Month: April 2008

grace and generosity

Some other details: the rear screen is amazingly bright if you need to check something in the field the image counter counts down , not up: in other words, it knows how many images you have room for on the card and keeps track, rather than letting you run the card full so you have to delete images while the action is happening there are a lot of options and choices you can make, but you don’t have to — the program modes are pretty reliable it just feels solid and substantial without being bulky…. The reason I wanted it is that I will be helping wrangle some kindergarteners for the Dalai Lama’s visit and there’s a chance that some photography might break out, even if I don’t get into the session.

I am spending a couple of days with this:

thanks to the generosity of Kate McElwee.

For all my grousing about digital photography, a lot of my issues would go away if I had access to one of these. Why? It feels like a good SLR camera, not a digital or film camera — just a camera. The controls are easily worked out (I declined the tour of the controls as she was pretty busy when I picked up the little gem), the quality of the images and the experience of getting them is first-rate.

It offers the control you need for some images but can do all the heavy lifting as required. The main thing I noticed (and loved) was that it’s responsive: it writes pictures to disk as fast as you can take them, something my over-rated 5400 has never done well. And that’s taking RAW images, 14 Mb in size, not jpgs or tiffs.

Some other details:

  • the rear screen is amazingly bright if you need to check something in the field
  • the image counter counts down, not up: in other words, it knows how many images you have room for on the card and keeps track, rather than letting you run the card full so you have to delete images while the action is happening
  • there are a lot of options and choices you can make, but you don’t have to — the program modes are pretty reliable
  • it just feels solid and substantial without being bulky. It’s not heavy (an F4 weighs 3 pounds, more than twice what the D80 weighs. I took one of those on my honeymoon — 3 weeks — and I wasn’t sad to turn it back in to the rental shop.)

The reason I wanted it is that I will be helping wrangle some kindergarteners for the Dalai Lama’s visit and there’s a chance that some photography might break out, even if I don’t get into the session.

Not having used any other D-series cameras, I have no idea how much this offers vs the D50 or even the D70. But I have to wonder what more you get with a D300.

well, that’s annoying

It looks like in the upgrade to WordPress 2.5, I inadvertently lost all the uploaded images up to that time. I back up the database nightly, but ancillary stuff? Apparently not.

To be clear, I did have a backup of the whole mess from the upgrade: I moved the old wordpress directory aside, set up the database connections, repopulated/upgraded plugins and themes. But never moved the uploaded images back. And I remember deleting that huge file, thinking I didn’t need it, just couple of days ago. Almost 6 years of it all, too.

Ouch.

late night mutterings

Today I observed 46 years of continued excellence, with the donation of 7.5 * 1011 platelets. I had no great plans for the day. Someone asked me the other week if this was a milestone birthday and my facetious reply was that at my age, they all are.

As you go through life and your circle broadens to include an age range of 1 to 81, as my daily routine does, it lends some perspective. I can’t claim any material accomplishments, no patents, no published works (or unpublished ones of any consequence). I was listening to something on the radio about some educational project and realized/reminded myself that if I did have the resources, all I would want to do would be to make it useful for others. I won’t say give it away, as that doesn’t imply any conscious thought or plan. But the happiest people I know are the ones helping or doing things for others without trying to make it worth their own while.

I have known for awhile now that my kids weren’t the only ones getting an education these past six years. I have had a lot of catching up to do.

persistence

I have been trying for some time to work out how to get automounts to work in Tiger…. shuttle:/usr/local/share/mt-daapd/media /Network/Servers smbfs resvport,net 0 0 That puts a link in /Network/Servers that seems to mount that filesystem (where all my iTunes goodies are kept) automagically.

I have been trying for some time to work out how to get automounts to work in Tiger. One last plunge into the Google and I came up with this.

[/Users/paul]:: nidump fstab .
shuttle:/usr/local/share/mt-daapd/media /Network/Servers smbfs resvport,net 0 0

That puts a link in /Network/Servers that seems to mount that filesystem (where all my iTunes goodies are kept) automagically. Launching iTunes mounts it just fine.

Read the original link if you can’t work out what’s required.

[update] Well, this almost works ;-( permissions on the mounted volume are not being set properly.

[updated update] Looks like it was all about file ownership and NFS: samba/cifs doesn’t care, or more correctly, takes its cue from the authentication process. it seems to work now.

yourserver:/your/local/path /Network/Servers nfs resvport,net,rw,-i,-P 0 0