Carl Hutzler’s Blog

OK, I just dropped $5,000.00 on a camera!. No, not a car, a camera. It takes pictures and not much more. It can’t even take movies for God’s sake :-)

Yes, I could be taking pictures with any number of excellent D-SLR cameras for $600 to $1500 or so. Is my photography worth $5,000? Hmmm.

And we all know its not the camera, the megapixels or any of the other bells and whistles, it’s the photographer, stupid. So why $5000 for a camera?

Because this camera (Nikon D3) is simply revolutionary. It is better (yes I said better) than any other camera on the planet. It actually takes better pictures…really!

It is better than other cameras in one specific area, the sensor. This sensor which is the “film” inside the camera can adapt to any type of light and yield absolutely beautiful results. By type, I mean bright light, contrasty light, color shifted light, anything. And I don’t have to do the adjustments myself…the camera is smart enough to get it right on its own.

So you are thinking, OK. I get it. The white balance is better and the sensor has lower noise at higher ISO settings. And you’d be right. But its so much more.

No it’s not the full frame sensor. It’s not the 10 frames it can shoot in second or the dual CF card slots. It’s not these piddly little things (some of which are very convenient, don’t get me wrong). On this camera the important thing is the sensor’s dynamic range which is much larger and a better quality. And the software intelligently increases the effective dynamic range even more (Nikon Active D Lighting). So we are now talking about a digital camera that can see well in excess of 5 stops of exposure latitude. I have not tested it in a lab, but I bet it can see 8 stops or more. This is amazing.

But the sensor can also yield beautiful low noise images at ISO’s from 100 to 6,400! But the low noise is almost boring compared to the fact that it can also yield accurate color and beautiful highlight and shadow detail as well. Try this on your digital camera. My old one (Nikon D200) yielded poor results above ISO 1200. But it wasn’t just noise, it was nasty harsh colors and poor image quality/noise sharpening. Not that the D200 was a bad camera, but the D3 is amazingly better.

Today I was shooting indoors in a school under crappy florescent lighting. I discovered a neat way of shooting that will forever change how photographers create. Since the ISO almost does not matter, I set the camera to AUTO-ISO which means it adjusts the “film speed” to accommodate my shutter speed and aperture settings.

So I just went into MANUAL exposure mode and set the shutter and aperture as I wished. The camera adjusted the ISO to match the conditions. No longer does the photographer have to choose fast shutter speeds and trade off depth of field. Within reason, it simply doesn’t matter. Pick the shutter you want. Pick the aperture you want. And you get a picture. These variables (aperture and shutter) are no longer related in an inverse relationship. Just pick what you want.

Wow. That is a game changer.

(click on the below images for large file size - warning >2MB each) 

1/125 @ f/4 ISO 800

1/125 @ f/4 ISO 1250

1/125 @ f/4 ISO 3600

When I initially upgraded from 10.4 to 10.5 I had no trouble continuing to use my Motorola V3m (Sprint) as a modem via bluetooth. But due to a hardware failure on my old MacBook Pro, I had a different experience the second time around.

This time, I had a brand new machine. It shipped with 10.4 and an upgrade disk to take you to 10.5. I did the 10.5 upgrade as a fresh install and then used the Migration Assistant to move my user directory, applications, network settings, etc from my old drive.

All seemed fine until I tried to pair my Motorola V3m again and set up my Mac to use the phone as a modem. After pairing, I tried the connection and kept getting connected to Sprint but then immediately disconnected with an error. The messages in my console were similar to this:

pppd[681] MPPE required, but MS-CHAP[v2] auth not performed.

I scoured the web and found a few people having similar issues when the upgraded to 10.5. I also saw a number of people saying they were doing just fine. I tried a few changes that people suggested to this modem script and that, but nothing seemed to work. The curious thing for me was that I knew I had used my phone as a modem under 10.5 with my old machine…..hmmm.

So I plugged my old hard drive (from the old machine) into my Mac via USB and told the Mac to boot from this drive. Even though the operating system was technically for a previous version of HW (Core Duo instead of Core2 Duo and a different graphics card), the drive booted the new machine just fine. I tried the dial-up connection to my phone and it worked just fine! So under 10.5 (actually 10.5.1 in this case) the dial-up worked without a problem So just to be sure I wasn’t crazy, I took screen shots of the bluetooth networking set-up and I booted back on the laptop’s internal drive and again tested the dial-up and it failed with the MPPE error. I compared the settins to my old drive and they all looked identical. I even compared the modem scripts and they were the same. Hmmm.

So I decided to completely re-install Leopard on the internal HDD of my new MBP. Once it was installed, I did not migrate any data and instead tried the bluetooth pairing to the phone and the dial-up modem to Sprint. It worked! I migrated my user data again from my old HDD but this time I made sure I did NOT migrate my network preferences. This time I would only migrate my data and applications.

My bluetooth as modem continues to work reliably under 10.5. Although I have not extensively tested the issue further, I believe the Migration Assistant has a small bug where in if you migrate network settings, it will somehow make your bluetooth as modem not work 100% of the time. One way to maybe prove this is if you are having this MPEE error, try creating another user account and setting up bluetooth dial-up modem under that account. I bet it will work. Not sure how to fix your primary account other than starting over with 10.5 and being careful with the migration assistant. But perhaps someone smarter will figure that out.

OK, so its just a single page. And no graphics or anything difficult. But it does seem to work across the browsers I tried. And it does use CSS and XHTML which is cool. And I was able to mimic the comp that the client sent to me almost 100%. The best part is that I really got the hang of it! I wonder what Theoretical Ken will say about the CSS code ;-)

I bought a refurbished Mac Book Pro a little over a year ago now. The machine had some issues on the day I got it and I got these repaired quickly. But then it developed a speaker and fan issue a few months in. So again, I took it into the Apple Store in Tysons to have it fixed. And they got it back to me fairly quickly. It worked well for a couple of months but then developed a series of issues - screen backlight was faded in the middle, bluetooth was cutting in and out, and a graphic card “flashing” issue on my external monitor. Again I took it in and this time they had to keep the machine for nearly a month due to a part availability issue.

Now several months since the last repair, I again started experiencing Bluetooth: Not Available issues. I spoke with customer service again on the phone and they could not help. So I tried a fresh install of the OS and a few other things (PRAM/Power Unit resets) and it was still flaky. Then yesterday my bluetooth flaked out and simply would not come back. So I packed up the machine in the original box and took it to the Apple Store in Tysons.

I asked for a manager and got one quickly. After 30 seconds of starting into my carefully rehearsed speech about how this machine was now his and I wanted a new one, he stopped me and asked if I had ever been offered a replacement machine…I said No. He said that I should have been offered one a long time back as the issues I experienced were not acceptable.

He got his lead Genius guy to come over and handle the paperwork which was complicated by the fact that it had Apple Care on it and the machine was a refurb in the first place. But after about 45 minutes, I left with a brand new Mac Book Pro.

On the way out, the original manager who helped me happened to see me leaving and asked “Hope everything got worked out and you have better luck with the new machine, Carl”. Wow, he even remember my name. Impressive.

In 45 minutes I went from hating Apple to loving Apple once again. Not bad.

The OLPC is a sub $200 laptop created with the goal of providing a laptop to every child in the world. Right now you can buy two of them for $400 and they will ship one to you and the other to a child in a part of the world that needs one.

The machine is fairly nice. It has Wifi, ethernet, USB ports, sound in/out, a decent screen which even works in the bright sunlight, a still/video camera, a nice battery, and more. It really is a lot of machine for the money. It includes a web browser and several applications for kids to learn how to work with computers like how to program, memory games, music composition, and more. And if you are at all linux savvy you can install other stuff too (the operating system is linux although you don’t have to be a geek to make the machine work). Their help site (wiki.laptop.org) is very well done and has great information too.

I just bought one (and donated one) because I think my son will love having his own laptop. I was even showing him something last night called “Turtle Graphics” which is programming language (formally called LOGO) on my computer and he was very interested in how to make the turtle draw what he wanted….and LOGO is built into the OLPC. It even has the PYTHON programming language built in which is what makes most of the web work! What a great thing to learn. And it comes with a number of games and funner stuff too like the ability to compose music.

So, if you haven’t found the perfect gift yet and are interested in something that is both educational and also might help a kid somewhere else in the world, this might be a great idea.

http://laptop.org/

As you can probably see from the last 4 posts, I am playing around with podcasting. Its very easy to upload an MP3 file to your blog and have it become a podcast. You just go over to Feedburner.com and give them the normal RSS feed for your blog. Feedburner will then massage it into the right RSS format for iTunes and other applications to consume as a podcast.

One small downside is that the normal RSS feed for my blog has ALL of my posts in it. What if I had a link to an MP3 in a post that I did NOT want in my podcast?? I was interested in how I could segregate those posts. Turns out its simple. If you apply a category (tag) to your podcast postings (like category=podcast) then you can very easily have wordpress create an RSS feed for just that category. Below is such an RSS feed link for my blog. I have all my test podcasts under a category called “podcast”…

http://carlhutzler.com/blog/category/podcast/feed

I then tell feedburner to digest the above RSS feed and produce an MP3 Podcast feed which gets published as:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CarlHutzlersBlog

Add in the special itns:// service delineation and you have a podcast rss feed that will automatically open itunes and subscribe the person to your podcast with just one click. Cool :-)

itns://feeds.feedburner.com/CarlHutzlersBlog

Our third podcast is ready. This is just a test for a client.

podcast3

Our second podcast is ready. This is just a test for a client.

podcast2

Our first podcast is ready. This is just a test for a client.

podcast1

This is for a client. No, I am not going to start podcasting :-)

Subscribe to the Podcast in iTunes (via feedburner)