There have been hardly any surprises and I can’t find anything that demands gluing. Tomorrow I’ll complete the back pack cables and start the arms.

Related posts:

1. Starting the MG Gouf 2.0
2. Catching up on my Gundam stash
3. Zaku II version 2.0

I’ve started building the 1/100 MG Gouf 2.0. So far so good, once again I am trying to slim down on my Gunpla stash. I’ve only completed the first 2 parts (torso and head) but it’s a very different model than the original MG Gouf.

As I usually do, I’ll post photos once it’s done.

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See it while you can. The Titanic is going the way of all things, which after so many years is not at all surprising.

While I don’t care for wholesale exploitation of the wreck (you know, selling trinkets for cash), this is a part of history. Hopefully something can be preserved in some form.

The other day I heard someone say “Scientists challenge and contradict God” (not an exact quote, I’m paraphrasing) and I thought to myself “What unmitigated bullsh**” (that one is a direct quote). It was in church, I heard it during the homily and I was with the kids. Not a good time to let celebrant know he’s talking nonsense. He was trying to talk about having humility and doing it badly. Forgivable, it’s not easy to speak in front of a lot of people.

I’ve never seen or read about anyone challenging God. What I have seen people challenge other people understandings. I have even seen and read about people behaving badly. It’s not the same thing. How can you challenge God anyway? I mean, didn’t these people read about Job?

People should be encouraged to challenge ideas and frameworks. It’s not disrespectful, it’s called learning.

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So I bought inks and premium glossy photo paper. The problems he had? I just don’t see it. I’m on vacation and I’m printing up a storm. In Photoshop Elements 8 I can even print edge to edge and the results look fantastic.

I used to be an avowed HP Inkjet fantastic but Epson’s R300 has converted me.

Related posts:

1. Recycling an old printer
2. Oh. That many pictures.
3. Photoshop Elements 7 pet peeves

Phil Plait of Bad Astronomy fame is getting his own show. The patented Adam Savage “Oh My Gosh! ™” look when he pushes the button is great.

I hope this continues a trend; the kids get to learn and have enjoy watching. Science is fun. It’s hard work too, but that’s alright.

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1. Wow, what a great game ending
2. In between weather
3. New Old Russia

Wednesday August 25th the family and I went to the Statue of Liberty.  The trip was planned weeks in advance and we took the Huntington Station line at 6:15 Am to get there nice and early before the crowds.

It was raining cats and dogs the whole time we were there.

I had expected to take lots of outdoor photos so I only packed my 18-200mm lens.  Since it was raining, we went into the museum. For museum photos, I consistently use my Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens with a circular polarizer attached. When I do, I get photos like these.

You can see more from that set on my Flickr page.

With the 18-200mm the results are OK but not inspiring. Here’s a sample.

This was an OK picture but the ISO got bumped up to 3200 and the photos lacked a lot of sharpness. Also without the circular polarizing filter, reflections off the glass was a pain.

With the 30mm I get a nice prime lens that opens wide. With the circular polarizer I can dial out most of the reflections off of the display cases.

Next time I’ll plan better. We still had a good time, but I want to take better photos.

Related posts:

1. Washington DC trip
2. Disney and digital photography
3. What I am looking for in a new camera kit

Just the thought of it, all those bouncing bowling balls.

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1. Okay found one commercial product for posting.

The only thing that would bring it back to life would be to pull the plug, wait a few seconds, and put the plug back in. The last firmware for my device is version 2.1.13 dated May 16th, 2oo8. This doesn’t fill me with confidence that the vendor can solve my problem. I don’t blame Netgear for that; they make money on the sale of hardware and not support.

I use a pair of these WNR834Bs to connect my second floor to my ISP in the basement.  It’s strictly for bridging a gap where I am not easily able to run a wire.

So I went to the dd-wrt website and picked out the firmware using their router database tool and put in my model. This lead me to their wiki page to read some instructions, and in less than an hour of playing with settings I had dd-wrt running.

The speed difference is pronounced. It’s not just my imagination, web pages are loading more quickly than before. I don’t think that means the Netgear firmware was defective, I do think that tuning additional options in dd-wrt helped improve the situation.

This is a low cost solution to extending the life of some hardware and keeps me from running cable. So far so good and I’ll just see how it goes.

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The new additions are a great touch. Can you imagine if George Lucas had a platoon of Dance Troopers in the background while Obi-Wan and Darth Vader slugged it out?

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Extending WordPress has always been easy. You can add what you want via a plugin, or you can put the functionality into your theme’s function.php file.

I wanted to play around with adding this to my blog, so I went to their page and created my button. I then used the generated code as a template for what I wanted to do.

There is no way I’m savvy enough to write a plugin, but adding a filter to my theme’s function.php file is within my reach.

This is from an idea I got when I read WP Beginner’s post on how to add post thumbnails to your RSS feed. I used his code to do this.

function tweet_button($content) {
        global $post;
        // Your Twitter ID goes here
        $twitterid = 'jan_dembowski';
        $tweetbutton = '<div class="tweet-button">';
        $tweetbutton = $tweetbutton . '<a href="http://twitter.com/share" class="twitter-share-button" data-url="' . get_permalink() .'" data-text="' . get_the_title() .'" data-count="horizontal" data-via="' . $twitterid . '">Tweet</a><script type="text/javascript" src="http://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script>';
        $tweetbutton = $tweetbutton . '</div>';
        // $content = $content . $tweetbutton;
        $content = $tweetbutton . $content;
        return $content;
        }
add_filter('the_content', 'tweet_button');

You can download the code via this text file link.

It’s not exactly user friendly, but it gets the job done. I wrapped it in a <div> so I can style it later. If you want the button at the end instead of the beginning, then comment out line 9 and un-comment out line 8.

It’s a fun hack for me and I am sure that soon there will be a plugin to do this. If you do decide to do this then make sure you backup your theme’s function.php file. Any typo’s or mistakes will make your WordPress blog stop working.

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