Leopard Day 0: A Day in the Life a Mac Fanatic

www.flickr.com

7:00 AM

Wake up early (yes, 7AM is early for me) to prepare to go to the Apple Store opening at 9AM

7:10 AM

Check the Apple website and find that the countdown still reads 11 hours. By 10/26 they didn't mean morning of 10/26. Back to bed.

4:45 PM

Leave work to head over the Apple Store at the Natick Collection Mall

5:30 PM

Join the line camped outside the locked doors of the Apple Store. A kid in front of me walks the line, returns to his father to report that they are #38 in line.

5:35 PM

The frumpy old guy next to me starts chatting with about Macs. Says that he's a web developer that works at home and uses Dreamweaver and Flash on PCs and wants to trash them for Macs instead.

  Galleon Home Media Server for Tivo

A coworker recently recommended a free program to enhance Tivo. This weekend I installed it and now I'm hooked. I don't have to get up from the couch to follow what's going on in the blogosphere, weather, movie listings, and local events. For someone that spends 40+ hours a week sitting down already, is this really such a good thing? ;)

Get a lot more from Tivo with the free program Galleon for Tivo. You can now push recordings from your Tivo to your PC rather than having to log on to the PC and then pull them over. Galleon also has very useful features such as viewing your RSS feeds from your TV, plus local movie theater listings, local social events, local weather, as well as listening to your iPods music collection and watching your JPG photos on your TV. ...And you can watch movies on your TV over the network from the program library on your computer.

Here are some pictures of my TV menus when using Galleon...

» Read More » »

  Backup Fiasco: Short Lifespan for CDs

I've been considering how to improve the backups of my personal digital library such as photos, music, files, and other data after reading a story that's been widely circulated since last week. An IBM researcher estimates the lifespan of CD-R discs to be a mere 2-5 years, depending on factors such as heat, humidity, and light.

Storage expert warns of short life span for burned CDs

I'm considering options such as a 300 GB, 600 GB, or 1 TB Maxtor Hard Drive, maybe two of them in fact. To prevent bit rot I could transfer all the data from one megadrive to the other every couple of years, back and forth to write the data fresh. Of course, just like genetic mutations, with frequent copying some variation is introduced due to minor copy errors.

  Intro to Digital SLR Photography

This week I began a six week course on Introduction to Digital Photography at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA. The class intends to impart technological mastery of digital SLR cameras as well as artistic considerations such as subject, composition, and lighting. Each week we are provided with a shooting assignment to be reviewed collectively in the following class. Look for photo updates with technical commentary soon.

I had used a Nikon N60 film SLR through much of the 90's, and by 1999 I had switched almost entirely to digital photography with various point and click models. Those digital cameras included my first 1 megapixel Casio, a 3mp Kodak DC210, a 3mp CoolPix 900 which I used for its ability to capture images from film negatives with an adaptor, and for the last few years a 5mp Kodak DX4530 with a wide angle attachment. While I like these digital point and click models for their convenience and ease of use, I miss the creative freedom available in an SLR. Finally digital SLRs have improved sufficiently to challenge any film SLR, but have also reached an affordable price for that creativity and quality.

So with the right combination of features and price, I plunged into the digital SLR market with the CNET Editor's Choice for digital SLRs, an 8 mp Canon EOS 20D with the default 18-55mm lens. My first shooting adventure will be this weekend where I'll get to know the camera and apply the lessons learned at DeCordova.

  Bicycle Route Thru Concord, Carlisle, Sudbury, and Lincoln

Now that I've mapped some bicycle tours around Concord as shown here, today I combined and traversed the suggested routes. Two hours, two flattened turtles, one flattened skunk, one eighteen-wheeler, and many clumsy landscape trucks later, here's the stats on this combined loop:

Time:	2:02 (2 hours, 2 minutes)
Distance:	28.47 miles or 45.5 kilometers
Average Speed:	14.0 mph or 22.4 kph
Average Pace:	4.3 min/mi or 2.7 min/km
Highest Speed:	30.7 mph or 49.1 kph (on Lincoln Rd, near Audubon Sanctuary approaching Rt 117)
Calories burned:	1,895 (estimated by Garmin's setting for body weight)

I prefer to strap the Garmin Forerunner to my Giant Cypress DX handlebar rather than my arm because it makes viewing much easier. Seeing my current speed and distance provides constant motivation. The velcro strap fits snugly around the handlebar when wrapped over the headlamp mount.

  Journey to the center of the iPod vortex

Today, I shoved off into the brave new iPod world as the vortex has finally sucked me in. Today, I am no longer an iPod virgin. My iPod Photo has finally arrived, and the world is good again.

Seriously, I decided it was time to take a look at all that iPod hacking, podcasting, and audio blogcasting going on. I've loaded up my modest mp3 collection of 1900+ songs in about an hour, and the Old 97's are happily humming along in my head right now. Just 8GB so far with plenty of elbow room for my entire digital photo collection.

The iPod phenomenon is really amazing, and I'm surprised that it took me this long to dive in. There are people who use it for just about every purpose under the sun. People who cook by it. People who just want to keep their iPod cozy and warm while still being stylish. Personally, I'd like to catch up with those who want to use it with Linux, and others who want to run Linux on it. So if you see me on the street just tap me on the shoulder coz I might not hear you ;-)

  Bad Review for SmartDisk FireLite portable external hard drives

Last year I purchased a very portable external hard drive, the SmartDisk FireLite 40 GB USB model. Over the course of the year I used it somewhat regularly, perhaps maybe a couple dozen times. Up until this past fall I was satisified with it, so much so that I ordered another one for my wife, but an 80 GB model.

Just about that time I noticed my Firelite started giving me a few fits... It has an LED light that turns purple if it can connect at USB 2 speed such as when connected to a Windows XP workstation, or green if it can connect as USB 1.1 speed when connected to a Windows 2000 machine. If it has a connection the light is steady, and if it has trouble where Windows won't show the drive for the Firelite device then the light blinks rapidly.

Well, more times than not the light was blinking on mine just about the time I ordered the one for my wife. I thought it was just me. I tried Linux as well to mount it as /dev/sda1, for example, and even under linux it sometimes blinked and couldn't connect.

While using Windows, I'd plug into the USB port and Windows would give me an error:

» Read More » »

  Linksys Wireless-G PrintServer WPS54G

I just finished setting up the wireless Linksys printserver (model WPS54G) at home. Finally, I can effortlessly use my Compaq Inkjet IJ650 printer from every Windows computer on the home network. Yay!

The printserver attaches to your 802.11g network and to your USB 1.1 or USB 2.0 printer. Previously, I had always attached the printer to one of my Windows workstations, but then that computer either always had to be on or it had to be booted up in order to print. Further, if I changed the printer from one USB hub to another, then I had to first deal with driver issues on the local workstation, and then I had to share it out again, and finally change all the remote workstation shares. The Linksys printserver is a breeze.

» Read More » »

  Epson Perfection 1670 Photo, Negative, and Slide Scanner

I'd like to recommend the Epson Perfection 1670 Scanner for the purpose of scanning photographic slides. I recently purchased one at Best Buy for just $89 which is very reasonable compared to its big brother the Epson 3170 for $189. I read the CNET reviews and a couple of them seemed negative, but I figured I could always return it if the quality really was sub par, and that was why I bought it directly from a local store rather than by discount mail order.

Setup was easy, although the many layers of wrapping and stickers was a pain. It includes a black frame to hold either a strip of negatives or two slides. This frame lays on top of the glass pane, and after removing the white reflector on the under side of the lid, a top light is exposed. In slide mode, the scanner shines this light through the slide or negative and onto the electronic receiver under the glass.

After some testing, I settled on a scan resolution of 800 pixels/inch. The scanner generates an image of the black frame and the two slides (a smaller version of the scan result is shown to the left here), and then the user must later perform image editing to isolate each slide into its own image file. Because the slides were scanned into this combined image, the resolution needs to be larger because you end up trimming it down to separate the two slide images. Depending on image detail, this combined slide image was typically 2 - 4 MB, and then each image isolated from it ranged about 800 kb - 1 MB. I tried to up the resolution to 1200, but the scan time was unreasonably long at 3-5 minutes. At 800 dpi, the total time to put two slides on the bed, scan them, & remove them was about a minute and a half.

I recently scanned my Yellowstone and Alaska slide collections, each one culled down about 125 slides per set. To scan a set of 125 images, crop the individual slides from the dual scan, and then edit the images in Adobe Photoshop to remove the specs of dust and improve the brightness required about 6 hours each. At 6 hours per set, that pretty much ate up my weekend, but to have high quality digital images made from my withering slides provided a great relief. I think the Epson slide scanner was a very good purchase and well worth the cost. In 1997 I had some of those slides scanned at a little shop on Kneeland street in Boston, at a cost of $1.25 per slide. I recently checked prices and found that $1 per slide was about the norm, which would have cost perhaps $250 in total.

Previously, I purchased the Nikon Slide Copying Adapter ES-E28 for my Nikon Coolpix 995. This requires an external light source and I found it very difficult to get sufficient light, and even pointing it at the Sun on a very bright day wasn't good enough. The problem was that the center of the image would be at a higher brightness than the edges, making it look like the slide was taken in a tunnel. I was very unhappy with the slide scanning feature of that adapter. To the contrary though, I scanned some negatives with ES-E28 and I found it worked very well.

  SnapDialer Software for Laptop Internet Access using a Cellphone

I recently purchased SnapDialer software from FutureDial to connect my laptop to the Internet by using my Sprint cellphone as the uplink over the Sprint 3G network. Should I need to connect to the internet anywhere within the Sprint cellphone coverage area, now I can just plug in my cell phone and dial up for rates about 5 times faster than a 56k modem (~250 kbps).

Although I can use the cellphone's built-in web browser and email clients that are already part of the Sprint PCS plan, I can get full page browsing with images and all by using the laptop with it. However, I did notice significant image degradation while using SnapDialer with my laptop, though. The images appeared to be somewhat compressed and grainy, but they are sufficient. While dialed up, the cellphone displays connection status and transfer rates. I noticed a very short idle disconnect time, such that if no internet activity occurred for about 30 to 60 seconds the connection would drop. This may be a means of efficiency and lower bandwidth usage, and hopefully it would help save on minutes used in the Sprint plan.