Archive for February, 2009
Me and my iPhone
Well, I’m not exactly what you’d call an early adopter, and I’ve only recently rediscovered a place in my heart for Apple based computing devices.
That said, there was a lot of internal debate an struggle when it came time for me to upgrade from my Cingular 8525 HTC/Phone/PDA device. Initially, I was convinced that I wanted the newest HTC the Fuze, since it was a logical upgrade from what I had. But there was just soooo much hype about the iPhone, I had to give it a fair shake. Fortunately, my sister and brother-in-law each got one a few weeks before my wife and I were due to upgrade. I got a real good chance to check them out. After seeing the HUGE amount of apps, and overall support that existed for them, the choice was easy. Sign me up, I’m a lemming..
I’ve had my iPhone for two and a half weeks, and I’ve made a lot of changes, tweaked a lot of configuration, and jailbroke the device. The rest of this post will serve to document that for my own sake should I ever have to recover the device, but also to hopefully shed some light on why you might jailbreak your phone, and what apps a techie like me finds useful.
Read more after the break… Read the rest of this entry »
No Internet For You!
You might have noticed a little change to the look of the site. Until the 23rd of February it’ll continue to look this way. You can see some detail in the right column, and in the following paragraphs. 
There is a little piece of legislation that’s been passed in New Zealand which could set precedence for similar laws elsewhere. In short, this legislation says that any copyright holder can accuse an internet user of copyright infringement or theft, and their ISP is compelled to disconnect them without any burden of proof.
You can read more about it here and here.
Be sure to sign the petition and if you do, please comment here, I’d like to know my contribution to the cause.
I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for water today.
Posted by RyanG in Photography, Rants on February 12, 2009
For the past few weeks there have been a rash of issues with our water supply lines here in our apartment complex. We’ve been without cold or hot water or both for hours at a time.
It’s culminated into our landlord deciding to basically gut our water lines and replace them. So since last Friday we’ve had folks coming in and tearing out large chunks of our drywall to reveal the plumbing, then the plumbers running new source lines along the outside wall and into each apartment. Then water was turned off Monday night around 9PM. The plumbers were coming in on Tuesday to finish hooking up the lines that had been run in parallel to the existing lines. Well, the water remained off through Tuesday, and we’d already forgone bathing for one day so we weren’t looking forward to another day without running water.
That brings us to the image above. We chose to check into the Ramada Inn that’s directly next to our apartment complex. They have this awesome koi pond/lagoon which the hotel surrounds, and as I was walking to the jacuzzi that night, it struck me how pretty the whole scene was a night.
So in an attempt to find a silver lining, I took some timed exposures of the lagoon at night. I didn’t quite get the effect I was looking for, but I think this is a cool shot none the less.
Super Special Chuck in 3D.. Riiiight
Posted by RyanG in Funny, Photography on February 5, 2009
For those of you who may have missed it, this week one of my favorite new(ish) sitcoms Chuck presented this episode in 3D.
I had evidently missed the marketing campaign that mentioned that it would be in 3D, probably cause I’m not a big sports fan, and most of the hype was during the super bowl. Consequently, I was caught with my pants down (as it were) with no 3D glasses with which to watch the show.
Fortunately, I always record Chuck on our cable company provided DVR (no fancy Tivo for us), so as soon as I realized it was being presented in 3D, I paused it, and began scrambling for a solution.
As it turns out, I have some gels used to modify the light coming from my photography flashes. I also just happened to have two each of the red and blue gels (so my wife could enjoy the 3D-ness too). A quick Google search later to determine which eye is which color, and the contraption you see before you was born.
Sadly though, it was still the same cheesy 3D effect that we’re all used to. And to make it worse, since it’s a broadcast television show, they toned down the effect so those without glasses could still watch without their eyes hurting. The overall result was less than awesome. Never the less, the episode was good, and I can’t complain. Plus, I’ve got a fun story to tell about how I made my own 3D glasses.
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