Last week I’ve been complaining about the capped volume on the iPod nano and the inability to circumvent it. At the end of that very week, the iPod earbuds solved the problem for me by breaking down. The rubber rings started comming off, and the right speaker produced only 10% of the sound the left speaker was producing.
I decided that this was enough reason to go looking for a nice set of in-ear headphones (earbuds) which would sound nice, and also improve on produced volume.
A while ago the drives in my fileserver (PPC Mac Mini) began dying on me, one after one. The disks were somewhat old (approx. 4 years) so I replaced them with 2 new Maxtor 500GB USB drives, and restored all data from my backups. The server came up and looked and worked like it had never died, but now had more diskspace.
After a few months of trouble free operation, one of the Maxtor disks seemed to have died this morning. I had kept the receipt, so I thought I’d get the drive and bring it in for repairs, because after all, this is well within the warranty period. While disconnecting the drive, it occured to me that I could never bring that harddisk in for repairs, particularly if I was not able to access it.
I know you’ve been playing with your ultra-cool iPhones, but did you realize that it only is 6 years ago that Apple showed is the first iPod? It’s amazing how fast technology advances nowadays. Today I read that 128GB flashdrives are not far away, so how about an 128GB iPhone, or even a MacBook with a solid state disk? We’ve got a nice future ahead…
Past few weeks I noticed that the spindle bearings of my lathe were becomming warmer than I liked, particularly when working with higher rpm. Last weekend I decided to take the spindle out, clean the old grease out, and rebuilding it. It turned out to be more work than I expected. The tight fit of the pully made me use the hammer-and-wood trick on the spindle, which I did not like. After a few hours of tapping and fiddling, the pully came of. The spindle gear and the left hand bearing were no fun job either.
Anyway, the whole thing is apart now, and I cleaned out all the grease. I test-fitted the spindle sundaynight, but I can feel a slight “bump” when turning it, I think the grease must have picked up some dirt, most likely a wood chip from the bench. So I have to take it apart again, it has to be perfectly smooth.
After I re-fit the spindle, I have to adjust it with my micrometer to have a play of between 0.004 and 0.005 mm, no more, and no less, while being able to turn it by hand. Sounds like an interesting excercise which will take up more than a few minutes 🙂
TomTom decided to remove the earphone plug from their newer version One. This blog entry will describe how you can add your own.
Why would TomTom remove the earphone plug? There are a few simple reasons, one being that the new version has a slimmer formfactor with less room for plugs, and the other being that they probably don’t want it to compete too much with the XL and Rider versions.
Seth Godin did a talk at Google campus in Februari last year. I recently stumbled upon this video of his talk, in which he explains to the Google people why Google sells.
He is very clear in explaining to technology people that technology does not sell. It’s technology that gives you a shot at marketing, nothing more. He makes some very good points which I’ll try to summarize, because the video takes 48 minutes to watch 🙂
Lately Greenpeace has started a campaign against the usage of hazardous materials by Apple. The campain setup is friendly, nicely designed and urges Apple to choose materials which are less hazadous to the environment.As a spinoff of the Greenpeace campain all kinds of so called “journalists” have begun to put Apple on the “wrong end of the scale” of their “environment-o-meter”, and are happily writing doom articles about what will happen to your Karma if you buy any Apple product. But how environmentally unfriedly are Apple’s computers really?
I am very close to migrating the data on my bulky PC to my new Mac Mini fileserver and mounting the IDE drives in the USB drive brackets. Once I’ve done this, I will have the screenshots and data to write a nice “how to” on using the Mac Mini as a file server. There is however one slight problem which could prove to be a showstopper…
Samba test 1: local directories.
I created a directory in the root of the HD in the mac mini, and made it R/W for everybody. Then, I used SharePoints to make it available to all password-less Guest users on the network (which happens to be the default Windows user for connecting to drives without asking for a password). All was well. I could access the share, and could copy as many files from as many machines imultaniously as I wanted.
Samba test 2: USB mounted volumes.
I mounted a HFS+ formatted USB disk to the Mac Mini, and made it available to the network in the same way as in test 1. Everything seemed to be working fine and as expected, but while running some tests I discovered a strange thing: I can only copy files onto the USB drive from 1 machine at a time, 1 file at a time. When starting a new copy while allready in the process of copying an older file, one or both copy jobs crashed with a “file in use” error.
I am now trying to find out what is causing this problem. I have a firewire drive I can use to determine if it is the USB protocol or driver which is causing this problem, or if it is the fact that it is a mounted volume alltogether. If anybody has tips I’m glad to hear them. Meanwhile I’ll be searching the web…
Update
Using a firewire drive does not solve the problem. I did find some articles on fast user switching which state that only 1 user can access pheripherals at a time. This seems to be related to this problem.
Update 2
Creating a symlink to the mounted volume and sharing the link through samba will not change behaviour. I was expecting this, but tried anyway because it only costs 1 minute to test. Maybe a virtual drive would be an option. I can create virtual RAID disks in OSX, but I don’t want my setup to be complex. This will add to the complexity when recovering from a sever crash. Simple, full and fast recovery from hardware problems is my top priority.
Do you still want “that last lens and that’s it”? According to the statistics on this page, you probably already have the right lens in your camera bag. Chances are that you are using your cheapest lens most often. The best quote from this page must be “The cost of the lens is inversely proportional to the frequency of its use.”.
Where did I get that link from? Well, from a brilliant text by Ken Rockwel titled “Your Camera Does Not Matter”. It states that you may not only have overspent on lenses, but on your complete kit alltogether! According to Ken, “Buying new gear will NOT improve your photography.”.
Next time you see a guy with a D200, don’t be impressed. The guy behind him with his old Holga camera could be shooting far better pictures!
I have had a Canon EOS 300 (35mm film), a Canon Powershot A20 and now a Canon 350D. I also have made photo’s with some of my dad’s camera’s, a Canon FT-QL, and an Exa IIB. When changing from one camera to another, my photography (in particular composition) did not change. It just took some trouble away from the process. EOS 200 to Canon A20: no more film hassle. Canon A20 to 350D: Faster bootup and shot-to-shot times. Canon FT-QL and Exa IIB: The romantic feeling of craftsmanship when holding the camera 🙂
Sure the 350D gives me nice resolution and more freedom to play with aperture and exposure times and I still like the camera after reading Kens article. But he is right. Period. I recently spoke to a guy who owned an EOS 300 just like I did. He looked at one of my photo’s from the 350D and said “I’ve got to have that camera, how did you do that?”. I explained “aperture” to him and told him that he could do that with his own EOS 300 if he had taken the time to learn how to use it.
I guess some sales people translate “I want a good camera” to “I want to spend a truckload of cash on a camera of which I’ll only use the full-auto mode to shoot pictures of uncle Zed with.” People who don’t know what “aperture” or “exposure time” means just want a snapshot camera which automatically will produce clear, colorful, crisp foto’s of uncle Zed 95% of the time.
Before buying a camera, read Ken’s article, get out of that chair and start shooting with whatever camera you have right now. That one brilliant moment is waiting for you!
When you are using a (digital) camera and need to place it on an uneven surface to keep it still long enough for your long shutter speeds, or you want to make a shot on the release timer (or both), you’ll need a tripod, or a beanbag. A beanbag is an ideal option, you can tuck it into your backpack, take it everywhere you need and it fits all camera’s.
Sure, you can buy a beanbag from a nice company like this, and spend about 30 euro’s or more. But, If you’ve got a needle, thread, a T-shirt or linnen bag, and some rice, you can make one for free!
