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Personal Technology & Gadgets

HDR photography

Last year in November, Cassie and I visited Bandelier National Monument (funny story, the native Americans were called Anasazi for many years, turns out this was a derogatory term used by other tribes, dirt people, they now refer to themselves as the Pueblo Indians) while we went to Santa Fe, NM. There I encountered a couple of guys with tripods, Canon SLR digital cameras, and the odd habit of taking three identical photos at a time. I asked them if they were using AEB or Automatic Exposure Bracketing on the Canon, and they said why yes. They introduced me to the fun of High Dynamic Range photography. In this technique, three (or more) different exposures (as far apart as possible, like -2, 0, +2) are used to take the same photo. Then in software (I use Photomatix Pro) the photos are combined to produce some fairly startling effects. The interesting thing is that HDR photography can capture situations where the light and dark areas could not normally be captured in a scene at the same time.

Enough talk, here’s some examples of my attempts:

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More after the break, or in the gallery

Categories
Technology & Gadgets

10 things about WordPress 2.3

I’ll be on the new WordPress as soon as it’s finalized, so read on

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Technology & Gadgets

Funny linux commands and their results

Check out these priceless geek-jokes.

% got a light?
No match.

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Technology & Gadgets

Notepad2 text editor

Wahoo, I found Notepad2. It contains the only two features I really use ALL the time in a text editor: syntax highlighting and UNIX (grep) style regular expressions search and replace.

For those who don’t know about regular expressions search and replace, it allows you to do wacky stuff like swap words, change case, and to pinpoint replacements on a source file, using bits and pieces of what you were “finding” in the “replacement”. Just don’t tell anyone you know how to use it, as it really opens up your ability to process huge input files with ease to do, well, anything.

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Technology & Gadgets

Best freeware

Discovered a few I like and didn’t know about:

From Live Slick. The comments actually pointed me to a program I really like Notepad2.

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Technology & Gadgets

Awesome error pages

Smashing Magazine has this selection of error pages… I’ll implement one of these shortly…..

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Technology & Gadgets

Linux Slug: VOIP & Weather Station

I wanted a silent weather server to run wviewweather on, to go with my new Davis Vantage Pro 2.

Temperature

In view of the latest problems Vonage has been having (they are involved with litigation with Nortel, Sprint, Verizon and SunRocket), I decided to go somewhat farther afield to seek out an alternate solution.

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To serve as both servers, I bought ($79 eBay) a tiny Cisco NSLU2 (known to the hacking community as the SLUG), a tiny little linux server (designed just to share USB HDDs), along with a 4 GB USB memory stick ($34 CompUSA). I’ll post details and instructions when I get it all working.

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Technology & Gadgets

1986 computer vs. 2007 computer

Check out this comparison on several fronts…. 1986 wins many tests!

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Technology & Gadgets

HD Homerun

Now this is cool….

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I may have to get one for my new computer. This is a network-only ATSC tuner.

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Technology & Gadgets

Building a supercomputer

OK, not really, I got put in charge of maps for the BMFPD, and took it as an excuse to buy a new computer. Here’s some details and my screwups.

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First, I went around all the computer retailers, online and brick-and-mortar, to see if I good buy what I wanted in a built-to-order or off-the-shelf computer. I couldn’t.

The criteria were:

  • Silent. I live at 7400′, so fan runs faster up here. A silent computer at sealevel isn’t silent at my house!
  • Fast.
  • Diskless or small hard drive (HDDs come cheap).
  • Dolby Digital Live and/or DTS connect for on-the-fly encoding of game audio.
  • Serial port, just because. (Maybe a new weather station in my future?)
  • Fanless video card.