Binarynomad

I’ve had an itch for the past 2 months and yesterday I finally got around to scratching it.

I’ve been playing with cameras as far back as I can remember, I tended to have a knack for getting good shots every now and then, so I was usually the one handed the camera for outings and family get-togethers.

When we moved to the states my dad gave me access to his Nikon F2(?). Now this is a very manual camera, the only automatic thing about it was the analog light meter in the view finder. So I got lost in the world of (iso, shutter speeds, apertures, f-stops, exposure compensation, etc). I learned from trial and error how things worked. Now don’t confuse this with technical know-how, I’m still perplexed by the things like setting “push processing” and manipulation of exposure compensation, etc.

Eventually I stumbled into the land of timed exposures and night photography. I love playing with light and perception, a friend and I once traded “trick pictures”, he sent me the standard (double exposure) ghost shot of himself standing in his room, so I followed up with my own, except I upped the stakes because I was able to get half my body fading in (this is much harder to do, you can see the pictures I’m talking about at the end of this post). Since then I’ve slowly nurtured a love of photography.

In 1998′ish I got my first digital camera the Kodak DC260, and boy did I have fun with it. Some of my earliest trick photography was done with this camera. (see the album at the end of this post). I had some fun with long exposures and a flashlight. I also wanted to play with high speed photography (freezing something in space).

Then around 2000, I upgraded to a Nikon Coolpix 990 which was a more professional camera, but it had some problems. It suffered from a very slow response time when taking a photograph (so I ended up missing some good shots), it didn’t handle low light very well, and it was not very portable (it needed its own bag). One place it excelled at was macro photography, I’ve gotten some really good nature photography (when there was ample light), and it’s swivel lens was useful to getting some odd angles. I used this camera all the way up until I moved to Australia, but in general, it’s use was depreciating.

I’ve been wanting a new camera for a while, but have had the hardest time trying to find one that met my needs. Either I’d find a camera that met all but 1 or 2 of my requirements, but that was enough for me to keep looking (and it didn’t help that some thing better was always just on the horizon).

Since I was moving to Australia, I knew that I’d have a lot of free time, and I was in the market for a camera, so I decided to not bring my Nikon 990 (bad decision, do you know how painful it is to experience so many new things and not have a camera with you..GUH!!). I was relegated to borrowing Kristen’s camera when possible (and it is one of those pocketable point-and-shoots that allow very little artistic play).

So here I am, itching to get a new camera, working with a (small budget), and my most recent “just released” camera option turned out to be a flop (it had the good 10x zoom, high ISO, anti-shake, etc) but absolutely no manual controls. (that was a deal breaker, argh!). I’d LOVE to get my hands on a nice digital SLR (like the Nikon D70) but the reality is: I’m in Australia, next to the beach, the outback, flash rains, etc. I need something flexible, portable, and won’t make me cry if it happens to drop off of Uluru. A nice digital SLR does not fit this description. You normally need different lenses, extra batteries, cleaning equipment, large carrying bag, etc. So I compromised. I got my self a small portable camera, that still has manual controls, 6x zoom, built in creative color filters, and an acceptable low light sensitivity. The Canon PowerShot A700. The only thing missing was an image stablizer.

So be forewarned, my photo galleries are about to start filling up as I get more comfortable with my new toy

The ghost photos I traded with a friend

My album of time lapse photography

I’ve been busy over the past few days making changes to my website. The most notable and obvious is the inclusion of a photo gallery. (which admittedly has very few entries right now, but that is mostly due to my second MAJOR project of going though my 4000+ photos, killing the bad ones, rotating the skewed ones, and then adding annotations, keywords, descriptions, etc to each and every photo. This is not a light task by ANY stretch of the imagination).

I’ll also be working on the general layout and finally updating the links and static pages in the right column.

So stick around, check back every now and then, and excuse the seemingly chaotic look and feel of the site (as I test and configure different themes).

I came across this link in Engadget. I’ve been toying with the idea of creating a PVR (Personal Video Recorder, think Tivo) for myself. This looks like a quick easy setup:

http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000460049488/

Rail guns, plasma generators, and tesla coils, oh my.

http://www.angelfire.com/80s/sixmhz/index.html

If you at all work with linux or are a system administrator, then by now you’ve at least heard of Live CD’s. These are a great concept. You can basicly carry around a working operating system in your pocket. Yeah, you might be able to pull if off with a mini HD or USB drive, but what computer these days doen’t have a cdrom drive. To top it off, lets see you drop that portable HD from one story high and see how well your drive boots

A lot of people use these CDROMS to: Test their hardware, play with linux without doing anything to their existing Windows system, perform forensics on dead computers, security auditing, etc.

This article goes over most of the Linux Live CDroms’ that try to provide a portable desktop environment. Basicly something you can, connect to the internet, listen to music, chat, write a paper, and print on. There are a number of interesting options avaliable and the author does a nice high level summery. Check it out.

This article is a quick roundup of “best picks” for Linux Live CD’s:

http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=9569

[UPDATE]: I found this site that maintains a full list of linux based live cdroms:

http://www.frozentech.com/content/livecd.php

Nifty:

So I’ve been a geek long enough to say “Yeah, I know what a BBS is…” “Yes, I know how painful it is to download 100k on a 2400 baud modem BEFORE zmodem and any other “download resume” protocol was standard.”

I played around in the Bay Area BBS scene between 88 to 92. I had my favorite list of BBS I would autodial through, check the latest postings, the latest files, synchronize my FIDONET feed, etc. Most of this occured between 7pm and 4am, at which point I would catch up on sleep in my high school classes :). I had my elite accounts on a number of boards (note that was before l337, existed) Hey, it was the only way a student had any chance of getting software with a non-existant salary. Oh, and I was much more in tune with all the dial prefixes in the Bay Area. (Trust me, when the household phone bill goes from $30 to $200, your parents notice!)

Then I discovered “THE INTERNET”. I was not a student, but I was lucky enough to know the main administrator for UCSF’s computer department. He decided to give me 1) An Unix account, 2) the LS command, and 3) The MAN command. After that I never looked back at BBS’s.

In general, BBS’s started to die around 1995, mostly because Windows 95 and AOL had become pretty popular and were making it easier and easier for the rest of the world to discover “The Internet”.

Just reciently, I discovered information about a DVD Documentary on the whole BBS subculture that happend in the late 80’s / early 90’s. I am so getting this

http://www.bbsdocumentary.com/

Unfortunately it looks like the release was delayed a bit.

Lately, I’ve had a growing interest in getting a PVR (Personal Video Recorder), but without the subscription fee that Tivo’s get ya for. So, I’ve been keeping my eye out on the home brew market. Slashdot just posted this article that sums up a number of commercial units that are not ’subscription’.

http://linux.slashdot.org/linux/05/01/12/027210.shtml?tid=129&tid=137&tid=106

Flash Linux: http://www.encryptec.net/flashlinux/ (linux usb flash bootable key)

GameShark Media Player: The GameShark Media Player provides consumers with easy to install, “plug and play” software that leverages the powerful PS2 game console to stream digital media from a networked computer to the television or home entertainment system. Functional with Windows, Mac OSX and Linux with a wired or wireless home network connection, users enjoy virtually all the popular media formats including MPEG, DivX, MP3, JPEG and more. Complete with parental controls, the software enables users to create and save unlimited playlists while navigating with a remote control or game console controller.

WOOT!!! I’ve been teaching myself Mysql and Php for a little while now. I’ve gotten comfortable with the database design, but I’m still not up to par with webpage design yet. I can modify or code basic pages, but overall, I don’t have the patience to build an interface. So I’ve been searching off and on for a script or program that would connect to a database, let you pick the fields, or define relationships and then generate a web based interface for: ADD/CHANGE/DELETE/SEARCH of records. Most programs I found were commercial and windows based.

Well I think I just found what I’ve been looking for in “mySiteMaker”:

mySiteMaker is a collection of CGI tools written in Perl for rapidly creating web interfaces to MySQL database tables. The primary goal of this project is to make accessing data in database tables as easy, convenient and simple as possible.

Link here: http://www.itlab.musc.edu/mySiteMaker/

I just came a cross a DIY titled: “Supersize Your TV for $300: Build Your Own XGA Projector!” (I think I just found my next project)

I found the link on engadget’s site but the actual article resides on Tomshardware site. Engadget has a permalink while I’m not so sure about Tom’s. So here are both:

1. http://www.engadget.com/entry/7435545908821755/
2. http://www20.tomshardware.com/howto/20041113/index.html