For those not familiar, glims, is an addon for Safari that provides all kinds of cool tweaks to the browser.  My absolute favs are that it allows for running safari as a fullscreen browser, meaning hidden menubar, and also provides predictive google searching in the search box.  It does tons of other cool stuff as well.

I’ll be waiting patiently for a way to get back tabs on top.  Thanks Apple.

I recently took a trip down to the Charlotte area to visit a few friends.  I left early in the afternoon, early enough that I would have time for at least one photographic adventure on the way down.  I had decided that I would just truck along until I found a nice little detour.  I eventually found it when deciding to take highway 29 off of I85 in search of a location.  As you can see from the map embedded below that opportunity came almost as soon as I could exit the interstate.

I honestly have no idea what it is that I found.  The water towers were printed indicating that it maybe was the North Carolina Finishing Company.  I noticed that in the satellite view that whatever it was still stood at the time of the satellite imagery.  This is certainly not the case any longer.  Whatever it once was, it is now completely leveled.  I saw a few old broken down pickup trucks and heavy equipment, but overall it appeared to be deserted.  The one exception was a 18-20 foot camping trailer that was parked in an empty lot nearby.  This looked like it might be occupied, but possibly not at the moment.

Things looked quiet enough so I parked the car, grabbed my gear, and set out to capture some photos.  I have included a few here and more at my flickr site.  There are still more to be edited on my laptop, although many are fairly repetitious.  It was certainly an interesting site to photograph and given more time I’m sure I would have taken more shots.  Most of it was photographed from open land, however, some of the site was behind a chain link fence.  The vehicle gate was chained shut, but the pedestrian gate didn’t even have a gate anymore.  I didn’t see any tresspassing signs specifically, but it seemed pretty clear that it was.

After about 30 minutes of shooting I took a look around and noticed a figure in the distance moving along the side of the road.  It was a man, older guy, maybe around 70 from the distance I was viewing.  He looked to be the type of guy that could occupy a camping trailer parked out in an empty lot next to a demolished factory.  With this I decided to head back to my car.

As I approached my vehicle, so did the old man.  I could see now that he was pushing along a Vespa-like scooter and was dressed in some rather large and worn overalls.  We were equidistant to my car and once we were near enough, about 100 yards, he addressed me.  He asked what it was I was doing behind the fence.  I held up my camera and stated that I was taking some photos.  He responded by saying, “Did ya’ ever think that maybe somebody didn’t want no photos taken behind their fence?!?”, in a heavy southern drawl.  At this point we were both about 10 feet from the car and I decided that this old man wasn’t worth the fight.  I simply said to him, “Sorry buddy, I’m leaving”, jumped in my car slammed the door shut and took off while he angrilly shook his fist at me.

I looked in the rearview mirror and could see he didn’t have any fight in him today.  He just looked off at me, making no attempt to make chase.  In hindsight it was all pretty comical.  I do wish I had snapped a few shots of him and the trailer.  He probably wasn’t any real threat to me.  Although you never know what kind of firearm he had stashed in the scooter or the trailer.  Seems pretty likely that a 12 guage was lurking not far away.

SDHC cards are cheap, REALLY cheap.  For this I am very grateful.  It’s awesome that you can get 16gig cards for 30 bucks.  Massive storage for all!  They are also VERY small and there isn’t a whole lot to these little cards.  The cases are flimsy and don’t have a whole lot to them.  I have a handful of cards and one of mine had it’s tiny little $0.01 write protection tab fall out.

I thought I was screwed because no matter how I tried to use this card it would not let me write to it.  The card was cheap, but I didn’t want to waste the gas and\or shipping costs of getting a new card.  I thought back to my analog days of 3.5″ floppies and cassette tapes.  I remember that these items when write protected were easily overriden with a piece of tape (or drilling a hole in the case of the cheap floppies).  I tried the same with my SDHC card and voila! I was writting away.  It turns out that the write-protectedness of the card is determined by the reader just like in the old days.  AWESOME!

I recently got very brave and decided to try out Windows 7 on my Lenovo S10 netbook since I had heard so many different sources speak highly of the new Windows Release Candidate.

Initially I wanted to try and dual boot and keep my existing OSX installation fresh.  So I used Disk Utility to shrink the Mac partition and make room for the new Windows OS.  This was a failure.  Even thought Win 7 is supposed to be able to deal with the GUID partition tables I just couldn’t cram the thing down the throat of the install.  So knowing that I have my Time Machine backup handy I decided to just say screw it and blow the whole thing away.

Once I made this leap the Windows 7 install was a piece of cake.  Very little input was needed from me to do the install and it didn’t even take that long.  After the first reboot pretty much everything on the system worked right out of the box.  Video, Webcam, Audio, Mic, Wifi, Ethernet, Card Reader, Sleep, you name it, it worked.  Install, thumbs up!

Next up I got the business of getting the system ready for real use.  This meant finding a browser I enjoyed and getting Lightroom rolling.  I found that the IE8 was pretty awesome!  The full screen mode is unbeatable on the resolution limited netbook.  It’s completely fullscreen with an autohiding address bar, tabs, and bookmarks.  Top notch!  Lightroom installed just fine.  The big issue here was that I could not get it to properly import photos.  The other big issue was that overall performance just couldn’t touch Mac OS X.  Expose and Spaces completely dominates the Windows Aero switcher.  Both in usability and in animation smoothness.  iTunes also performed much better in OS X.  Finally I would say that overall multi-tasking performance in OS X was considerably better.

So in the end Windows 7 didn’t last long.  Next post I’ll discuss the switch back to Mac OS X.  There are some new tools and twists since I last did this and the process is now even smoother!

What it has been really great for is having a fully functioning laptop I can drag around with me anywhere I want in my Tenba bag along with all my camera gear.  I don’t even have to bring the power supply along for a day trip since I invested in a 9 cell battery for it from ebay for 75 bucks.  This is a pretty unstoppable combination for day travel.  I am getting between 7 and 10 hours of battery life in this setup.  Not bad for a little netbook and a cheap knockoff battery.  I also added a Logitech Nano VX mouse to use along with the system as well.  It’s a great match since I can leave the micro reciever in the netbook at all times, very convenient.  I’m also using the netbook hooked up to my 20″ LCD display when at home sometimes.  This is a great setup when I want to do heavy photo editing or work from home.

Overall system performance is OK.  It’s tolerable basically.  It runs Lightroom fine if I am willing to be a little bit patient with it.  I don’t do a lot of brushwork and cloning so that definitely helps, these functions are a bit slower for real artistic work.  I would guess Photoshop would be nearly unusable if I were to try.  It’s great for web browsing with the Safari 4 beta which saves me some screen real estate.  Watching video is a crusher.  It can handle 480p h.264 video and lower quality flash video, but no more.  With 2 gigs of memory it handles multitasking just fine.  I keep Adium, iTunes, and Tweetie open at all times along with a few browser tabs and Lightroom and switching is fine, no issues there.  I have even set up XP in a virtual machine using VirtualBox.  I would say that compared to netbooks running XP performance is actually better, especially for multi-tasking.

Ergonomics is another issue all together.   The keyboard was my main concern initially but this turned out to be almost a non issue.  They layout of the Lenovo S10 keyboard is fine for all but the most intense typing.  The touchpad is worthless for anything but the most basic navigation, thus the cordless mouse.  The screen has also turned out to be a bit of an issue.  At 1024×600 it doesn’t have enough vertical resolution for a lot of apps.  I have to use some scaling trickery to make these work.  Overall, a higher res screen sure would be nice.  I’ve even gone in search of the panel from a Dell Mini 10 “HD” which is 1200×768 or so to see if I could hack it in somehow.  No luck yet.

So in the end it’s still a usable solution.  I think I would really like a real mac though.  The extra screen real estate and the added horsepower would be really great.  Not sure how I feel about giving up the insane battery life that I get right now or the compact size.  There is also the cost.  I’m not limited with what I can do with the Lenovo right now, so I think I’ll just stick with it.

Flash that is. I got my hands on a Canon 220EX Speedlite recently and it was a blast! I have never been much for flash photography but this was something completely different. I had a cable attach so that I had the freedom to hold the flash in my left hand and aim it wherever I please. The ability to bounce it off different walls, floors, and ceilings combined with bringing the light in from different angles was amazing.

I also combined this with the close-up lens filters that I have for my kit lens to do even more cool stuff.  Macro photography is much easier indoors when there is lots of available light from a flash.

I’ve been on a real kick lately to spend more time with the photography toys I already have.  Borrowing, begging, and stealing is also allowed in the case of the speedlite.  Overall it’s just cool to see how much there is out there in photography land that I have yet to investigate.  So cool!

I recently got the bug to try and do some time lapse photography when I saw this post over at Digital Photography School.  It’s a good intro to what you are getting into and links to various attempts around the web.  I had considered doing this previously but never really got around to it.  This work by Ross Ching is pretty much the ULTIMATE time lapse I have seen out there.  It’s combining the use of tilt shift lenses and telescoping mounts along with crop panning to create an even more unique and dynamic experience.  Amazing.

I don’t own a dedicate intervalometer at the moment.  I will soon.  Using my laptop with the Canon EOS software hooked up to my Canon XSi allowed me to employ the basic concept of doing time lapse.  The result is interesting, it does not really meet my artistic vision though.  The biggest issues was that the fastest interval I could accomplish was a shot every 5 seconds.  This combined with a 1-1.3 second exposure time just didn’t give me the shutter drag I really wanted.

So there will definitely be more to come on this topic.  I have a big plan in my head of exactly where I would like to go with the concept.  I’m looking forward to implementing it and sharing it with everyone.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve posted any photos on the blog.  I’ve been really into photography again lately so I figured I would share a few.  This first shot was taken with some friends at an old burned down hotel.  All kinds of strange plants were growing out of the concrete foundation that looked pretty cool.  Here are some tiny ones that I shot with my 28-75 which is not Macro, but it’s pretty close.  I really liked the depth of field here and the look of the tiny little forest of trees.

The shot below was taken while I was on vacation in NYC over the winter.  New York had gotten a pretty good snow the day before.  It was FREEZING out on the bridge but I soldiered on.  I took over 200 shots just crossing the bridge, which is excessive even for me.  Only a handful were really interesting to me, this is one.  Architectural style photos are not my thing, but this turned out well I think.

Yesterday I posed the question “Is there a name for the concept of spending a lot of time planning for something that is not likely to happen?” and received a lot of responses.  Here they are:

Via twitter:

Via Facebook:
Don: Working for the State?
Chris: Oh! College!

It looks like the winner is college.  Not that exciting overall but I definitely got a kick out of it.  It’s by far the most response I’ve ever seen out of a tweet.  For the record the scenario that prompted this tweet from me definitely falls into the Mental Masturbation category.

I’m really shocked that I’m able to use a 350 dollar system (plus 20 dollar RAM upgrade) as my only personal system.  So far the only thing it really can’t cope with is “HD” flash video streams.  Even non-HD flash video gives it a serious run for it’s money.  If flash would stop sucking so much it would be far less of an issue.  Another good test has been playback of Apple’s Quicktime movie trailers.  480p is handled with ease.  However 720p is too much to handle.  It’s close, but it’s dropping a few frames making it choppy.  Still, none to shabby.

Extra bonus, when the next gen of these little buggers comes around in a year or so I won’t feel to bad about making the upgrade, as long as I can still run OSX.  If not I may have to bite the Apple bullet.  I’m getting kinda hooked on OSX all over again.