Mostly Harmless

Mostly about my amusement

Year: 2008 (page 12 of 22)

July 8, 2008

Hans Reiser comes clean

If anyone had any doubts about Hans Reiser’s guilt, this is from Threat Level: Hans Reiser Leads Police to Nina’s Body.

It’s unfortunate that he chose to lead the police to his victim’s body only after bargaining for a reduced sentence.  But at least now her family and children will have some closure and be able to bury the body properly.

During the trial, reading Threat Level’s coverage was surreal.  I know that programmers like Reiser can be eccentric and erratic, but his behavior was way out there.

Hopefully he will remain in jail long enough for his children to grow up and keep their murderous father out of their lives.

July 6, 2008

Raw NEF files and WD’s MyBook

I take pictures in Nikon’s raw NEF format because I can use Photoshop Element’s raw importer to tweak the exposure, clarity, black level, etc.  But the NEF files are often 9 MB files and I have almost 3,000 of them and that’s just since May.  That came out to 22 GB’s and counting. Even cleaning up the ones I don’t want to keep still leaves me with a mess.

Time to get more storage. Instead of just installing another drive in my system, I wanted to get an external drive.  In the past I was put off on USB hard drive cases, so this time I went looking for a complete out of the box solution.

Costco had a instant manufacturer’s rebate on the 1 TB Western Digital MyBook Home Edition.  We went and picked it up very quickly. It supports USB 2.0 (480 Mb/s max), Firewire (400 Mb/s max), and eSATA (3Gb/s max).

Guess which interface I picked?  But my Dell XPS 700720 does not have a built in eSATA port.  So I went to Bestbuy and picked up a DYNEX eSATA card and a 6 foot long cable (the MyBook only comes with USB and Firewire cables).

After I installed the card and hooked up the drive, I ran “Command Prompt” as Administrator and ran this command:

convert F: /FS:NTFS

The drive ships with a FAT32 file system and I prefer NTFS for Vista.  The mostly empty drive converted quickly and I started to move data to it.

It’s a fast drive when using eSATA.  I went to my Pictures short cut and right clicked the icon. I selected Properties -> Location, clicked Move…, typed in the new location on the MyBook and clicked Apply.

It moved 22 GBs of files onto the drive in no time at all.  Less than 10 minutes.  Using USB or my Firewire port would have taken a lot longer than that.

Right now I’m playing with my Photoshop Elements catalog, but so far I’m satisfied with the new drive.  It’s got a LED bar on the face of it that does the vertical Cylon eye thing.  I may keep that covered up when I’m watching old episodes of Battlestar Galactica just to be safe.

July 4, 2008

Disney and digital photography

The castle

The whole family came back from Disney World Wednesday and here are some of my notes for the pictures I took.

From Thursday the 26th to Wednesday the 2nd I took 1,600+ pictures with my Nikon D60.

What I have been doing since I got back is going through each vacation day and selecting photos for Flickr. So far I completed up to Sunday June 29th and have uploaded some 88 pictures.  You can see the Disney World 2008 set on Flickr here.

The Lowepro Fastpack 200 was a great idea.

It’s a great backpack and easy to use.  It was raining on and off everyday. Being able to quickly take the camera out, shoot the picture, and pack the camera away was fantastic.  The only thing I think I may change is replace the Nikon neck strap with a hand strap.

I need to buy an 18-200mm lens.

Stefan lent me his Nikkor lens and it was great for the trip.  Being able to take pictures close up and zoom out immediately without changing the lens was just way too useful.  I’m thinking of getting the Sigma 18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS just to be different.

The Sigma 30mm f/1.4 EX DC HSM lens is still my main lens and does not disappoint.

In either Aperture or Program Auto mode it works great.  It covers low light really well and I took a lot of shots with it.

I forgot to switch to the zoom lens once and left the 30mm on during the Animal Kingdom tour.  I found out that Shutter Priority works well too; I took this picture from a really bouncy “safari” tour bus.  For that shot, the camera was set at ISO 400, f/4.5 and shutter speed was 1/2000 of a second.

I saw more Canon cameras than I did Nikons.

I guess Canon markets better in the U.S. 🙂 I don’t know what the Canon models were but the Nikons I saw were mostly D60s with the 18-55mm kit lens. The camera that all the wandering Disney staff use for taking shots of the guests? A Nikon D70.  The person I spoke to recommended it highly saying that they never have any problems with it.

I did see several D200s and one D300 with a Nikkor 17-35mm AF-S wide angle lens and a Manfrotto mono-pod stand (not that I pay attention to such things).  I tried not to be jealous, but the fact is I would not know what to do with a camera like that.

I am still uploading more pictures to Flickr and I should be done by Monday with the whole set.  I could dump all 1,600+ straight to Flickr but what would be the point?  I prefer to share only the good ones and not show people all the ones that were not in focus.

June 25, 2008

Tomorrow we all go to Disney World

Right before a trip

All packed up and ready to go.  We are all looking forward to this and we’ll be a week in Walt Disney World. The kids have been talking about this for weeks.

We wont be gone that long but two grown ups and two kids means lots of luggage.

I plan to take lots of pictures and post them on Flickr, so I’m going to carry on all the camera equipment.  The kids insist that I bring their cameras as well and if they take any really good shots I’ll post those as well.

June 20, 2008

The exploration of Mars

NASA Phoenix Arm

Since I’m convinced that there is little intelligent life in the world (or at least in the U.S. government) let’s head to Mars for a moment.  From Gizmodo I followed this link to The Big Picture’s Martian Skies.

The NASA Phoenix Mars lander has confirmed water on Mars.  That does not mean there is life on Mars but it’s a huge discovery and can lead to a better understanding of how Mars formed.  Was it always like this? And if not how did it become like this?

The web page is an amazing collection of pictures from various missions.  Just look at the picture of Phobos. Head over to that page, I feel better knowing that we’re still capable of such exploration.

June 19, 2008

Same old political pandering

Telcom immunity: I’ll wait to see if the Democrats sold out the constitution again, but I’m willing to bet they did.  No politician has any principles during an election year.

Update: Crooks and Liars has more, but it looks like it’s a done deal.  These Democrats are not Blue Dogs, they are Blue Cowards.  All it takes is the President to say something is legal and game over, you have no rights.

Anything from detaining American citizens, torturing people, to spying on our own population is allowed.  All it takes is for a brown shirt government employee to say “War on Terror” and for the President to say “this is legal”.  No one is held accountable, no one has to deal with the consequences of their actions.

When the Democrats opposed blanket immunity I was thinking that maybe these dark days are closing.  It was all a scam; the Democrats are up for election too.

I’m upset and I can’t wait for January 20th, 2009.  Even if it’s McCain at least we’ll get a new king.

June 18, 2008

Gears of War for Windows

Gears of War for Windows

The other day I was in Best Buy getting some Nintendo DS Lite games for the kids.  The Windows version of Gears of War was on sale for $30 so I got it.  I always get last year’s games.

After the nightmare known as Halo 2 for Windows I was worried that the game would crash.  So far it’s stable but there is one problem.  The game stutters a lot.  The whole screen pauses then jumps and it’s really annoying.

To minimize the problem, I’ve shut down all the added background programs such as the iTunes helper, Java updater, and other odds and end junk.  The stuttering is acceptable now but the game definitely runs better on the Xbox 360.

It plays well, and I already know how the story will end.  I was afraid that without an XBox controller that the experience would be not so good but the keyboard/mouse combination works well.  And I aim much better with the mouse than I ever did on the Xbox 360.

Now if I can only work out dodging the berzerker using the keyboard then I’d be all set.

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Jan Dembowski

Jan Dembowski

I am a software enthusiast who is easily amused and definitely mostly harmless.

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