technology – Page 17 – frans goes blog

Adobe Lightroom 3 Beta

Another new piece of software that I have been testing lately has been the new free Beta version of Lightroom 3:

For the development of this latest release, we’ve focused on what we believe are the fundamental priorities of our customers: performance and image quality. Lightroom has been rebuilt from its core to provide a performance architecture that meets the needs of photographers today and into the future. The raw processing engine has also received an overhaul in order to ensure that you’re maximizing the potential in your images in terms of sharpening and noise reduction. And, a number of other new areas have also had new features added and enhanced. Like any beta, Lightroom 3 beta is unfinished, which means some of the features we have planned are not in this release, and some of the features in the beta are not yet complete.

I am not sure which parts of the new Lightroom are still not complete, and which are related to the supposed performance and image quality improvements, but according to my experience this Beta version is really slow! Every time you navigate from image to image, it takes several seconds to get a sharp preview. I think at this point the lack of performance really makes this tool pretty useless. The built in previews of Windows 7, and the Windows Live Photo Gallery are fast, and then you can open the shot into Photoshop if you need to get into serious editing. Maybe I am missing something, but what is the real benefit of paying for software like Lightroom?

Ubuntu under a virtual machine

VMware Player running Ubuntu under Windows 7

This is a system you are most probably already using, if you are akin to test driving various operating systems and software combos: VMware Player is a free virtualization software tool that can be easily applied to set up different, “virtual PCs” inside a single OS installation. Very useful, if you do not want to mess up your primary system each time a new interesting tool or OS comes available. I followed these instructions to set up Ubuntu 9.10 Karmic Koala to run as a virtual machine inside my Windows 7 workstation. Seems to run just fine.

New faucets

27.11.2009, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

This is probably the least sexy topic for techno-blogging like, ever, but here we go. Our old faucets were having rather bad leaks over the tables and over the floors, I was getting water to my head from the shower while trying to fill a bucket with water from the faucet underneath, and so on. It was definitely time to move on. After some deliberation and consideration, we ended up ordering the installation of Oras Vega (the new eco-button model) to the upstairs wash basin, the slightly more fancy Oras Vienda faucet to the parade side basin in the first floor, and two Oras Optima thermostatic bath and shower faucets to the bathroom in the cellar. There are all sorts of nice engineering details in the valves etc., but I really liked the overall functionality of design and the feeling of workmanship. Using the shower faucet is now a small, everyday pleasure: the control movements feel natural, and mechanisms react with pleasing, muted ‘clicks’ and ‘snaps’. Donald Norman has written about “emotional design”, and this is exactly it. Oh, and we bought a new toilet seat also. IDO Seven D Image model. It has something called Siflon on its inner surfaces (no need for detergents, I am told). Dunno. But it looks cool and feels good…

DVD collectors' databases found missing

I have been using some DVD collection software before, but inserting all the movie details manually has proved too much work, and my collection listing is seriously out of date (meaning that with this lousy memory of mine, I am likely to start buying doubles at some point). A practical solution would be to use a bar-code scanner that would produce the product code that then would be used to automatically fetch the right details from a movie database. However, I test drove two programs/services tonight — www.dvdcorral.com and www.collectorz.com/movie/ — and at least in the new Finnish market blu-ray releases that I tried to input, could not be found in the database (Collectorz could find the new Star Trek blu-ray, that was the only match). It looks like the databases these solutions are using are rather heavily relying towards the US market data, or that was the impression I got at least. Oh dear. Need to work on that long-term memory of mine, then.

Canon EF 70-200 mm L

My old Sigma tele-zoom lens is pretty useless nowadays, particularly in cold (the mechanism gets stuck, and you cannot zoom even by using force). I went shopping, and got a Canon EF 70-200 mm L — my very first L class lens. This is the cheapest of line, and does not have an image stabilizer, for example. But it should produce much better images than my old one, the aperture should be enough for daylight at least, and the usability is a huge upgrade to my old Sigma. A review is here: http://www.the-digital-picture.com/Reviews/Canon-EF-70-200mm-f-4.0-L-USM-Lens-Review.aspx.

Bird table in the night

Lumiyö / Night with snow, originally uploaded by FransBadger.

These days you can find pretty nice bird tables, like this little house we have now in our front yard. It was originally designed to be hung from a string, but it was pretty easy to hack into a suitable stick. So, now we have a regular show going on, with five pheasant, a flock of small birds and a squirrel fighting over the nuts and seeds.

Quiet at the night time, though. The photo was taken at the point when the snowfall had turned into light rain (of water), using my trusty old Canon EOS 350D (exposure time 3,2 seconds, I was using a Manfrotto stand), and I admit a serious graving of 7D with its environmental sealing and advanced autofocus point selection system… (More here: http://www.dpreview.com/reviews/canoneos7d/ )

Windows 7 sleep problems

The sleep state problems that I have previously blogged about in Windows Vista appear to haunt the OS even in its new incarnation. It appears that the default behavior of Windows 7 (as set up in Redmond) is to enable ‘wake from sleep’ in all peripherals, including network card, mouse and keyboard. And for some reason all these peripherals send up some kind of signals that wake up the OS pretty much the very moment is has put itself to sleep state. Most irritating, making ‘sleep’ in Windows 7 totally useless. It took me a week or two to find out all the different devices that were sending the wake up signals, and disable them in the Device Manager > device properties. Here is a tip: you can save much time by going to ‘cmd’ prompt, and writing there ‘powercfg -DEVICEQUERY wake_armed‘. That should give you a list of the potential culprits for the sleep problems. Read more e.g. from here: http://www.michaelaulia.com/blogs/fix-windows-vista7-sleep-mode-from-waking-up-by-itself.html

Windows 7 Ultimate & WD 1,5 TB disks

The weekend was too busy for this upgrade effort really, but at least I made a decent start:

getting rid of the old hard disks in my old workstation (they were getting too small for all this data)
making full transition to the official version of Windows 7 (I bought a boxed set of the Ultimate version)
migrating all my data to the new, 1,5 TB main disk (Western Digital Caviar Green, I bought two of these)
setting up an identical disk to my Windows Server 2008 system (the unet.fi main machine)
setting up some kind of mirroring or synchronization scheme to make data in the workstation and server identical.

The two last steps are the ones I did not have time to do this weekend. Maybe this is a good thing, I need to do further research on the Windows 7 backup and synchronization options. I would really wish for a LAN sync version of Dropbox, but I think that version is not out of beta yet. Any tips for keeping really big data piles backed up & in sync at your home network?

Moving to OpenID

OpenID logo

From today, this blog will be supporting OpenID authentication [edit: support removed, see the comments], meaning that it is possible to log in and comment using such familiar login names like the ones that you already have at Google.com, Yahoo, LiveJournal, Blogger, Flickr, MySpace, WordPress.com or elsewhere. (Read more from here.) Open registration to this site appeared only to attract spammers, and there are many benefits from using OpenID. And if you are interested in implementing OpenID authenticating at your own site, it is relatively easy these days. (Setting it up into this blog took less than 10 minutes, hooray! 🙂

iPhone 3G S experiences

I promised to post my iPhone experiences at some point so here they come, even if in rather short form (realities of busy life these days). The key points are very positive ones: particularly the use of social media and Internet in general was radically transformed when I moved to iPhone. Everything is so much faster, more intuitive and pleasing to use. Listening of music, following video podcasts and Internet radio went up, too. The available applications (games, media, utilities) are fun and mostly moderately priced, but the App Store is also one of the obvious points of criticism. Apple has implemented a controlled environment for the use of iPhone, to a degree that the user sometimes starts to ask, who is really the owner of the phone, the actual owner, Apple, or even the operator that the user is locked with in the deal. It is of course perfectly possible to jailbreak iPhone, but the default situation for the regular user does not change. In this sense Symbian/S60 or Google Android based devices appear parts of much more open ecosystem. The lacking support of existing Internet standards is also obvious in the lack of support for Flash and Java in the iPhone browser. You can watch Youtube videos, since they have a specific iPhone format supported, but not regular Flash videos or animations that the net is full of. Also, and this is my final gripe with iPhone, the camera is below the standards I have gotten used to while being a Nokia N95 user. Images are blurry, too dark and more soft than you would expect from a 3 mega-pixel camera. This is a real pity, since the magnificent user experience and accessibility of all kinds of interesting functionalities would really make iPhone my dream device if camera and these other — relatively minor — issues would be dealt with. Now I continue to live in a two-phone (plus laptop, plus netbook, plus workstation…) configuration. Not everything can be expected from one environment, or manufacturer, I guess. Might be a good thing, even?