Arca-SwissLast year I bought a Gitzo GH2780QR [1] ballhead with an additional (medium) lens plate for my 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. The concept of this ballhead was/is ingenious. By using the big knob/dial you could change the friction on the ball. This enables you to pan/rotate the camera and lens very fluently, and when you applied enough friction, you could let go of your camera, and it would not move or fall down, and you'd still be able to pan/rotate the camera. All in all very safe and handy.
But there were some things that annoyed me;
When working with Virtual Machines (VM's) you probably work with templates (and/or) clones to create new VM's. When you do this, you basically get a fixed drive with this. The size of the drives are basically the size from when you created them in the past. Since people put more and more crap programs in these VM's, you'll need more, and more diskspace.
Under VMWare it's relatively simple to add space to a virtual disk (vmdk), or even add an additional disk to the VM. The problem is that this works for creating additional partitions or extend existing NON primary system partitions. This means that you can't enlarge your C: partition, a partition where (under normal circumstances) all your programs are installed.
A while back, I wrote a couple of blog posts about the FileVault quirks in OSX. The problems seemed to be gone with the upgrade to Snow Leopard, but this week I ran into a (new??) 'feature'?
When I remove a directory on a (SMB) file-share it removes the files and directory (or so it seems). But after a couple of seconds the (empty) directory re-appears.
There's a new service around called Backupify. It's an online backup system for your online identities/services (free usage till January 31, 2010). It provides automated online backup for the following online services:
- Gmail
- Twitter
- Google Docs
- Flickr
- Facebook
- Basecamp
- Wordpress
- Delicious
- Photobucket
- Blogger
- FriendFeed
- More coming soon...
On itself a nice service, since cloud services aren't invulnerable to customer data lose. This way you have a online backup in case Flickr or Twitter 'decides' to purge your data.
There are some 'drawbacks' though (in my opinion).....
Later this week several Hollywood-related companies will announce a new digital media distribution system that's suppose to ignite digital downloads of movies (and possible other digital content). They call it DECE (Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem). The key-feature being 'portability'.
This time a name without 'protection' or 'rights' in its name, but the result is much the same.
In the 'old' days DRM was implemented by protecting the resource with a key, and if you had the proper 'key' on your device the content was playable. Downside was that playback was mainly limited to only one device, or it was OS/player dependent (Windows -> Windows Media Player, or Apple iTunes, OSX -> Itunes).
If you wanted it to play on another device you had a problem, since you lacked the proper key to 'unlock' the digital content. Thankfully Apple has lot's of DRM-free mp3's in it's iTunes store, but not everything (like the movies / TV Shows) is DRM free, or watchable on lots of devices.
The German scientist Karsten Nohl published his findings this week on the CCC (Chaos Communications Congress) in Berlin. The CCC is an annual hacking convention, which is being held in Berlin, Germany.
Normally, the GSM communication switches frequency regularly, and therefor it's hard to listen in, but if you can crack the frequency switching algorithm..... Which is exactly what Karsten Nohl and his team did.
They cracked the so-called stream-cipher A5/1 which protects the voice conversations, and published details off it on the CCC in Berlin.
James Hetfield of Metallica by Guillaume Raisonnable, on FlickrMy photo of James Hetfield (lead singer of Metallica) won this years photo contest at the local cameraclub (out of 51 other photos).
The photo was taken this year at their concert in Ahoy, Rotterdam [1, 2], and this image felt right from the beginning.
