This Old Blog

Last week I was up in Virginia, near Alexandria, participating in an system-of-systems integration event. I took the Sony with me and practiced using the camera. Up to this point I've not been particularly pleased with the output from the camera, attributing that to my lack of familiarity with the NEX system. The only way to gain familiarity, and thus satisfactory results, is to practice as much as possible. Something must be happening because these last few groups of photos are actually beginning to look good. I can still see the flaws from the Sony 18-55mm kit zoom, but they don't bother me anymore. Instead I'm doing something I think I forgot how to do. I'm standing back and looking at the whole picture. And when I do I find the flaws disappear and I like the kind of photos the NEX-5N is capable of producing. I like them very much. Whether taken during the day or after dark, the photos turn out rather well. Part if this comes from working with the various ...

Well, I'm back to Fedora 17. I've learned a lot these past two days, and I managed to get WiFi working. You know what the problem was? Are you ready for this? Are you sitting down? The bloody external switch was off. Yes, off. When I bothered to look at the side of the notebook and saw the state of the switch I could have screamed. I had basically forgotten that it was even there. I looked at my E6510 that runs Windows 7 Enterprise, and yes, the switch enables WiFi. And of course it works. But the switch on the side of the E6510 I've been installing various Linux distributions on, it was disabled (red showing on the switch). As soon as I turned it on the WiFi icon changed state on the panel. And it found all the local WiFi hotspots. And I was able to log in just like I log in for every device in this house, from Windows notebook to Apple Macbook to smartphone and all the various Barnes & Noble tablets. And WiFi under Fedora 17 on the E6510 with Centrino 6300 WiFi ...

I've been spending far too much time with this over the weekend, but then, I figure why not. This is one of the few times I can install Linux distributions with impunity. So I grabbed a DVD ISO of the latest openSUSE, version 12.2. Funnily enough I installed the Gnome 3 desktop (Gnome 3.6 according to the openSUSE site) rather than the KDE desktop. After messing with the latest Gnome 3 desktop while I had Fedora running I actually liked the underlying technology, if not the visible implementation. When openSUSE finished installing I found I liked it's implementation a bit more than Fedora's, primarily for such little touches as a computer shutdown entry on the far upper right drop-down user menu. In the end I would up installing Cinnamon 1.6.1 as my desktop. I would have done the same under Fedora 17, something I'd already said I would in an earlier post. With Cinnamon I finally have a desktop with a minimal touch that reminds me a bit of the Metro desktop and Go...

Fedora 17 base install with Gnome 3 before a massive update I spent the majority of last week at an integration event. Part of the toolkit I took with me was a Dell Latitude E6510 with RHEL 6.3 installed. Running on top of that was VMware Player to host several VMs that ran additional systems as part of the event. I'd also installed Google's exfat driver to support a 64GB SDXC card and additional drivers from EPEL to support a 500GB LaCie external drive formated as NTFS. It was a decent enough system, and certainly supported the integration event to a very successful conclusion. When I got back home, however, I wanted a more advanced kernel on the notebook, one that had a chance of supporting the E6510's wifi wireless chipset. The older driver under RHEL couldn't see it (or I never saw it with the tools), so I installed Fedora 17 to get at least the drivers installed. Sure enough, dmesg logs that the Intel wifi chipset was found and enabled on boot: [ 5.40642...

Subtitle: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. I have several thousand photos from the September 2012 Road Trip stashed in my digital shoe box. When I remember to do it I go back and rummage about in there, looking and being reminded of that intense two week trip up to Toronto and back. Today I looked at a few of the 9 September photos that were taken that day with Matthew, Penny, and Judy about. The first three in this sequence were taken at the 2012 Cabbagetown Festival. The last four were taken after dinner at the By The Way Cafe . After we finished our excellent meal we walked slowly down Bloor Street for a ways while attempted a bit of very amateur street photography. Nothing matches the charm and rich cultural texture of a sophisticated urban center like downtown Toronto. Orlando, unfortunately, doesn't have that. While the subtitle could refer to Toronto, it was written more with my NEX 5N experiences in mind. While there's a lot to like about the 5N, an...

Personal I'm going through pre-op right now (blood, x-rays) for a new awesome cyborg left knee replacement on November 2nd. I've been living with this gimpy human left knee for over a year. Last November it went to hell in a hand basket right after I flew up to Ann Arbor on a business trip. The weekend after I returned I wound up in an emergency room unable to really use the stupid thing. After months of medication and physical therapy it's finally come down to surgery and a partial knee replacement. Today I drove to Dr. P. Phillips hospital with my scripts and my NEX 5N with an OM 2.8/28mm to take care of everything. The original scripts had me going to Quest Diagnostics here in Orlando for the blood work. I've been to Quest in the past and I've not been particularly happy. To walk into a Quest is to walk into a location that looks like it's seen better days. Dirty carpets, stained furniture, scruffy walls. It makes me wonder if I'll catch something l...

Max with Plumbago blooms About a week ago a NEX-5N arrived at the house with just the stock 18-55mm kit zoom. Today I finally received a Fotodiox OM-NEX lens adapter so that I could use my OM lenses with my NEX-5N. In order to use my manual focus OM film-era lenses with the 5N and the adapter I had to enable Release w/o Lens under Menu | Setup . I then selected Peaking Level of High and a Peaking Color of Red in the Setup menu. And then I went back to shooting raw. Unless the subject is colored red, focus peaking works a treat with the 5N. This is the one feature above all others I would have liked Olympus to have added to its digital cameras, especially the Pens. I managed, after a fashion, to learn how to manually focus my OMs with my Pens (E-P2, E-PL1 and E-PL2), but it was a slow process. With the 5N focus peaking system, correct focus is absolute and certain, and for me at least a lot faster. I've also noticed another feature I appreciate on the 5N, and that's ...