Low Bit Test

Sticking with the Program

lowbit — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 16:59:24 +0000

The first camera I ever really used I borrowed from my Dad when I was in college. It still worked flawlessly then and still does now. This was my introduction to Pentax and for some reason I still remain brand loyal to this day. It isn’t that I don’t research what else is on the market, I do. Nikon has some fantastic kit out now and Canon is no slouch. But, not being a huge fan of zooms I can’t seem to break away from the Pentax camp. They have long made some of the best fixed focal length lenses around.

I recently sold off some seldom used lenses with the goal of reinvesting in photographic equipment. After briefly entertaining a complete system switch, that Nikon D90 is looking pretty sweet, I think I’ll stay put. The DA 35mm F2.8 Macro Limited is too nice to pass up. I have the DA 21mm Limited and the build quality is a thing to behold. The DA Limiteds from Pentax are built the way all the old lenses were built, well save for the lack of an aperture ring. All metal housing, great damping of the focus ring, a real pleasure to use. I’ll probably get around to finally getting a flash too.

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Urban Farming 2008

lowbit — Mon, 05 May 2008 23:47:20 +0000

I finally got the garden planted for the year. My wife bought me a copy of the Square Foot Gardening book. Here is a shot of the freshly planted garden.

Nothing fancy, from right to left the front row has two basil, one rosemary and one oregano. There is bell pepper, mint, and a small pickling cucumber in the next row. In the back row is a cherry tomato and better boy tomato. It it weren’t for the awful drought we had last summer our harvest would have been great. I hope this year is a good deal better.

A Walk in the Woods

lowbit — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:52:58 +0000

While visiting my grandparents recently, my little family went off for a walk. In the Florida woods you have to be careful of what crosses the road.

“Red touch yellow, kill a fellow; red touch black, friend of Jack.” Yep, that is the bad one. Walk away walk away…

Interesting Crema

lowbit — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 01:05:34 +0000

I have a pound of local roast going right now for my morning espresso. This particular roast is creating a pretty interesting looking crema. Admittedly, I can’t tell you if this is good or bad. It tastes quite good so I guess it isn’t all bad.

Easy AFP Automount on OS X 10.5

lowbit — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 17:24:53 +0000

I have been working on the home network in an effort to attain seamless integration with the Macs. I use a ReadyNAS NV+ with 4x 500GB drives as the network backup/media/storage device. Media sharing is done via a Mac mini to the Xbox 360, Squeezebox and the Mac laptops. When I was running on Tiger I configured automount AFP shares using the NetInfo Manager application. Well, as of the upgrade to Leopard, this application is gone.

I was digging around a bit this morning on how to go about a proper automount under Leopard. I wasn’t interested in any sort of kludgey AppleScript that would be setup as some sort of login or startup item. AppleScript will work of course but it wasn’t good enough, this *is* UNIX right? A couple of queries into Google and I found a great blog article detailing autofs in Leopard. There are lots of different options, but I was primarily concerned with AFP automounts. This is detailed in part two of the referenced article.

Here is what I ended up with and it works great, as of 10.5.1 that is. I dropped the net option as I wanted a more direct way to access the mounts from the Finder. I created /etc/fstab and added the following.

# -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

# Mount AFP shares from the ReadyNAS

# servername:/path mount_point url auto,url==afp://username:password@server/path 0 0

# -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

mynas:/Backup /Network/Backup url auto,url==afp://username:password@mynas/Backup 0 0

mynas:/Media /Network/Media url auto,url==afp://username:password@mynas/Media 0 0

mynas:/Storage /Network/Storage url auto,url==afp://username:password@mynas/Storage 0 0

# -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------


These will be auto-mounted on boot but you can easily refresh the automount config after making changes using sudo automount -cv. You can guess that, via a terminal, you can find the configured mounts under /Network. From the Finder, this is accessible in the Sidebar from either Devices -> Computer -> Network or Shared -> All... Depending on your Finder preferences, you my need enable visibility in the Sidebar.
So really that is it. Easy right?



Biggest Lens Ever?
lowbit — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 12:16:14 +0000
This post caught my eye over at gizmodo.com. Aside from bragging rights, I wonder what you would actually use a 1200mm lens for?

         


A Gift of Meat
lowbit — Fri, 14 Dec 2007 00:29:42 +0000
The previous owners of our home here in Nashville are session musicians. Specifically, contributing to Reba McEntire’s music. Tis the season, cause FedEx pulled a stealth delivery and left a box from Lobels’ of New York on our front porch today.
The box was clearly labeled as perishable and was addressed to our home’s previous owners. We looked up their new number and left a message re: said gift box. Due to the nature of the contents, I decided to open it up and get the meat in the freezer until such a time as we could arrange for a proper delivery. What do we have here? Two boneless strip steaks, two porterhouse steaks and two filet mignons courtesy  of Narvel and Reba.  All said around $250 worth of aged steaks which sure beats a holiday ham I think.
What we secretly hope is that we never make the connection and Reba sends us steaks every year. Oh, did I not mentioned this happened last year but we were able to catch the FedEx guy and have them returned? I give them until January 1 to call back, if not I fire up the grill. Happy Holidays right back at you Narvel and Reba!
Update:
We met one of the previous owners last night around 10 PM. She was coming home from playing a show and stopped by. It was actually really nice to met her, incredibly nice woman and we chatted for a while about the neighborhood and such. Turns out they did get their steaks last year after FedEx got them to Reba’s office. This is a yearly gift for playing and touring with Reba, quite cool. I mean, if you like steaks, which I do. Apparently one of the other band members had his steaks delivered to his next door neighbor. Before he could go and get them, the neighbor had eaten them. Not really in the spirit of the holidays! I assume that the address confusion will get worked out, but we won’t know until next year.

         


Grilled Thanksgiving Turkey
lowbit — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 19:41:48 +0000
This year for Thanksgiving I tried a new method of turkey preparation, grilled! I used a simple dry rub that consisted of salt, black pepper, cayenne pepper and sugar. It was grilled over indirect heat for about an hour and forty five minutes. I am not saying it was barbecued since I was using propane and that can be a touchy subject.
Before:

After:

I am happy to report it was a rather tasty bird.

         


I Suck at Espresso
lowbit — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 00:36:42 +0000
Let me clarify, today I got my first home espresso machine so I am a total newbie when it comes to pulling shots. I plan to post some pics of the equipment I picked up in a later post. For now I just wanted to say, one of my worst practice shots was better than 90% of the shots I have had at Starbucks, restaurants, or local coffee shops. I can’t convey how excited I am to be able to perfect pulling shots on my home equipment. I will be taking all my coffee at home now, thanks.

         


Smugmug.com is Awesome!
lowbit — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 13:44:31 +0000
I just have to being up how cool SmugMug is, specifically their customer service. I had been a paying customer for two years. Well, while in a state of severe sleep depravation, I decided to cancel my account and either host something myself or move to Flickr. My sleep deprived state was due to the arrival of our first child, so when am I going to have time to work on something hosted locally? After playing around with Flickr some, I found that the feature set at SmugMug is far better. So last night after realizing the error of my ways, I emailed them to ask if they could reinstate my account as it existed before.  I fully expected them to direct me to signup again. Much to my pleasure, I got a reply this morning. They restored my account such that I am still listed as a user since 2005 and all my uploaded images are back. It is like I never left. Thanks a lot SmugMug!