January 2009 Archives

Test of posting with a new app called LifeCast. I give it a 5/10 so far though.

Things happening at work were just a false fire alarm, someone saw smoke in the elevator or something so everyone had to truck around the corner until the FD got there and cleared things up for everyone to go back.

So I finally got around to throwing up some pics to Flickr of my "Stealth Camera Bag" which I raved about before. The inspiration came from this article (via lifehacker). The idea is simple, take a generic and boring looking messenger bag and fit it with foam and padding to protect a camera so you can wander around the or foreign area without lugging around a Lowe Pro bag that screams "mug me, I've got expensive photo gear here!".

Most of the work here was done by my lovely wife, as the bag I found needed a bit more work than the article described (it was a single big interior pocket and not segmented like they found and she felt doing it right and sewing things properly was better than slapping a cut up old t-shirt in with duct tape :)

Anyway. My idea for this was to allow me to use it as a laptop, going-to-work bag as well as a photo bag. A little bit of design and voila! Here are the "build" pics:

First of all the overall view of the finished product.

Here's the top view in "Laptop" configuration. It's got a piece of cloth sewn on both sides along the seam, made a bit longer to accommodate the laptop and it's extra padding in the left hand side. Note the small bits of stick on Velcro on the inside of the pocket, those'll come in handy in camera mode.

This is the laptop in it's padding. It's basically a three fold chunk of cloth with foam inserts in each section. It's not a perfect fit, but as it's stuffed into a cloth area so perfect fit doesn't matter that much.

Fully stuffed for work.

For when I want to put in a camera (the real purpose) I use the bits of Velcro (see above) to close the laptop area and now it's open with more stick on Velcro in a familiar looking configuration for anyone with a camera bag.

... which I use to stick in standard camera bag dividers stolen from another camera bag. It's not perfect, but it gives side padding and creates a familiar and usable triple section setup. There's a fair amount of adjustment in the center area, though it doesn't make it as snug as a "real" camera bag.

This is another bit of folded padding, this time a 4 fold section, each with it's own foam padding, and configured so it can be wrapped around something, say a longer zoom lens.

In full camera configuration. Note the zoom lens on the right wrapped up in the second chunk of padding and my beloved K20D sitting happily in the middle. Lots of room on the other side (and front pockets) for flash, more lenses, etc.

I've been using this bag as my full time work bag for a week or so now, and for one weekend of photowalking and here's what I've found so far:
Pros

• Sits nicely and comfortably across the shoulders. Much nicer than my laptop backpack as I don't have to have one hand on it for security (I tend to carry my backpack off of one shoulder only). Seems to stay comfortable for longer, even with laptop and workstuff in it.
  
• Easier (marginally) to get in and out of compared to my Lowe Pro bag, and way easier to get into than my "proper" camera backpack.
  
• Feels way more subtle carrying it around, and could potentially even be something to not alert people I'm a tourist on my next Mexican vacation (assuming my sunburnt or white skin doesn't of course).
  
• Flexible! Easy configuration changes with a small towel, tuque or t-shirt for padding.
  
• Lots of room for everything I've needed to lug around. Fits personal stuff (phone, wallet, etc) along with K20D with 16-45/4, Sigma 70-300, DA 40 Limited, walkaround P&S, batteries, spare memory cards, etc.
  

Cons

• There isn't a "top" handle so it's a bit odd to pick up the bag, I tend to grab it from the side and worry about it falling to the side and dumping everything out.
  
• The interior isn't perfectly padded compared to a real camera bag and I'm not sure how much I'd trust it to take a fall.
  
• The flap is a bit large, so the distance you have to go to get into the bag, and the amount of cloth you need to hold up if you're changing lenses is a bit much. Fairly easily mitigated though.
  
• The Velcro in the front isn't the most secure thing in the world. The option of a proper buckle that can be optionally clipped for longer trips might be nice.
  
• The Velcro really needs to be properly sewn in, the stick-on stuff isn't all that great.
  
• The colors are a bit.... uhm.... unexpected compared to the green of the canvas. Course, I'd have to be crazy to bitch about what my wonderful wife did set up for me!
  

The short answer is to look here for the instructions that finally made it all work for me. After a little "mishap" with my addressbook a few days ago (helpfully synced, empty to the net and to my phone, so nowhere had a backup) I finally figured that checking out the much touted "Time Machine" backup software from apple probably would be a good idea.

Course, being that I use my laptop 99% of the time on my lap on the couch, having a external hard drive connected would kinda suck. Also I'm not paying the apple tax to get the Time Capsule hardware when I have a plethora of unused external disks here.

So what I did:

• First step was get one, plug a 500G disk into my linux workstation.
  
• Format it as ext3 and mount it in a safe place
  
  
  
  • Find the disk's UUID
    
  • Put it in /etc/fstab
    
  
  
• Make it a share in Samba
  
• Mount it under leopard and make sure it automounts.
  
• Follow the instructions here to tell Leopard to allow unsupported mounts (the defaults write... command) and test.
  
• In my case it failed, and I got the "backup disk could not be created" error, so I followed the rest of the instructions to create the sparse image and copy it to the samba share.
  
• Test again, correct typeos.
  
• Run the Time Machine config to select the share. Wait for the long 'processing' to finish.
  
• Success!
  
• Run backup.
  

I now feel a little bit safer, and get to use the funky Time Machine interface :)

Coworker of mine pointed out that an article on 9to5 Mac regarding Microsoft layoffs uses a very familiar image with a very familiar ponytail! Again, my little contribution the the Internet.

Now if only I could monetize that image..... I'd never work again!

Wow, it's been a weird week of weather (or two weeks now) where pretty much the whole lower mainland has been foggy (think thick like pea soup) morning and evening. The following picture was passed on from someone from someone from email spam. Super-cool. This is apparently a view of Downtown Vancouver from Cypress Mountain at 6:30 this morning. Click for the full image.

A couple of shots of my own from downtown are below:

Foggy Canada Place
A Foggy Street

Had to share the great shot of downtown from Cypress though!

Another weekend almost over, another couple of days of vegging and relaxing done. Sadly not much was actually accomplished this weekend. I did get my new camera a few days ago (had to get it from B&H in New York as it's impossible to get in the lower mainland. The plan with this camera is not to replace my beloved Pentax K20D, but to give me a pocket-sized camera with features and quality that a DSLR geek can appreciate. Also the fact that the guys from the TWIP podcast love it helps.

I also picked up a messenger bag to do a project found via lifehacker, a Stealth Camera Bag. The shop was a last ditch find from Andrea, who saw it on our way out of Abbotsford after visiting 7 other shops (everything from thrift stores to a camera store). A tiny little store full of fake machine guns, grenades, camouflage everything, and a very friendly (and scary) proprietor. Not surprisingly, the store and parking lot were completely empty (what, no one buying fake M-16s a week into the new year?).

Unfortunately the bag I found has no internal divider or pockets, so the next step will be to get a couple of dividers setup inside so I can use it as a DSLR bag or a laptop, going-to-work bag. Alternatively I could use a more expensive, but easier, DIY method, ie: buy a pre-done divider.

Holy crap, will this white stuff ever end? I thought it was over and suddenly today it started coming down again, something like three weeks now, which is insane for the lower mainland... normally we get a day or two of snow, turns to rain the next day and is turned into a grey sludge and is gone the day after, and we get the standard rain, grey, and more rain.

Rain is predicted Monday though, which makes sense as that's the first day I'm back to work.

Christmas was good, very lazy. In contrast to last year when I had on call and a blackberry to deal with, the new job gives the time between Christmas and new years off, plus a couple of days (cause who is going to go back to work for the one day after new years day before the weekend). I have to admit the the couch now has a far more pronounced dip in it in the shape of my ass.

I have resisted buying a new huge TV, partially cause now I have bills and whatnot paid off and actually have money in the bank, I want to do my best to keep it there. Course, I did buy a new laptop for Andrea and a new camera (Canon G10) for me.

I'm not convinced about the camera yet (pics to be posted soon) because it's image quality seems to get really full of sensor noise. The DPReview reviews of the G10 compared to the Panasonic LX3 show the LX3 coming out way ahead in terms of lower light shots. The Canon folks seem to call BS on this, saying that the image stabilization will make this less of a big deal, and pointing out that the 5x zoom (vs 2.5x) and viewfinder (vs no viewfinder) trump the LX3. This is of course accurate, but for me the smaller size (potentially fitting in a pocket) lens with wider angle (24mm vs 28mm) and faster aperture (f/2.0-2.8 vs f/2.8-4.5) may trump all.

Course, the LX3 seems to be unavailable anywhere (stores in Vancouver say anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 months, amazon won't ship to Canada, and there may be some available in Bellingham), and I really don't want to plunk a pile of $$ down on a camera without getting my greasy paws on it in the flesh.

The other issue with the new TV is it's of course not just the TV..... to take advantage of an HD TV I'd need a blue ray player of some sort, plus the digital HD service, plus a new PVR (or HD PVR card) to get HD stuff played on it. I'm sure it'll happen at some point though.

Oh! Other big news... after literally months of work I have completed my music library organization. All tracks are rated (or at least, have been gone through and the good ones rated), all tracks have good metadata (through Musicbrainz) and proper genre's. So now I have:

Total:	31510 (174Gb, 13 weeks of solid listening)
Total Tagged:	4976
One Star:	2553
Two Star:	1293
Three Star:	846
Four Star:	233
Five Star:	51

And yes, I know I have a problem with packrat-itus.

The other thing this has let me do is re-create my old cassette tape mixes. The one thing that just isn't here anymore is a new/better way to do mix tapes anymore. I guess about the closest would be a CD mix, but who uses CDs anymore? Anyway anyone who drove with me in the 90's (Brad!) will remember Mix I, Mix II, etc, which are now back with me! Now to back that library file up somewhere...

Course, 99% of the time I'm listening to the Howard Stern show or some random tech podcast...