 10 years ago, I started writing an application that would have a profound impact on my life. Keystone started out a simple problem tracker, grew into a mature product that was getting 3000+ downloads everytime I did an update (about once every 3 months), and was ultimately sold to a DotCom that basically killed it in its tracks. That sale let me have a few toys and was a high point of the dotcom bubble for me.
3 years ago I re-aquired the rights to the application from the failed dotcom, and set about upgrading the vastly outdated software. My user base had for the most part wandered away to other applications, but there was still interest and heck, it was my application, I wanted to do things with it.
But other projects were taking precedence, and Keystone languished.
On a recent trip down to DC, I had the opportunity to spend 7 uninterrupted hours on the train, each direction, with nothing but a laptop and a music library to keep me company. After trying to get my current projects working, I settled back into “well, maybe I’ll work on Keystone some more.”
In those 2 train rides, I did more upgrading, tinkering, and fixing in Keystone than I’ve done in the last 3 years. I revived the contact manager and fixed all the dependency problems. I continued the changes needed to bring a PHP application, written in 1995, up to 2006 standards. Keystone is over 12,000 lines of code – not a trivial application, but not so huge that it is an unassailable target.
The question is – why do this? Sure, part of it is ‘this is my baby, I want to see it succeed’, but in the back of my head, the question burbles… “Can lightning strike twice?” – can I make this a successful opensource application again?
I’m certainly not deluding myself into thinking “THIS WILL BE THE NEXT KILLER APP!” – that’s a foolish and unrealistic mindset. But can I bring it back to where people are using it, they like it, they contribute suggestions and fixes, and the application continues to grow?
I’d like to think I can. But the code still needs a lot of work, and there are some design decisions that will most likely require huge chunks of code being ripped out at the roots (database connection methodology has advanced SIGNIFICANTLY since 1995).
It’s a nice dream, I sort of miss my users. Maybe they’ll come back.
Lo I am converted
This weekend I’m down in DC doing registration services for an event – more detail on this later, but I have to gush a moment.
The hotel room here is your fairly standard ‘big chain’ accomodation, except for one minor touch.
The king-sized bed has a Tempurpedic mattress on it.
I’m so hooked. It’s the only mattress I’ve ever slept on where I could lie on my side comfortably, from head to toe. It gave enough in the hips to let me settle in, but supported everything else nicely. That, coupled with absolutely no motion from other occupants – I’m completely hooked.
If they weren’t so fripping expensive, I’d be, er, on top of one in an instant. As it is, I need to get into a place where dropping $800 on a king sized tempur-pedic mattress is a comfortable expenditure. Not to mention we just got up a new futon, so buying another mattress now really doesn’t make a ton of sense. Ah well.
Chasing the Power
Every once in a while I get a good dose of greeniness, and look around my little corner of geekiness and sort of wonder “How much juice is this actually using?” After asking Cat what our monthly electric bill was ($300!), I decided this question needed a closer look.
A month or two ago I had picked up a Kill-a-watt (terrible name, ain’t it?) power monitor. This little gadget plugs into a wall outlet, and tells how much power is being used by things drawing through it. Today I jacked it into the single outlet that feeds my nest o machines, and powered things up.
The meter dutifully reported the load as things came online, and steadied out at about 280 watts. All in all, that’s not too bad for 3 computers, 3 lamps, and associated peripherals, but I was curious how that load was distributed. What was actually pulling all that juice?
Unsurprisingly, the single largest draw is yawl, my 2.2gig P4 Linux box. It accounted for about 85watts of power (without monitor). The second biggest draw was, oddly enough, lights. I have 2 compact flourescent desk lamps (about 15watts each), and a single halogen desk lamp (35 watts). I knew the halogen light was pretty dreadful, and this pretty much confirms it. That chalks another 65 or so watts. Which leaves me with 140 unaccounted for.
Well, the two laptops were about 30 watts each (pretty nice considering the horsepower in clipper and hunter). Down to 80 now. This last chunk was pretty much the combined load of the LCD monitors, various chargers and other desktop doodads, a pair of external USB drives, and the like.
So what’s to be done about it? Well, I’ve been considering moving to LED based lights for a while. They’re small, cool, draw -very- little power, but have the current drawback of being ridiculously expensive. A single bulb equivelent to a 100 watt incandescent bulb would cost around $52. The equivelent compact flourescent bulb costs around $5. The advantage to using LED is the current draw is miniscule. For the equivelent amount of light, the bulb would only consume about 2watts of power, AND have the advantage of being dimmable – something impossible with CF bulbs.
If I replaced my 3 desktop lamps with LED lamps, I could cut my power consumption by a third. I also have 4 other lamps in the room that could be replaced as well. The question is, is it worth it?
I’m still puzzling this one out. If anyone has suggestions for good sources for inexpensive LED fixtures and lamps, please let me know!
A quickie XM comment
In all my driving around I have a lot of time to listen to XM Radio in the techno-van. Much of the time I spend listening to the various comedy channels – sort of non stop standup. It’s pretty interesting, but one unexpected delight keeps coming up.
Apparently XM Channel 151 has picked up the entire “Chicken Man” radio series. I used to hear this regularly on WMMR in Philadelphia, but hadn’t heard it since. It was a delight to hear that unmistakable introduction…
And now, it’s time for another exciting episode in the life of the most fantastic crimefighter the world has ever known… BRA BRAAA BRAH BRAAAAHHHHH CHICKEN… MAAAAAAAAN… (He’s everywhere, he’s everywhere!)
For those that know this series, you can’t help but smile and hear the intro clearly when reading those words. Even after almost 40 years, it’s still a hoot to listen to, and I have to thank the anonymous genius at XM Radio who managed to get this show back on the air.
Some further details about the show are here. Thanks XM!
Bad Dell designers! No biscuit!
In many ways, working with clipper has been quite a joy. Everything works well, I only have to reboot once every 2-3 days (hey for Windows, that’s pretty good), and it’s pretty zippy.
But part of my job includes teleconferences every morning, which requires a headset. Headsets need to be plugged into the Mic and Speaker jacks.
Some Dell designer decided that:
- The jacks should NOT be color coded. Basic black works great for everything! I now know intuitively that the Microphone jack is toward the ‘back’ of the laptop.
- The jacks are NOT duplicated on the docking station. This is just daft. The docking station is supposed to be used to dock and undock the laptop with a minimum of hassle. NOW I have to plug and unplug my headphones -everytime- I dock or undock the laptop.
- And, of course, I situated the laptop to the -right- of my monitor stand, so it’s in the way whenever I need to do this. I blame Dell for that one too, while I’m at it.
Thanksgiving in Ashland
Yesterday we all went over to Steph and Dwight and Sarah‘s house for their (now traditional) “Day after thanksgiving hang out and share leftovers” day. It ended up being an outstanding afternoon of socializing, food, kids, chat, and general friend-connectedness.
Part of the fun was being outside (after all the rain we’ve had) and playing football with the kids. John joined in as well, and we kept Zach, Ian, Andy, Mishka, and Alexei well entertained for an hour or two. Diana took this shot while we were tossing the ball around.
I really enjoyed having the time to spend non-business time with my future neighbors and other friends. It was just what the Dr ordered.