I keep forgetting that I have a couple of 40-year-old Nikkor manual lenses that do work on my D7100 DSLR. This 105mm/2.5 would effectively be about a 155mm/2.5 on this body. It’s said that lenses this old are not optimized for digital (though this lens was renowned for sharpness back in its day).
But this ought to make an excellent portrait lens with its f2.5 max aperture. If it is a bit soft compared to modern designed-for-digital glass, so much the better.
Wondering if I should upgrade my Samsung SIII phone to an S5 model, while the S5 is still available.
The reason I’m thinking about this is because I hear Samsung has gone Apple — as in “bad Apple” in the sense of constraining user access — on us, and made the S6 a sealed unit with non-user-replaceable battery, a la iPhone.
I have a second battery for my SIII, and it takes just seconds to pop the back off and switch batteries, or, for that matter, swap memory cards.
I like that.
And no, I’m not a knee-jerk Apple fumigator. I’ve had Macs since the mid-80s. I just don’t like Apple’s steadily increasing drive to shut out hardware hobbyists.
Or Samsung’s moves in that direction.
Today I reached the limit of my patience with a CPU fan that had become whiny over the years. It sounded like a 1-pound mosquito, and the whine varied in pitch with the workload on the CPU, making it even more irritating.
Air blowing and vacuuming a couple of times had reduced the volume, but it always returned to distracting levels after a day or two.
The new CPU fan above the old fan. The new one is huge, stands “sideways” atop the CPU like a mini-skyscraper, and has a different mounting system from the old fan. When I was buying it, the guy asked “are you sure you have a big case?” I can see why he asked :-).
After struggling with instructions for nearly two hours (!), I laid out all the parts that came with the new fan, checked my parts bag from the original motherboard, and put together my own installation solution.
The new fan nearly touches the clear side of the tower.
Ah, the sounds of silence! The computer is now barely audible, knock on wood…
I have a fairly robust backup system for my office computers, and in particular my extensive archive of photographs.
I have two NAS (network attached storage) devices on my local network, one with dual 3 TB drives in it, the other with dual 1.5 TB drives.
I also have a couple of USB 3.0 “toasters,” or HD docks that enable hot-swapping of HDs, so that I can have several in rotation, with one always kept in a safety deposit box at my bank.
But I had no “permanent” backups, or in other words, ones that could not be accidentally overwritten. So even with backups on several HDs, the data on those HDs is always potentially in flux.
The solution many professional photographers and videographers seem to use is Blu-Ray backup, specifically to archival-grade M-discs. Once burned, these cannot be overwritten, and supposedly have archival lives reaching into many decades, if not the claimed centuries.
Each Blu-Ray M-disc can store 25 GB of data. I have read about photography backup systems in which flash cards are immediately copied to Blu-Ray for archiving.
As of this writing, I have 1.54 TB of photos and videos. So I plan to slowly burn them to Blu-Ray over the summer, a disc or three or five a day. And of course I’ll be burning all new photo/video files from now on as they are ingested into the computer.
How much is all this costing? Well, the writer was about C$100 with taxes. The M-Discs were just over C$450 for 100, or about 2.5 TB of storage.
Cheap for the security.
I picked up a Microsoft Universal Mobile Keyboard (universal = Windows, Android, and IOS phones and tablets) on sale for C$59 at NCIX in Burnaby, BC, today.
That’s my Nexxus 7 sitting in the keyboard. I’ve also paired my Samsung smartphone and my iPod with the Bluetooth keyboard.
I’ve done just a bit of writing with the new keyboard, and so far so good- it’s usable for my medium-large hands. I bought a keyboard/cover for the Nexxus 7 awhile ago, but I cannot touch type on it, so I think the new keyboard will be much better.
It’s not going to be a laptop replacement by any means, but it’ll be something I can throw in a briefcase, backpack or camera bag, and barely notice it’s there.
Here’s the keyboard on top of my ASUS 13″ notebook computer for another indication of the size.
For the Appleistas out there, here’s an iPod mated, with, gasp, the Microsoft keyboard : -)
I spent a few hours today cannibalizing old computers for usable parts, and doing an archaeological dig beneath my computer desk.
Two old tower computers being disassembled
The old towers produced four hard drives of 750 GB, 1 TB, 1.5 TB, and 2 TB capacities. I’m reformatting all of them and will put them to use as secondary or tertiary backup.
Zounds, as I tunneled over a decade into the timeline beneath my computer desk I unearthed a SCSI interface ZIP drive. I can’t remember the last time I used a ZIP drive, and I don’t have any computers with a SCSI card in them.
I think I’ll resurrect the second-to-oldest tower as a Linux box. It’s got a 4-core AMD processor, 6 GB of RAM, and a 512 MB video card, which should be zippy with Ubuntu.
Backing up computers is one of those tasks that nobody likes, but everyone should do. Questions about backing up arise often. Here’s how I do it.
I find it impractical to use automated Internet offsite backup services. With around 1.5TB of photos/videos, and 185GB of documents, it would take well over a month running 24/7 to initially back everything up online, and would incur substantial data overage charges from my cable ISP.
So I continue to use multiple hard drives with a combo of in-office storage, and offsite storage in a safety deposit box at my bank.
For immediate, short-to-mid-term backup on my main Windows PC, I have two NAS (network attached storage) devices with multiple hard drives in each. For my Mac I have Time Machine automagically backing up to an external USB HD.
I also have a couple of “toasters” that you can hot-swap hard drives in and out of. I clone my entire Windows HD to an external drive every month or two, and rotate with the one(s) in the safety deposit box.
I am looking into adding a Blu-ray drive to my arsenal. Once burned, write-once discs cannot be overwritten, and archival-grade Blu-ray M-discs appear to be about the most permanent affordable means of long-term backup.
I’ve had a stubborn spot on the sensor of my Nikon D7100 for awhile now. I could not remove it simply by blowing air at it.
I did some reading online (in particular this detailed article), and went out today and bought a pack of Sensor Swabs preloaded with Eclipse fluid. I was a bit hesitant, but followed the instructions.
The first swab didn’t do it, but a second swabbing appears to have dealt with the annoying spot.
Fan noises on my tower computer have reached annoying levels, so I pulled the side panel and spent some time dusting with compressed air and a Shop Vac. The whiny sound has been cut at least in half, but it’s still noticeable. It may be time to try a new CPU fan soon, as I think that’s the one that’s most irritating.
It wouldn’t be too bad if it were a steady sound, but the fan responds to load, so it’s constantly rising and falling in pitch.
Earlier tonight I posted in an international editors’ forum about some software I was considering buying. To be clear, the question was about an application, not about operating systems.
I mentioned that I have both Windows and Mac machines, because there are similar apps for both, though in this case I was looking for Windows apps.
One would think that other editors, being literate, professional wordsmiths, would read this and understand it.
No. Of course not.
The first reply (and the only one after several hours) was from someone touting Windows as the ultimate development platform, and by relation, trashing Macs.
Thanks, you just behaved like an idiot, and scared other folks away from the thread. We’ve been there and seen it done so many times. When the first bozo comment appears, we don’t waste our time on the thread any more.
So why am I wasting time on this blog post? I guess I’m still pissed off at this antisocial behaviour.
Why? Why? Why do adults succumb to such stupidity?
Some of us like Windows. Some of us like Macs. Some of us use Linux. I have machines running all three.