Wednesday, March 26, 2008 at 22:33 Photography, flickr, panorama, photo, snow, spring in Photography Thursday, March 20, 2008 at 19:15 There are lot's of people who complain about the updates on the Windows platform, but Apple tries to compete I guess. In the last 3 days there was a big security update, Safari 3.1 (both Windows and OSX), Time machine and Airport Updates, and now a Camera RAW update for OSX 10.5.2. Thankfully no problems on my side with the updates. Looking for other updates from Apple? Just go here.
Saturday, March 15, 2008 at 9:12 Early this week, I found a new firmware for my Nokia E61i (out since October 2007). The version I had was v1.x, and this one was v2.0633.65.01 (press *#000# on your E61 to see the current firmaware version). Updating goes through a separate application, but it should also be possible through download over the mobile network (I haven't tried this). All you need to know is explained on the Nokia website, but there are some thing you don't want to forget;
Thursday, March 6, 2008 at 21:18 I listened to the latest 'This Week in Tech' podcast today. They mentioned a screensaver called FlickrFan. This screensaver can connect to flickr account and images to use in the screensaver. But it also downloads current Associated Press images in high quality and more. This results in awesome pictures from around the world covering the news in HIGH-RES. B.t.w. it's much more than just a screensaver, but I liked the screensaver-part best.
Monday, March 3, 2008 at 19:47 Since I have an iMac with OSX 10.5 (Leopard), I use TimeMachine for my backups. This works great actually. But I also need an off-site backup of some sort. Just in case the house burns down or that some f*cker decides to steal my hardware. So I bought an external Freecom 160GB USB2 drive (USB powered) for my off-site backups. I encrypted the entire harddisk with TrueCrypt 5.0 on my iMac, and copied the data I needed to preserve. After that I wanted to access the data from my work laptop (Windows XP SP2 with TrueCrypt v5.0)..... This didn't work. TrueCrypt didn't recognize the password, or the encrypted disk (AES / SHA-256 full disk encryption). I tried to access the data on my Mac and everything worked, so there's no data corruption of some sort. Eventually, I recreated the encrypted drive on my Windows XP laptop (lost the backup in the process). This time the disk would mount, and could also be read/mounted by my Mac. So, I guess that TrueCrypt is Cross-platform, but with the current version (v5.0a) you need to make sure to create the volume on Windows if you also want to mount it on OSX. I reported this through their bug-reporting tool to the developers. No idea if there are similar problems with Linux. UPDATE: Pretty soon they released v5.0a, and today v5.1 was released. So development goes on :-)
Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 17:23 As you might have noticed, the server was down the last 24 hours. When I got home last night I found my server dead. The green power LED on the mainboard was still on, but apart from that... nothing. So I tried to switch the server on and off a couple of times. After a few tries, the entire room lit up for about a nanosecond followed by absolute silence, and darkness..... The power supply had short-circuited and took the entire house with it. Byebye power supply. The initial thought was; 'Well, it's gonna be a nice weekend reinstalling the server from scratch', but thankfully, it was only the power supply that had died on me. After replacing it, the server ran as before. This got me thinking about the life-expectancy of computer hardware. Frequent visitors may have read a similar post on my blog last year. So the power supply that died isn't even a year old. I still might have had some warranty on it (if I hadn't pried it open to see the internal damage :) ). If I would like to use the warranty, I'm looking at at least a couple of days downtime, and since a new power supply is relatively inexpensive, I couldn't be bothered. The life expectancy of hardware is obviously shorter than the Mean Time Between Failure (MTBF) given by the manufacturer. The new supply has a (theoretical) MTBF of >100.000 hours, This means >4000 days. Well, mine lasted <365 days.
Monday, February 18, 2008 at 17:28 We went to the Hoge Veluwe in Gelderland last weekend for some 'serious' photography. This would be the first real trail for my GPS Logger (Qstarz BT1000).
At the 'start' I switched the logger to 'Log', and forgot about it completely during the day. The device did its work during the day. The real challenge came at home. Linking the GPS info to the photo's.....
The software for adding the GPS data to the photo's was 'GPSPhotoLinker' (remember that I use a Mac). Unfortunately, the software kept crashing when I tried to combine GPS data and the images. Possible reason could be the large NEF (Nikon RAW) files, because the crash happened every third image.
So the search for an alternative started, and I quickly found 'PhotoGPSEditor' (also DonationWare). This tool could also manipulate NEF files.
Adding the GPS info was relatively easy with this software (GPSPhotoLinker is more intuitive IMO). After that I imported the photo's in Adobe Lightroom, which showed the GPS data in the Metadata section of Lightroom (you can see the map location when you click on the arrow behind the GPS coordinates.
Just click on the following picture, to see when and where it was taken.
The complete set can be seen here.
Gadgets, Photography, Software Tuesday, February 5, 2008 at 20:38 A couple of weeks ago, I was pointed towards Google Maps on my Nokia e61i (I got a download link when I visited google.com on my mobile). After downloading and installing it (which was very easy), I started the application (which was hiding under Menu -> Installations -> Google Maps). Most basic features are available on the phone app (directions, searching for restaurants etc., Zoom in and out), and there's the possibility of positioning yourself on the map by using cellular positioning. Thankfully, this is done for you by the application. Downside is that it's not that accurate. In my case, I could be anywhere in a 1.7 mile radius circle. It's also possible to use a GPS mouse (which I recently bought) for your location. The neat thing is that you can see yourself walk across the map (or drive if you're by car). This is an excellent application. These is one downside... Google Maps is using a constant Internet connection to update the maps, so make sure you have some sort of flat fee data service (or use wifi when available). Otherwise you might be in for a surprise when you receive your phone bill.
