Random Musings

Since I became a dad, and bought a dSLR I’ve been trying to figure out the best way to store and share my pictures of my son, and other interesting stuff I shoot. As far as securely storing it locally, I have a sizable RAID setup that handles redundantly storing my pictures on two drives, but it’s the sharing part that I’ve had some trouble with.

Initially, I was using my own web host and the rather nice PHP based SPGM photo gallery software. The problem though, is that it’s fairly tedious to resize and upload the images (I wrote a whole blog post about it here), and I have “only” 20GB of storage and 500GB monthly throughput. When shooting at 10 megapixels I could fill that space up quickly. Beyond that I knew that some of the web based sharing sites out there had some really cool features for sharing and organizing your photos.

So, the search begins. I had some (I thought) fairly simple requirements. I was hoping to have these requirements met by a free solution, but I was willing to pay a nominal subscription fee if I got everything I was after. Here’s the run-down of what was important to me.

• Ability to upload original sized images. Some services have a limit to the size of each image
• Unlimited storage/uploads
• Sophisticated organization features. This means unlimited “albums” and the ability to have an “album” hierarchy and probably some other stuff that the service would surprise me with
• Ability to use my images on my website, blog, forum posts, etc.
• Ability to have a gallery on my site which displays all of the public images from the photo sharing site

That’s a fairly short list, and seems as though it should be fairly easy to match but surprisingly it isn’t.

So let’s break down the services I tried and how they stack up. First, let me say that I did not try every service out there, I ruled some out just based on their feature set, some due to their obscurity etc. Listed here are just the ones that I either discovered myself, or were directly suggested to me. If you want to do your own search and want to see all of the services available, here are a couple links that I found useful during my search.

Top Ten Reviews
CNET Reviews

Picasa

This was a fairly natural choice for me since I’m a pretty heavy user of Google services. I use Gmail, Google Reader, Google Analytics, Google Calendar, Blogger (switched from blogger to wordpress), Google Docs, and YouTube. Additionally, Picasa has a great desktop tool for uploading photos that acts as a great photo management tool on your local system as well.

Unfortunately, Picasa only allows you to organize your photos into albums with no hierarchy. Also, while you can upload a photo in it’s original size, the number of photos you can store is limited by your storage space. You’re given 1GB of space for free, and you can buy additional space on a yearly basis. But again, shooting at 10 megapixels means I’m going to need a whole lot of storage space, and I suspect that even their 400GB plan for $500 a year would become insufficient sooner or later.

Facebook

To be honest, Facebook is actually what warmed me up to the idea of using a photo sharing service on the web. So while it’s technically not a photo sharing service I thought I’d talk about what I did and didn’t like about the photo storage and sharing options it had.

First, I loved how easy it was to upload pictures and tag the subjects in the photo. Facebook also had no limit to the number of photos I could upload. Of course, those photos were downsized to a much more reasonable 604×404px, and their album hierarchy was also flat. And perhaps the most annoying thing was that I couldn’t share my pictures on my own web site and the galleries I made public I had to link directly. For instance I can send you to my public album of artistic shots but I can’t send you to a page that shows all of my public albums on Facebook. If you had a Facebook account, and were added as one of my friends you could see them all, but that’s cumbersome.

Snapfish

Frankly, I didn’t get very far in evaluating this service. There wasn’t much public information about the services offered, and it had a requirement of buying some product from them at some specified interval in order to keep your account active. As such, I never even signed up or tried it.

And the winner is….

Flickr

As it turns out, this had all of the features I wanted, plus some ones I didn’t realize I wanted until I used them.

First, the negatives. With a free account your only allowed to upload 100MB of files each month, and you’re limited to 3 “sets” (Flickr’s version of an album). Also, you can’t technically have a multi-level hierarchy of sets but there are ways to overcome that (more on this later). Of course, those limitations are removed as soon as you buy a “Pro” account which is a paltry $25 per year. Needless to say I went with that.

Now the good stuff! While you can only have a flat hierarchy of sets, you can create “collections” which contain sets or other collections. These can be nested up to 5 deep. This more than handles my organization needs. For instance, I’d like to categorize all of my pictures of my son, then break it down into particular types of events, then the specific event. Something like “Baby Pictures -> Firsts -> Crawling, Walking, Solid Food, Etc.”.

And if that organization is not enough, you can also tag a photo with keywords that are search able by the community, and act as a sort of metadata for organization.

Built right in is the ability to use your photo in a variety of sizes on your blog, forums, website, or whatever you like. Even more exciting is that there are plenty of options for sharing your pictures on other sites, as well as a public landing page for you. They even offer an open API which I’m sure I’ll find useful eventually!

So there it is. After a fair amount of time spent searching I found the solution that works best for me. Hopefully my comparison can help you if you’re searching for a photo sharing service.

Okay, so it’s not news that the new Nikon D90 digital SLR has been announced.

The camera is the following (new) features crammed into a body with the same footprint as the D80.

• 12.3MP CMOS sensor
• 3 inch screen with “Live View”
• Built in support for GPS geo-tagging in your EXIF data (GPS receiver sold seperately)
• D-Movie mode for up to 5 minutes of 720p video
• Probably some other stuff that escaped my notice or didn’t seem important to me

12.3MP CMOS sensor

No surprise here, it’s a higher MP sensor, and is a CMOS sensor rather than a CCD sensor. To be honest, I’m not clear on the differences between the two, but CMOS sensors are what are in all the newer cameras, as well as my HDV camcorder.

3 inch screen with “Live View”

You simply can’t argue that a bigger screen is better, and the addition of “Live View” (basically the ability to use the screen as a viewfinder, like your point-and-shoot digicam) is pretty cool too.

Built in GPS geo-tagging support

Also pretty cool and allows you to show exactly where photos were taken, though there are ways to do this with some existing dSLR’s. Doesn’t really do much for me since I’m rarely taking photos in any really exciting places.

D-Movie mode

Yup, you can record up to 5 minutes of 720p video with mono sound with the D90. There is a lot of controversy about this ability, and many are calling it a gimmick.

Now, with all that said, I’m not ready to go out and trade my D80 in for one. “But I thought you said you were excited.”, I can hear you saying..

Well, yes.. I’m very VERY intrigued by the D-Movie mode. Now, as it’s implemented in the D90 I’d rather use my Sony HDR-HC1 camcorder to capture video to tape, but the idea of similar resolution captured through a nice Nikon VR lens with the ability to use nice depth of field tricks is very VERY exciting to me. There have been people who’ve speculated that Nikon may make the transition into a full fledged video camera using the technology from this camera. If they do, and they keep it affordable (say, under $2k), I’d be first in line for one!

Meanwhile, I’m looking into building an adapter that will allow me to attach my SLR lenses to my little camcorder to get depth of field (DOF), but I’d much prefer having something that does this sort of thing by design!

If you’re curious about the “DOF adapter”, I just recently discovered that such a thing existed from a labor day post over at Strobist.

Since acquiring my Nikon D80 Digital SLR, I’ve been spending more and more time reading and researching about how to best exploit it’s capabilities and improve my shooting skills. As a result of this effort I’ve found a wonderful resource on lighting with small off camera flashes over at Strobist. I stumbled across them when I was searching for a cheap way to build my own “light box” for shooting small(ish) objects with great studio lighting. That’s how I found this article on creating a $10 macro photo studio.

Even as cheap as it was, I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to get the parts together to build it as it would require a couple trips to crafts stores etc. Then it occurred to me, I already have most, if not all of the materials to build this just sitting around the apartment!

My base was a cardboard box originally used to carry two 2.5 gallon Arrowhead water bottles, it’s almost EXACTLY a 12″ cube. Then, lacking tissue paper, I needed some sort of diffuser. I then realized I have plenty of white kitchen trash bags which are sufficiently translucent. After hacking up the box, and putting in the plastic windows all I needed was a backdrop. An old poster that had been rolled up and forgotten about in a closet for years was a perfect candidate after some cutting. So here, in all it’s glory is my free light box!

The poster I used for a backdrop was a teensy bit wrinkled, and was a bit more reflective than I’d like but it’ll do for free!

I’d actually like to build something similar to this, but a bit (maybe a lot) larger to accommodate bigger items and allow more flexibility as far as the angle of the shot. Right now I feel like I’m pretty much required to have the camera pointing straight into the box and I can’t shoot anything that fills more than 1/3 or so of the box.

You can take a look at a few of the shots I took with it over here.

Over the past couple of months, I’ve been transitioning a lot of my normal computing activities to the internet. What I mean by this, is where I used to use some software based solution for something that had to be installed on every computer I used, or had to be used on only a single computer I’m now using a web based solution.

For instance. I used to manage my email through Mozilla Thunderbird on my home computer. This worked fairly well for me and allowed me to filter spam etc. But in all reality, I really want to be able to access my email anywhere, anytime, with any computer. I’ve now redirected most of my email addresses by either forwarding, or using gmail’s POP3 functionality, and it’s much nicer to manage my email this way, not to mention the ability to search archived stuff way cool!

I’ve also had an ongoing problem of managing my contacts and calendar on my windows mobile based cell phone. You see, the “standard” way to keep this thing synchronized is to use some variety of Microsoft Outlook, and their anti intuitive and very painful ActiveSync. The problem of course is, only one computer can be the “master” which you synchronize with, and if you try to sync with another you run the very real risk of deleting appointments or contacts on either your phone or the computer. Enter goosync. Leveraging my aforementioned move to gmail, I can now synchronize my phone (over the wireless internet connection I’m paying for) with my google calendar and contacts. Sweet!

How about social networking? Well I’ve had a MySpace profile for some time, though I rarely visit it and I’m seriously considering getting rid of it. However, I’ve recently discovered (and become addicted) to Facebook. I find that their particular implementation of social networking seems to allow you to use this for “professional” purposes and mostly dodge the less desirable social networking behavior that turned me off from MySpace in the first place. As a software developer I’m also very attracted to the open API architecture and the multitude of very well written applications, in fact I’m just waiting for the inspiration to hit me so that I can write my own.

Another consequence of joining Facebook is that I (re) discovered Pandora Radio. I had given Pandora a test drive when it was first released, and only the “QuickMix” was available. I was fairly disappointed after only a few minutes of using it and quickly dismissed it as just another over hyped new “Web 2.0″ app. When I noticed that there was a Facebook application for it though, and noticed that what my friends were listening to showed up as status updates I was intrigued, and gave it another try. This time I was able to create my own station, seeded by artists and songs that I liked. Having only supplied one artist seed I found myself LOVING every last song that was played on a station. I now listen to it exclusively where I used to listen to the “chillout” station over at Digitally Imported using Winamp. Still another step away from desktop apps!

One disappointment I have with Facebook however, is that while it does allow you to upload unlimited pictures, and share the albums publicly, it does not have any screen showing all of your public albums. For instance, I can share and link you to this album containing some artistic shots, but I have several other public albums that you’d never know about, unless I directly linked those as well.

In order to remedy that I’m evaluating using some other online photo management service like Picasa then linking it back to my Facebook account. It’s a real shame though since I think that Facebook offers an ease of use that so far I haven’t seen in the alternatives.

My last discovery in the world of Cloud Computing has been a password management system. You see, I have more logins than I could possibly keep track of, in fact I’m CERTAIN that I have logins to forums and other sites that I don’t even remember exist. As a result, I have the same problem of remembering passwords that many computer users experience, and I’m not great about picking unique passwords! To resolve that I went looking for some good online password management. Now, I’ve conducted this search before, and come up wanting for security or functionality in the solutions I’ve found. Not so this time!

Allow me to introduce Passpack. What I like about this is that it uses a lot of AJAX, and consequently the information I enter is encrypted in my browser before it even hits the wire! Very cool. It also has the ability to generate strong passwords then automatically enter them for me at the login prompt for the website! I could go on about the features for a while but I’ll save that for another blog entry when/if I feel so inclined. If your interested, or conducting your own search for an online password manager I recommend Passpack, go ahead and follow the link over there and check it out.

This Labor Day weekend I finally put the finishing touches on my wife’s Lexus ES300. You see, about 5 weeks earlier I had started the seemingly simple task of removing the cylinder heads, and replacing them with a rebuilt pair I had practically stolen from a seller on eBay.

The goal of course, was to fix the valve stem seal leak(s) and what I thought was a valve cover leak “once and for all”. Suffice to say there were some complications and unanticipated distractions during the several weekends it took to get it done.

The result? I’ve replaced the two broken motor mounts I found, got the pretty new heads installed, replaced the timing belt, installed new spark plugs, and replaced the master and slave cylinders for the hydraulic clutch. The car is running much better, and no longer billows a big blue cloud of smoke when being started up.

However, the passenger side axle still has a broken CV boot which I have a replacement for, but may not get to for another couple weekends and…. The oil leak I had assumed was the valve cover gaskets turns out to have been something else. At the moment I’m suspecting the oil pan gasket, I’m hoping to fully diagnose it and possibly tackle the replacement next weekend. I’m going to take this weekend to relax!

I just placed the first of two orders for the components to my new desktop machine!

This upgrade is sorely overdue, the last time I got a “new” machine was about 3 years ago and it was antiquated then. So I’m going from my 2.4GHZ P4 with 1GB RAM and an assortment of various drives to this new beast I’m building.

This first order was for a 24″ Widescreen LCD, Ergo keyboard, speakers, and a gigabit switch. I also ordered a power supply and some fans for an different project entirely. The total cost shipped was $631.53 with about $50 representing stuff not associated with this upgrade.

The rest of the parts will consist of a 2.4GHZ Intel Core Quad Processor, 8GB RAM, a 500GB drive, Vista Ultimate 64, and a fairly run of the mill 512MB Nvidia GeForce 9500 GT.

Sadly, still not “bleeding edge” but certainly a big step up from what I’ve got. I’m hoping to enjoy it’s speed when doing stuff like non linear video editing of HDV from my camcorder using Cinelerra. I’m sure I won’t be disappointed, and I’ll be sure to post results here, so stay tuned for more!

Okay, so I’ve been a little bit out of the loop on the new Corvette ZR1 in spite of being a Motor Trend subscriber.

Bottom line, this is the fastest car the General has ever produced in any quantity for public consumption. You can read all about Motor Trend’s first drive here.

However, my very favorite part is in the first paragraph of this page, where they reveal that every new ZR1 owner will be given the opportunity to attend a free high performance driving school!

It’s good to see Chevy taking a proactive approach to educating their customers, particularly when planting them behind the wheel of something as quick as the ZR1. It’s not exactly what I proposed here, namely that I should be able to buy a car like the ZR1 if I was able to demonstrate my ability to handle it and my overall enthusiasm for the car, but it’s certainly a step in the right direction. Hey Chevy, how ’bout if I finish a course with Bob Bondurant “with honors” you offer me a discounted ZR1? Yeah… Right..