I recently bought a Hoya HD CPL filter for my Canon Rebel XS. I had a few minutes to spare this weekend and I wanted to you show you how it improves the images on a sunny day.
The first picture was shot without any filter.
This second picture was show with the CPL filter. Notice how much the sky is more saturated and the clouds stand out. The trees are also brighter.
Last week, I bought myself a Synology DS110j along with a 1 TB hard drive. I also took the opportunity to upgrade a segment of my network to Gigabit speed with a cheap D-Link switch. My computer and the NAS are now on that segment.
Now, I still haven’t decided what my strategy is gonna be. For now, my computer contains all the “master” files and a scheduled job synchronizes my computer with my NAS every now and then. This method has a few important advantages:
The only drawback is that my files are not live on the NAS. This means that if I download a video and want to watch it immediately on the media box in my living room, I have to run the sync job manually.
This also means that if I turn off my computer before the sync job runs, new files won’t be sent to the NAS until the computer is turned back on.
Because of that, I tried to switch roles: the NAS would store the master files and my computer would only keep backups. In normal usage, I would never use the files stored on my computer, I would always work on the NAS. All the different My Documents, My Music, My Pictures, (etc.) folders would be mapped on the NAS. This has a few drawbacks:
However, I also found out that Windows 7 won’t let me add networked folders to Libraries. So I would loose that functionality, which I actually like.
So I’m back to my original strategy: masters stored on my computer and files backed up to the NAS on a regular basis. The NAS will always be a bit “behind”, but that’s the best solution I found.
Do you have a NAS? I would like to hear different point of views on that subject.
I’ve had the opportunity to take an iPad home for a few days last week. They’re not available in Canada yet, but my boss brought one from the States. I already have an iPhone 3G so I didn’t focus on the OS or the applications.
First, it’s fast. Like, wicked fast! Moving around in the Maps application is just amazing, especially when you’re used to the iPhone 3G’s speed.
The screen is pretty much like my iPhone, but obviously bigger. The size is just perfect: not too big, not too small. But just like the iPhone, it’s glossy and hard to read outside. And the DPI is pretty much the same as on my iPhone (it’s not sharper). There also seems to be a bit of ghosting under certain circumstances. In other words, it’s not much of an improvement over the iPhone.
They keyboard is an improvement, especially in landscape mode where the keys are much larger. But you have to type with your fingers, as there is obviously no feel (like any virtual keyboard). Typing with both hands proved to be slower because one of my hands would always “drift away” from its initial position. But I must admit that I was surprised how fast I could type with only two fingers. The bottleneck was always with the accentuated characters, as you have to hold a key and wait for its alternative characters to appear (like on the iPhone). I wish the delay was shorter.
The main problem is finding a good position. On a flat surface, the optional casing does a great job giving the iPad a slight angle so it’s a bit more perpendicular with your eyes. But on the sofa or a chair, I found it really hard to be comfortable. It’s a bit heavy so holding it with one hand is only when you want to do something quick. Plus, you can’t type with both hands in that position. You really have to lay it down some way, and it’s not always elegant.
Last but not least, it desperately needs multitasking. I want to use it like a real computer, not like an iPhone! In Apple’s defense, the next version of the OS is going to come out this summer and it will have multitasking (among other things).
Is it a nice toy? Definitely. Is it worth $600+ bucks? I don’t think so, especially if you already have an iPhone.
Here are the cameras I had in the past:
I loved both of my Canon cameras, but I found myself too limited in some situations. Particularly in low-light situations. At ISO 800, there was a lot of noise with my SD700.
I always loved photography, so after looking around for months, I finally found a great deal and bought myself a Canon EOS Rebel XS. It’s an entry-level SLR, but the level of control you have is simply in another league. I understand pretty much all the theory, but I need more practice.
For now, I only have the 18-55 IS lense that came with the body. But I might buy a 50mm f/1.8 prime lense sometime in the near future, it’s helpful in these low-light scenes such as weddings and all.
I have a few pictures in the « Experimentations » album in the kPicasa Gallery demo.
Here’s a list of my favorite applications:
And now a list of nice/useful applications that need improvement:
What are your favorite applications?
It seems I’m the last person on Earth to get an iPod. I’m still discovering how it works, but one thing’s for sure: it’s really cool.
Last week I bought myself my first pair of very nice headphones. After listening to the Sennheiser HD595 and HD555, beyerdynamic DT 770, Grado SR125 and SR225, I finally decided to purchase the SR225.
I felt the Sennheisers were very detailed, at first I was shocked to hear details I had never heard on Ozzy Obourne’s I Just Want You. But after about 15 minutes of listening, I felt they lacked the “punch” I was looking for.
No matter how detailed the the beyerdynamic might be, they didn’t put a grin on my face either.
Then I tried the Grado SR125 and it hit me right away – OMG the guitar is amazing on these cans!!! I listened for about 20 minutes and was amazed by the energy they output.
I went back to the store a week later to listen again to the SR125 before buying them, and I also wanted to hear the SR225 just to compare. I came to the conclusion that the SR125 were too bright, I’m pretty sure they become annoying after a while.
They forgot to update the price shown on the floor stand so they had to sell them at that price ($45 less than they were now listed at). He had trouble applying that rebate in the computer system so he called another employee and they put the wrong rebate. I ended up paying $75 less than I should have.
It’s been a VERY long time since I bought something that I love THAT much!!!
If you are like me, you probably have a few gigabytes of pictures and a some important documents lying around on your computer. And you probably have a whole bunch of stuff that you know you will never use again, but you just can’t get rid of them.
Back in the day, I used to backup my stuff on a CD-R. But like everyone else, I didn’t do it really often. Then as my data grew larger and larger, I changed the media for a DVD. But now with multi megapixel cameras, it’s not unsual to shoot a gigabyte of photos in a few days.
So today I bought myself an external hard drive enclosure. Since I have a few hard disks laying around, I simply needed the enclosure and not the drive itself. They are really cheap now — I paid mine $21. I plugged a 80GB drive in and it worked right out of the box as expected. The drive is formatted in EXT3, so I guess sometime I’ll have to reformat it in FAT32 if I want to use it on a Windows machine.
The reason why I never did frequent backups was because it was too much trouble to find out which files were updated, so I always ended up backing up everything from scratch. It would just require too much time to do it all over each time. So I wrote a simple rsync script so now I only have to plug the drive in, double-click on my script file, and everything is going to be synchronised with the hard drive. Easy as 1-2-3, quick and I don’t have to do anything!
At the price they sell these drives now, I think it’s worth getting one. I know my photos are worth more than $21!
A few days ago, my girlfriend and I planned to go on a small trip to Montréal. I had only been there a few times, and only had to drive there twice. I’ve never had a chance to play with a GPS, so I thought it would be cool to create myself a need (!) and ask my boss if I could borrow his. The next day, I had his Garmin StreetPilot c550 on my desk.
It’s a little big compared to the new units, but it’s been out for a while now. It has a very nice touch screen display and was perfectly readable in the sun, which impressed me. I just read in the specs that it is supposed to speak street names, but it never did while I used it.
I plugged it in my car on the way home and I found myself laughing all alone in my car just hearing that little machine talking to me and telling me where to turn. It found my address without any problem, but it gave me the directions of the shortest road, not the quickest one. As soon as it noticed I was not taking the suggested road, it recalculated another path based on my new location and direction. It recalculated a new path a few times since I kept driving on my favorite road. I was afraid it would just say “alright, if you don’t want to listen to me, I’ll just shut down”, but fortunately it didn’t.
