JerryKnight.com

For a while, I’ve been out of the world of photo printing. Everything has stayed digital, mostly staying on Flickr. I just ordered a print from Shutterfly so I could spruce up the apartment a little bit. By the way, I find it rather odd that the 20″x30″ print I ordered arrived before the free 4×6. Figure that one out… The print I ordered was this one. It’s definitely my best photo worthy of the 20″x30″ size. I was very impressed at the quality of Shutterfly’s print. They even have a canvas printing service (16×20 in canvas = $90.. ouch!), but I think I’ll stick with their matte finish large prints. At first glance, the colors appear to be spot-on with the JPEG I uploaded. I had to process the photo a bit to get the blues and greens to “pop,” but I think it’s better than the original. The abundance of those two colors makes it easy to notice any miscalibration in Shutterfly’s printing process. I haven’t yet directly compared the print to the digital copy, but it seems close enough that I’ll blame any differences on my monitor. Now I need to figure out what other photos are worth printing big. Update: Frames are hard to find for 20″x30″ prints!  Michael’s had nothing useful, so I’m hoping that Hobby Lobby will have at least the correct size of acrylic & backing so I can use a custom-sized frame kit.  I found some decent poster frames online, but they seem to be rare in Waco.

I am now officially in the first page of results for the Google search “Jerry Knight”. I’m fifth – still behind R&B guy and Washington Post guy, but I guess Google likes my About Me page. For some strange and pathetic reason, that really makes my day. It seemed wrong that “jerryknight.com” wasn’t in the first page of results for “Jerry Knight”, but all is well now. Someday I’ll be able to say “To find out about me, enter ‘Jerry Knight’ in Google and hit ‘I’m feeling lucky’.” Sort of like the Wordpress creator, who Anthony just told me about. Google for “matt” and hit “I’m feeling lucky”. For those not geeky enough to know the all the advanced Google features, “I’m feeling lucky” automatically sends you to the first website in the results of your search.

I’ve been reading up on the new Canon Digital Rebel XTi (400D), and I’ve decided it’s going at the top of my list. It has many features of the 30D at $400 less (or lower, depending on the store). I’ve cleaned up my current Rebel (300D), and I’m ready to trade it in. So if you’re interested in a good deal on a great used camera body, let me know. (You can’t have my lenses, sorry.) I’ll probably aim for Thanksgiving/Christmas time, so that my extra income can accumulate, but I will wait until my trusty drebel has a good home. (Drebel is my nickname for it, since the other non-digital “rebels” were common at the time.) I’m not so snobby that I have to go for the 30D or better. Inside their magnesium alloy bodies and sturdier construction lies the same sensor, apart from the 2 extra megapixels in the XTi, the same firmware (practically – every Canon camera is different), and now almost the same performance. The alloy body, slight bump in speed, and name aren’t worth $400+ to me. In the very long-term, I might consider a full-frame 35mm camera, like the 5D, since the larger sensor size alone makes the quality of the images much better. With a smaller sensor, fewer photons hit the sensor to contribute to the image, and as I found out from my photon-tracing illumination research, fewer photons means more noise. But such a camera is in the distant future for me. So let me know if you’re interested in a digital SLR body. I’ve taken pretty good care of it, and apart from scratches and wear-and-tear on the outside, it works perfectly. The sensor and memory card slot are still in excellent condition. I prefer not to ebay it (I don’t think my account is even still active), and I prefer that it is well-loved by its next owner. Why am I upgrading at all, if my current camera does a good job? It’s not for the megapixels – I never print anything bigger than what my current Rebel allows. It’s not for the latest-thing factor – I’ve passed up lots of other Canon cameras: Rebel XT (350D), 20D, 30D, 5D (haha).. Simply put, the original digital Rebel is slow. It takes almost 2 seconds for the camera to be ready to shoot after you flip the power switch or wake it up from its sleep. This has only been a problem a few times, since I learned to keep tapping a button to keep it awake and ready, but it could be the difference between getting a shot and missing a shot. Also, the image buffer is pretty small. This means that after taking 3 or 4 shots, the camera has to wait before taking the next shot, so that the first shot can be written to the card. The XTi’s startup time of 0.2 seconds and buffer that allows 27 consecutive JPEG shots or 10 consecutive RAW shots is enough for me to upgrade. I’ve been fine with what my drebel has given me, and I haven’t missed that many shots because of the startup time or the buffer, but I’ve gotten good use out of the drebel, and the bang-to-buck ratio of an upgrade is higher than ever.

I was pondering the abilities of my new phone, and I realized I could make it a remote for a couple things on my computer – mainly, music and TV. Since I’m too lazy to fix my computer’s infrared receiver box (and then too cheap to buy a shareware remote control program for my phone), I wrote a couple web pages to do the switching from the webserver. It works great now, and since I can connect to the wireless network in my apartment, it should respond pretty fast. All this so I don’t have to sit at my computer or lug around the wireless keyboard to control music/TV. Call it an exercise in system control via PHP. However, in the process of writing these pages, I had to reconfigure sudo (non-linux-geeks: it’s a way to do admin-level stuff without having to enter the admin password; read this to get a better idea of what sudo does). In the process of letting the webserver run commands as me, I corrupted the sudo config. No problem – I’ll just log in directly to root (admin account) and fix it. This was when I realized the admin password wasn’t working right. I had just been using sudo to do all the admin stuff for a while, and now I had neither that nor the admin password. Techno-babble Warning. Normally, fixing this would be a long scary process of booting from a recovery linux CD and manually mounting the root partition and fixing the problem directly. This probably would have required admin access to create the recovery CD, and besides, I was tired of restarting my computer, especially since earlier this weekend I had to do a panic-restart after mounting an NFS share directly on top of the home partition. But, since I’ve had problems with my 64-bit processor and some programs, I had a separate 32-bit system (dchroot) running, and sudo still worked in that setup. The only problem was that the main config files weren’t accessible from inside the 32-bit system. In a flash of brilliance, I remounted the root partition from within the 32-bit subsystem, fixed the sudo config file, and unmounted the partition (not sure if double-mounting a partition can cause problems). Saved from a huge headache! Although I may have just inflicted one upon my non-geek friends reading this! Sorry, but I did put a big warning up there…

So I’m enjoying the new phone. It works well, get’s good coverage, and isn’t too terribly slow. But no device is ever without it’s quirks. I’m usually able to find them pretty quick for whatever reason. (Technology knows to fear me.) Here’s what I found out about this phone.

• While Minimo (portable Firefox) works, it’s sometimes slow – and if you push it too hard, the whole thing locks up. That’s always fun. Think I might have to cough up the $30 for Opera Mobile, at least until Minimo is more mature.
• The touch screen likes to get out of whack (technical term). I haven’t figured out why, but I have noticed that the handwriting recognition sometimes goes berserk and the stylus draws lines all over the screen. I think it happens when too much is running in the background. It’s annoying to have it think you tapped in one place when you really tapped in another. Recalibrating helps, but it’s still annoying.
• My phone can officially make nearby speakers buzz. I thought it was a bad input line in my computer, or a loose connection, but when it happened on the Bose Wave radio at work, I’m convinced the phone is spitting out tons of electromagnetic stuff. Makes me feel great that I’m absorbing some of that.
• Calendar reminders happen without any indication at all – vibration, sound, etc. Every other kind of reminder tells me something somehow, but not for calendar events. Weird. Haven’t yet invested much time figuring that one out.

None of those are deal-breakers. I still like my phone. I can learn to minimize my dependence on the touch screen, especially with a smarter web browser. I can keep it away from speakers, and I’m sure calendar events can buzz or ring, but the option is probably in a stupid place. Sorta like the Outlook/Exchange settings. You’d think that email settings for an Exchange server would be accessible from the mail program, along with the other types of mail connections, but noooo.. It’s in ActiveSync, a separate syncing program. Makes sense to me now, but to not be able to enter Exchange information in the Email Accounts page is perplexing. I can’t call it a gremlin, but I can call it bad design. Oh well. I can live with it. Update: The wonky-touch-screen problem was in fact caused by the Write-Right screen protector I put on it.  Guess those things are Write-Wrong on this type of screen.  That’s disappointing, but I guess I’ll just clean the screen often and minimize the non-stylus touching.

Tried another panorama, this time on Baylor campus, and this time using the wide angle lens. I had tried a similar shot earlier using the 28mm lens, but the number of shots required made the panorama very hard to construct. I found other problems while trying to stitch the wide angle shots, though. The perspective and spherical distortions and chromatic aberration at the edges probably made it hard for libpano to reproject the images to stitch them together. In other words, this panorama is not perfect by any means. There are several stitch errors. It’s mostly due to photo coverage and the fact that it’s very hard to align images along bricks, grass, or trees. I still think it looks good.. I’ll probably be able to fix the stitch errors by adding more control points, but for now, it’ll have to do. (Sorry about the techno-babble – It’s hard to dial that down at 2am.)

I noticed recently how weird my mind works. You know the most famous “easy” piano sonata by Mozart? In the movie Groundhog Day, the part where Phil takes piano lessons, they play that song. Here’s the thing – Phil rings the teacher’s doorbell at a precise moment in the song. Now, to this day, I can’t hear that sonata without also hearing the doorbell in exactly the right moment. If I had the score in front of me, I could probably find the exact note it’s at. It’s an annoying glitch!

So after seeing some of Mark’s panorama pics made by Autostitch, I remembered I had a few unfinished pano-attempts from Hawaii. I figured someone had come up with an open source automatic photostitching library, but I never would have guessed there is a very nice application that does it all (with a bit of nasty compiling, in proper Linux fashion). It’s called Hugin, and it uses the panotools library, autopano-sift, and enblend to stitch a bunch of photos together into a seamless (really!) photo… Usually. Sometimes you have to nudge it along with a few more control points, but the blender is so smart that it knows how to join two images that have been matched up, even if their exposures are slightly different. The shot above is from Hanauma Bay near Waikiki. It’s a prime snorkeling spot because it’s mostly protected against the waves, but all the coral there is mostly dead, and it’s always crowded. Looks good from the roadway above, though.

“It’s not bragging if it’s true..”

What? Yes it is! Bragging is only bragging if it’s true. If it’s not true, it’s called something else: lying, deception, exaggeration – take your pick. Who writes this stuff?

I think they’re trying to play off the old adage, “It’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you.” Too bad they failed.. miserably. I guess what bothers me the most is not that someone came up with this horrible line, but that so many other presumably intelligent people saw nothing wrong with it.

(I normally avoid all commercials by recording the few shows I watch on MythTV.)

(Those stupid Red Stripe commercials…) I finally decided to order the new and improved ScanGauge automotive computer, since a friend might be interested in the other one. I ordered direct from Linear Logic, the designer and manufacturer (smart folks if you ask me), instead of Think Geek, because LL included shipping in the price. I’m fairly certain that Think Geek would have charged for shipping, and their price was the same as buying direct. That, and since I knew I’d be thrilled with the ScanGauge II, I figured I’d let the extra profit margin go to the designers instead of the retailers. Nothing personal, Think Geek (There’s no way they’re reading this). So, as advertised, the Mk2, as I’ll call it, is about one fourth the overall size of the Mk1. This makes it much easier to fit in more visible places, such as on the dash. The Infiniti has a very low-angle windshield, so there is not much room for a box to sit on the dash. The Mk2 fits nicely. Another big improvement: on the cable, they hardened the OBD2 plug (no more loose wires) and put an RJ45 jack to plug into the ScanGauge box. Not only that, but they put two cable ports on the box: one on the back and one on the right side, so it might be possible to panel-mount it. Very nice. However, the adhesive-backed velcro strips they provided would not stick to the dash at all. Didn’t even slow down when I tried moving the ScanGauge after applying the velcro. I’m pretty sure it’s because I put a generous coat of protectant (like Armor-All) on the dash not too long ago. I had seen those non-skid, non-permanent pads that they make so you can put your phone or iPod on the dash and not have it slide around, so I picked one up. It too can slide across the dash, but it provides enough friction that I can lodge the ScanGauge between the dash and windshield and it stays put under normal driving conditions. Besides the smaller size and the improved screen and backlight (it can be a number of different colors), the biggest change is the addition of fuel tank capacity. Since it knows how much gas you’re burning (it has to for the MPG meter to work), if it knows the capacity of your fuel tank, it can approximate how much gas you have left in the tank. From that, it can give you an estimate of how far you can travel on the current tank (based on an average fuel consumption rate). Since you have to tell it when you fill up, it can also keep a separate set of statistics for the current tank of gas: things like average MPG, average speed, etc. The Mk1 could do this for the current trip, current day, and previous day, but the Mk2 adds the gas tank feature. So all in all, it’s a worthwhile upgrade. The price is a bit more, from ~$130 to ~$170, but given the improvements, I think the increase is justified. It’s a much more professional form factor than the brick that was the Mk1. They claim that they’ll also soon release a USB cord so that the Mk2 firmware can be updated and some kind of information can be transferred off of the ScanGauge. Not sure what that means, but I’m all for firmware upgrades. So go get one today. Read my other ScanGauge post if you haven’t already. Note: The Mk1 and Mk2 designation is entirely my own. The official product title is the ScanGauge II.