Every geek’s LAN takes on unhealthy proportions at some point or another. At first, it’s just two machines, his and her’s. Then a fileserver. Then a media server. Then a Bluray player. Next thing you know you know you’ve got network cables running through every room of your dwelling. When that happens, you need a switch.
I’ve only got one word for this thing: AWESOME!
This marvelously thought up piece of machined aluminum was featured on BikeSnobNYC last tuesday, and from the moment I saw it I knew I had to get myself one. Ahrens made it easy too, you can order a Wisecracker directly from their website and checkout via Paypal.
If you’re like me and only drink stuff that doesn’t come with a twistcap (I sound like such a douche eh?), this is a godsend. As soon as this arrives, my Malum is getting a taste of it for sure, and I’ll be all set to attend all the pompous fixie-riding hipster parties I want.
As I explained in a previous post, my relatively recent purchase of a film scanner, the Plustek Opticfilm 7200, was mostly to tolerated the fact that I was going to be dealing with film photography up until the purchase of a D300s to replace my D40. However, during the holidays, the new toy quickly found another use: my grandmother has boxes filled to the brim with Kodakchrome slides shot anywhere from 20 to 40 years ago, and I decided to gift her some lots of my time to scan the slides she wanted to keep, and give her a more durable digital copy.
The whole enterprise, while time-consuming, was loads of fun. My grandmother had already shown a couple of those slides to my family during Christmas a couple of years ago, but I think I missed the most of it because I had shifts during the Christmas period, back in the days where I worked at McDonalds. All in all, I found great pleasure in discovering relatives I knew very little to not at all, and rediscovering the ones close to me. Seeing your parents and grandparents at a young age is something that’s always pretty impressive, I’m sure anybody who has old family albums would agree. The photographies, apart from being beautiful in a totally innocent and accidental way, gave me a tiny taste of what it was like back in the late 60’s / early 70’s. Here are the best of the 101 mounted slides that I have scanned. Click on the pictures for a link to their respective Flickr pages, where they are available in their original sizes.
Some of those were total pain in the ass fixing up in Lightroom. At least two dozen slides were completely underexposed, and most of the others were just not presentable; flash glare, out of focus image, camera shake, the list goes on. Sadly, 5 good snaps was all I found worthy of posting.
While I have no confirmation yet, my other grandmother has been aware of my ability to scan Kodachrome for a while now, so I just might be scanning and posting some more vernacular photography. Next time, it’ll probably be more slides too… this granny has been storing her slides on ready-to-project trays, and she says she has several boxes of 100 slide trays. If you’re into those kinds of pictures, grab a feed and stay tuned, there is more to come.
To me, mail clients are a thing that belong to the old internet, alongside all the other nasty Web 1.0 garbage: animated gifs of rotating type, cheesy repeating wallpapers and ugly text formatting are amongst those. I’ve been using GMail ever since I was OH-SO-LUCKY to receive an invite from a tech-savvy buddy of mine who kept on raving about how awesome the service was. Ever since, it’s been my only mail client; I’ve had maybe a dozen different mail accounts ever since then, but I accessed them all through Gmail.
To me, it was clear that Gmail was my mail client of choice, however there didn’t seem to be an easy way of telling my computer that in order for it to stop opening Windows Mail/Outlook whenever I clicked on a mailto link. So I did a bit of research, and cooked up my own solution to the problem, a little batch script that I call Gmail as Default Mail Client!
This little piece of batch does away with all your Gmail woes, and tells Windows to use the most awesome mail service whenever it encounters a mailto link. The script is set as to open Gmail as a new tab in Google Chrome, everybody’s favorite browser. This is done through a single registry edit that associates the mailto: tag to a new tab of Gmail. Unlike the Firefox quick fix which only works from web pages within Firefox (and forces you to use an inferior browser), this fix works system-wide with any program.
As a bonus, I have also included a Gmail icon, which installs and associates automatically. That way, you can create cool .ink shortcuts to mailto links!
Installation is super easy… run the .bat file, and you’re done! You might have some security dialogs pop up since I’m playing around in C:\Windows to store the icon, you’ll have to trust me on that one and click OK if you want everything to run smooth.
Download the script package here (Mediafire).
This script is very easy to port to other browsers, feel free to modify and redistribute. I haven’t found a way of starting the default browser instead of just Chrome, I’ll be checking that out. I’ve tested my script with both Vista and Windows 7, and both systems worked. I am unsure about XP though.
If you have any questions of problems, post in the comments with your email, we’ll check it out.
I wrote up a more extensive review of my new, much beloved film scanner, a Plustek Opticfilm 7200, over at Epinions. Have a read:
I’ve started shooting film again with an old hand-me-down SLR to practice my skills as a photograph in general, to get myself to think more about each shot before I pull the trigger and refine my aptitudes at quickly aquiring and framing a subject, shooting the right thing at the right time, all that good stuff. Basically, ridding me of the “spray and pray” method that my DSLR had forced me into taking up..
Being a big fan of Flickr and not that big of a fan of stacking 4×3’s in shoe boxes, I want to be able to digitize my film snaps and post them along side my digital work online, and have high resolution copies available on my redundant drives for archiving. Most photo labs offer the possibility of scanning your negatives and burning them to a CD at the same time as developing, but I’ve had horrible experiences with all three places I’ve tried. Low quality 300dpi jpegs, that’s what I get for my 7.99$ additional fee? After being disappointed by all the labs which had up to then made me quite happy, I decided to matters in my own hands and do it myself, so I bought the Plustek Opticfilm 7200.
Digital photography isn’t a fact anymore, it’s a standard. When I bought my DSLR over a year ago, I never even considered film as a viable option, even though my father’s Pentax Super Program was just begging to be used, old and dusty in a long forgotten bag. It’s not practical, it’s clunky, it’s expensive… every reason was good not to pack to the Pentax. I skipped a considerable number of good shots because of that.
Fast forward to now, and my D40 is lots somewhere in New Jersey, hopefully on it’s way to Corin’s place (hey thanks USPS!), and I have no replacement DSLR. In fact, the only piece of my DSLR kit remaining is my beloved 35mm F1.8 DX. But a guy can’t stop taking pictures just like that… so out comes the Pentax and becomes my main photo rig ad interim.
The kit is pretty simple. My father had already purchased the essentials of an SLR rig back in his college days somewhere in the 80’s: Super Program body, which probably came bundled with the SMC A 35-105mm f3.5, and a Pentax AF200T flashgun. The body is just as slim as any manual 35mm camera was back in the days, and it’s very, very simple. No AF, a 5 character display, most of the action goes on at the lens. I later bought a used fixed focal pancake, an SMC M 50mm f2 for a couple of coins and a handshake. The first time I ever used it was back in my trip to Europe, where I brought it along as a lighter, more compact and rugged substitute to my D40, with the hopes of capturing the old continent on an old-timey medium. 20+ years old but it still works like a charm.
But of course with film, there’s more to taking a picture than just pressing the shutter release: after that comes developing and processing. That’s the part that’s been giving me grief. There’s no such thing as instant gratification with film, it’s all a waiting game. If you don’t shoot an entire roll, you either waste precious frames and wind it back regardless, or wait for an occasion to shoot the remainder. Then, the lab: trust me, this isn’t 1995 anymore, there is no such thing as a 1 hour photo service in today’s world. I was willing to cope with the situation, because after all, I’m the sucker who sold my DSLR. But when I got charged 9$ for a CD of shitty 3MP scans + developed negatives. I knew that I couldn’t do with that. So I took the matter in my own hands: I bought a Plustek Opticfilm 7200.
I really didn’t know what to expect, as most of the other types of analog to digital conversion processes I had witnessed before were always kind of sketchy and usually yielded less than perfect results, tape to mpg are a good example. I had shopped around for film scanners, and it seemed that most of the products available were either way shitty or way expensive. It took a while before I found out the perfect compromise. At 250$CAD, the Opticfilm 7200 is a very capable scanner which digitizes 35mm and mounted slide to up to 7200 DPI in either JPG or tiff, and produces surprisingly good results. I’ll be honest, you have to have some time on your hands if you want to scan your negatives, because it’s a multi-step process. But if you put in the effort for preparing the negatives and doing all the dusting work and editing in Photoshop, you will get EXCELLENT results.
So far, I’ve done only a couple of scans since I was lacking the proper stuff for cleaning up my film, but the few that I’ve done turned out great. A gentle swipe with a microfiber cloth soaked in rubbing alcohol, a little shot of compressed air to get rid of whatever leftovers, and you’re good to scan. In a dusty environment like my dorm (for some reason the vents here spit out dust like crazy), there is always a bit of correction work to be done in Photoshop, but it’s nothing the heal tool can’t take care of. Here is what I have so far:
All the shots were taken with the 50mm f2 on some Fuji Superia 400, the film I shoot most regularly. Resolution is great, as you can see from the full size jpegs available from Flickr. I could no doubt get some pretty nice big prints with that, and I’m not even topping off the resolution settings on the scanner. I don’t know if the sludgy noise is caused by my film or by the scanner, but in the even that it is the film, I’d be able to print off some good looking poster sized prints for sure.
All in all, this Plustek scanner is a great tool, but it’s only as good as the effort you put into making your snaps look good.
I also wanted to give a short little shoutout to the people running Onhop.ca, the place where I bought the scanner. In addition to having the lowest CAD price anywhere for this item, they were very courteous on the phone when I called to discuss a problem concerning the length of my address, and the shipping was just insanely fast: 36 hours from their warehouse to my doorstep! They don’t have much of a reputation compared to giants like Newegg and Tiger, but I strongly recommend checking them out if you’re looking for electronics and random computer doodads.
Jared Souneyis a Portland-based photograph and graphics designer who’s done a lot of work in BMX and skate.He has been on both my Twitter friends list and RSS reader for a while now. I can’t recall where I was linked to him, but I do know that the moment I landed on his site, I bookmarked and grabbed a feed: his stuff is tight.
He posted a picture that he took of the infamous Mt. Baldy spot in Cali recently on Twitter, telling us that he was going to get it printed. Upon popular demand from the many BMX/skate twits, he just today let a limit amount of the Mt. Baldy shirts loose for the public to buy, right off of the Yobeat webstore.
The shirt is sick. One of my non-skater and non-biker friends came up to me as I was ordering mine, and asked me what the heck the shirt was. I was expecting the usual “oh… BMX” kind of reply from him as I explained what exactly Baldy was all about, and to my surprise, he actually commented on how rad it look. I agreed, and happily zapped off a couple of dollars from my Paypal account.
Like I said, although I don’t have a number, Jared has said that this is a very limited run, and that it will be the only series, so you might want to hurry up if you want to get one. Buy them here off the Yobeat store.
Believe it or not, it is because of Animal that I started to ride BMX. Back in the days in 8th, maybe 9th grade, we used to sneak into the school’s computer lab to watch some random Youtube videos. One day a friend of mine, I can’t recall if he now rides or not, came in and showed us a video entitled “Animal BMX Roadtrip“. I was blown away, and next thing you know I was replacing my stolen hybrid with a BMX, a DK Fury. Ill suited for a freestyle bike, but that’s the best I had access to at the time.
Come to think of it, I never really stuck to Animal for my bike parts though. After talking with bike shop people and other local riders, I was quickly steered torwards brands like Fit, Odyssey, Primo and WeThePeople. The only Animal parts I ever had were pedals: unsealed metal Hamiltons that still are my Kona, and a pair of plastic Hamilton on my current bike setup. That and many pairs of Edwin Grips, which I consider the best thick grip out there. In the non-hardware related, I also emailed an Animal rep about a year ago to get my hands on the wicked Mike Brennan poster they had running a little while ago, which I got laminated and that now sits proudly right over my bed. Otherwise, I’d just check out their site a couple of times of month lusting over the awesome clothes they were putting out, to then be totally turned off by 3ride’s prices for the stuff.
However I have recently discovered that they have opened a web store of their own, with two extraordinary features: 1) they ship to Canada, 2) the prices are RIDICULOUSLY LOW compared to my LBS and online shops. Without further hesitation, I phoned up a buddy, and we ordered a bit of stuff to try the new e-store out. 96 hours later, I had a UPS box, with no COD border fees (a lifetime first for me) at my door. The contents:
Fine quality products, surprisingly good I’d even say. I knew what to expect from the Flap Ya Jacks, because after all it is a New Era, but for the rest, I had no clue. Turns out everything is solid, made out of quality fabrics and the stitching is clean and solid everywhere; unlike some other BMX stuff I had bought in the past from the now defunct Square One.
Oh and there’s one thing? You’ve probably noticed the INSANE amounts of stickers that was included with my pretty small (100$USD) order. Well I haven’t payed for those… I don’t know if somehow the warehouse guy remembered my name from the emails about the Brennan poster, but holy hell, that is a shitload of free stickers. They even included 3 posters with my order! I was awestruck. That’s what I call kickass customer service.
People (aka Russ from SPRFLS) have kind of been criticizing Animal for going from a respected OG small parts company to a brand that sells almost exclusively clothing. With what I’m seeing in their softgoods… I don’t have a problem with that. According to me, the BMX industry needs brands like Animal who have a respected and established branding to produce stuff that gets attention from the general public.
Anyways, I just wanted to make tender link love to Animal and for making my purchasing experience awesome. If you ever have a doubt on their products, well rest assured, the stuff is legit, and the service is exemplary.
Check out their brand new webstore, buy their stuff.
I know, I know. I’m very late on this post, but a rather particular condition made it kind of difficult to a) get my paws on the actual album, and b) get to listen to it attentively and write up this little blurb.
Every time I hear it, I go nuts. “There’s a new Slayer album out!” What? ANOTHER ONE? Not that I’d like those excellent records to be fewer and further and between, but every time, I’m surprise that those… let’s call them veterans, have been composing more stuff. This is the 11th studio album for Slayer. ELEVEN. You’ve churned out just under a dozen albums over the course of almost 30 years, you’ve won two Grammys, conquered millions of fan worldwide and you’re still rocking it out, pumping out tracks that never seem to lose their charm. You’ve got to give it to those guys, they are one bunch of passionate fellows.
This years release had much to live up to. Following up Christ Illusion, an album which was critically acclaimed by just about everybody out there is by no means a simple task, yet they pull it off beautifully. With every new album comes the fear that the band will grow old, and will release a total piece of garbage that will kill them off, and up to now, except for the slight disappointment that was Undisputed Attitude, my fears haven’t become reality.
You have to admit that the single for Hate Worldwide, the only single which I had the luck to stumble upon, was very promising. Fast paced, aggressive, with shredding solos, blasting drums, everything you’d expect from Slayer, it had. Well after listening to World Painted Blood two times from “cover to cover” in addition to the odd song pick, I can without a doubt confirm that this is truly a Slayer album worthy of it’s authors.
By the sounds of it, I have no trouble imaging that some fans might think of this album as simply an extension of Christ Illusion. Maybe it’s the order of the tracks, but the album kind of had this same feel as the previous. Everybody seems to agree that the 2006 album definitely had a new sound, this little special something that made it different enough compared to God Hates Us All, and in a way I think that the new record follows the trend that Christ Illusion set.
Is it merely a sequel? I don’t think I’m enough of either a musician or a fan to go through the details of the question. Is it good? Certainly. Is it worth buying? Absolutely. Probably the best 10$ you’ll spend on a thrash metal album this year.
Here’s my personal favorite, Snuff. Enjoy!
In a previous post, I already told you how you can get a free, fully legit copy of Windows Server 2008 R2 directly from Microsoft if you are a student in pretty much any renown college or university. However, I understand that it is not exactly practical for anybody to run an unaltered server OS, as there are generally quite a couple of components missing for everyday use.
However, as I also quickly mentioned in a previous post, there is a way to convert your server installation to a full fledged desktop version, as detailed on this website dedicated to detail how it`s done. This post won’t walk you through what this website showcases already rather clearly, it is rather an overview of how I got my installation up and running, and what little tweaks I applied to it in order to make it friendlier for everyday use.
For the non tech savvy, don’t fret: the conversion takes about 30 minutes of your time for the average user with a basic understand of how Windows Works (that’s what it took me including the multiple required reboots), and if your computer knowledge is minimal it might end up taking you an hour, maximum. The process is almost entirely done using Windows dialogs, so there isn’t any sketchy DLL replacement or whatever to brick your new install.
First off, installation. All went smooth, just your regular run of the mill Windows install, with graphical install. I chose to install the “Standard” version of the OS as I wanted to be sure that additional server components wouldn’t be installed on my machine, but you could also have installed “Enterprise” had you wanted. Here is what the install looked like on first login, without any customization whatsoever.
Pretty barebones, although you do recognize the new, HUGE, Windows 7 style taskbar buttons. From then on, it was just a matter of installing the Desktop Experience package and getting rid of all the nasty server stuff, as detailed on the guide, and I ended up with this:
Sexy. However at this point I pretty much had the stock Windows 7 interface, and as everybody knows, stock sucks. So I went right ahead and put it to my liking: I flipped the task bar up to the top as I have always done it, steamlined my taskbar by enabling small icons, removing those pesky Windows icons and quicklaunch toolbar and grabbed a cool seasonal wallpaper from Interfacelift. I also installed my trusty Rocketdock, onto which I put some custom icons for the Adobe software, the Flickr Uploadr, as well as both the My Computer and Trash icons. The end result?
Add your drivers, software and gizmos, and it is indistinguishable from a Win7 install, both from an aesthetic and from a function point of view. I will never rave enough on Windows 7; having used all versions of graphical Windows with the exception of 3.1, I can without a doubt confirm that this is by far the most stable, quickest, and most user friendly version of Windows up to now. If you haven’t gotten your free copy yet, do so now, and if you decided not to… well you’re really missing out on something great.
