Camera Hacking

Posted on by Jordan

I feel a little silly calling this hacking.

Somebody did some really amazing work on the tool I used, but lets be honest all I did was copy a file.

This is really just a step in the path to a fancy camera, but after the photography club I remembered an old Lifehacker post about some software that you could run on some Cannon cameras to do some more advanced things.

What kinds of things?

Well for one, club members were extolling the virtues of “shooting in RAW” instead of JPG. The second reason is getting access to an on-screen histogram.

Why would I want these things? Well, honestly I don’t know first hand, but from what I have read, RAW saves a lot of extra data beyond what is visible. This means you can bring out dark or light parts of a picture in photo shop later. Basically it lets your pictures behave more like film in a developing room. The histogram does most of what having a light meeter would do apparently. (The next step is to read a lot more about how to use the tool, now that I know it works)

Some links:

The Lifehacker Post

The CHDK Wiki (probably more helpful)

I started off following the Lifehacker guide, and was having some problems because the buttons they were telling me to push weren’t working. Then I realized that instructions for the exact model of camera I was using were written up in the section for the Cannon SD800. Using those instructions, I was rather quickly able to get my camera setup with this little program.

I should explain the most amazing part, these changes are 100% in software, and only act in volatile memory, meaning I can always stick in a clean memory card, turn the camera on, and have it be just like it was before I started this process. In the mean time, I now have access to about 500 menu options, about four of which I understand right now.

Learning is fun though right? 🙂

-Jordan

Photography

Posted on by Jordan

One of the topics that has continued to come up as Heather and I search for more things we enjoy doing together is photography.

Until now we haven’t really done much with that information, other than say “we should figure out a way to get more into photography together”

As of a few days ago, we are now proud members of the Des Moines Camera Club.

We attended one meeting to try and get a feel for the club, and were really impressed by how friendly the long time members were. To say that they are more knowledgeable than we are about the subject is an understatement, but they were friendly and happy to talk about their hobby.

The speaker at our first meeting was a nature photographer with an incredible portfolio of work. While he could still be considered amateur, many of his pictures have been published in books and magazines.

I was really impressed by his work. Neither Heather nor I are really interested in doing nature photography per say, but it was still really interesting to have someone that good at the craft tell us about some of his work.

On a tangent, it was hard to ignore that the speaker was retired, and therefore had a much more flexible schedule to work with. I guess the lesson to take away from that is he put in a lot of time learning the skills needed to take good pictures over the years, and now that he has the time to really dig in and wait for that perfect shot he can get great pictures!

I think we are going to quickly find that Heather and I have drastically different interests within the broad scope of “photography” but at least it gives us something to talk about 🙂

We have been putting aside a little money each month to eventually buy a nice camera (did someone say Dave Ramsey?).  After one meeting with this club, I am a little concerned about fast you could burn cash with the hobby. Heather seems committed to the idea of not buying until her talents surpass the cameras we have now, but there seems to be a pretty substantial leap from the point-and-shoot models we have and what most people at the club are running. Maybe we can pick up last years model from somebody or something.

Whatever camera we end up using, and whatever topics we end up photographing, hopefully we can post some interesting stuff here over the next year!

-Jordan

Labor Day Weekend

Posted on by Jordan

What are we doing this weekend?

Are we driving half way across the US for a wedding? Are we attending showers or parties? Are we going on a trip somewhere?

NO!!!!

We are staying home! We are not doing anything really, just sitting around the apartment and enjoying spending some time with each other.

That doesn’t make for much of a post though. Luckily we had a busy week, so I will tell you a little about that. 🙂

Thursday night was the Iowa State University football team’s season opener. Heather had a work event including a tailgate and tickets for the game. Ames is only a short drive from Des Moines, so we headed up right after work Thursday night. We got there just in time to eat a quick sandwich and walk into the game.

As with many teams, ISU did not pick a challenging team for their season opener. It made for a game that wasn’t terribly interesting. It all felt kind of odd, I was surrounded by loyal fans, and I don’t feel any real antagonism towards the Cyclones, but I didn’t really feel much emotion about the game ether. In the end (or perhaps at halftime when we left…) I think it was fun, and I am really glad we went.

Heather and I realized it was our first college football game that wasn’t the Huskers or the Mavericks, and that alone made it kind of novel. Parking was a bit of a problem. Most of the campus was under water just a few weeks ago, meaning many of the grass areas people would normally park were too soft to use. Or at least I hope that is the reason parking was so bad, we wound up parking about a mile away on some random side street.

On the way out, we saw an…. enthusiastic and perhaps geeky fan:

I started laughing, and stopped to take a picture.

It is at this point I discovered something somewhat sad about my wife.

…

She had no idea what that guy was dressed up as. I made sounds of outrage and left her guessing for a few minutes, but it became clear she wasn’t going to all of a sudden remember.

At the time of taking the picture, I had been planning on asking Heather if she thought he was in the 501st. I figured I would have to explain that group, but I thought it would be an interesting topic… I mean we had a rather long walk ahead of us.

I love my wife, but it is clear I have not fully converted her to a sci-fi fan yet. On the bride side, she did like Battlestar! 🙂

-Jordan

P.S. I came *this close* to blurring the faces in that picture of us in the ISU stadium, but I thought that might be taking it a little far. All the same I do feel more than a little conflicted living in Iowa this time of year.

Adventureland!

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What did Heather and I do last weekend you ask?

We went to Adventureland!

For those of you who didn’t know, and it’s probably a lot of you, Adventureland is an amusement park in Des Moines.

It isn’t the biggest park I have ever been too, but we had fun.

We probably wouldn’t have gone, but both our companies happened to have chosen the same day for their company outing to Adventureland.

Heather and I both remembered kind of liking roller coasters, but after two different ones, we weren’t sure they were all that much fun. I am going to blame having eaten some rather greasy food and the heat for part of my upset stomach… but the fact remains I kind of felt old.

The newer areas of the park all focus on water rides. Nearly all the slides require a tube to go down. I didn’t take the time to try all of them out, but the ones I did try were really fun!

They also have a feature called “the lazy river.”  Its an interesting idea, they basically recreated what tubing down a nice calm creek would be like… assuming the creek has concrete banks, chlorinated water and is packed full of strangers. I think the hot day probably pushed more people into the water, but the lazy river was way too crowded to be “lazy.”

We forgot to pack a camera, so I will have to put up yet another post without pictures /sigh.

The final verdict is that, with free admission, the park was well worth our afternoon. If we would have been required to pay retail for our tickets… it’s hard to say, maybe if we had paced ourselves better with the roller coasters 🙂

-Jordan

New Laptop!

Posted on by Jordan

As you probably recall, the laptop that Heather had when we got married is in the process of dying.

I have been watching for sales on laptops fairly closely, and finally found one. Amazon had an Acer Aspire 5251 for under $400 shipped.

I realize Acer isn’t really on the good end of the reliability spectrum that I linked before, but when you consider price and features in the equation, I felt like a little failure risk was acceptable.

I was going to post a picture, but … well you know what a laptop looks like.

We have actually had the laptop for a few days now, but I just finally finished doing all the setup today. Acer didn’t load the machine down with as many junk applications as HP did, but there was still a little more junk installed than I would like.

This is my first brush with Windows 7. I have absolutely zero complaints so far. The old HP laptop was painfully slow to do basically anything, despite having a passably beefy CPU under the hood (it was on the low end of desktop-replacement-class laptops, with the heft to prove it)  This new machine is wonderfully snappy!

We haven’t had a chance to use it much, but so far the slightly smaller screen doesn’t seem to be that noticeable.

I think we are going to enjoy the fact that the battery life is longer than 15 minutes. Granted, that isn’t really HP’s fault so much as what happens to battery packs when they age, but it sill makes the new laptop seem pretty nice.

I wish I could think of more to say… I am really excited about having it, but laptops do end up being somewhat generic. … “Yay a computer, it does computer-type things!”

Hope you are enjoying your weekend!

-Jordan

RSS Hax!

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Well… to be honest, not really hacks, I installed a plugin that (in theory) will seamlessly migrate the RSS feed to the blog through a feedburner feed.

If you don’t know what that is don’t worry about it. I just like to play with addons for the site once in a while, although this one shouldn’t really be visible.

While I am thinking of technical things, have I mentioned Lastpass?

It is a password management tool, that is frankly amazing. I was getting really uncomfortable with the number of passwords I was trying to remember, and getting more and more lazy about using the same password for “unimportant” logins. I knew that was a bad situation but I didn’t really trust a plugin to deal with that kind of thing.

Then the Security Now podcast that I try and keep up with, did an episode on Lastpass. I was really excited. I installed it, really with the idea that I could offer to to Heather as a way to help her beef up her password system. (side note, Heather HATES the Security Now podcast. Her life usually gets more complicated after I learn something new and terrifying on the podcast) So far I love Lastpass, but I don’t know if it is really something Heather is going to put up with. The fiddle-factor seems just a tiny bit too high. Also from what I can tell it would be a little hard to share a computer with the plugin running, unless I suppose you both knew the master password… I am not saying I wouldn’t tell Heather what mine is, I just don’t think she would be crazy about a 15 character password. 🙂

-Jordan

oh! I almost forgot, if you happen to be interested, the plugin I used is here:  http://flagrantdisregard.com/feedburner/

And a big hat tip to my sister, who actually told me about this four months ago, and I never got around to setting it up.

State Fair Reflections

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I have been to the Nebraska and Iowa State fairs.

Iowa has what people consider to be a successful fair, and Nebraska recently closed their fairgrounds.

(Granted Nebraska build a new venue, but the impression is that their fair wasn’t so hot)

Having been to both, I can’t really tell the difference. Maybe I am just not a fair person.

My suspicion is that Iowa having slightly more than double the population density of Nebraska helps a lot more than people want to admit.

Omaha being the largest city, not the capital, and not centrally located, all count against the Nebraska fair.

From what I can see in Iowa Des Moines is basically it. The state appears to have more large towns (large from my prospective having grown up in a town of 1000), without having a real competition for “big events.” A concert tour isn’t going to stop in Ames, or Cedar Rapids, or anywhere else in the state… it is going to be in Des Monies. I am imagining that most people are more willing to travel there thanks to it’s status as the big city in the state.

I don’t know how many people come in from out of town… also I am not going to spend the time doing any research… so this is just my musings. It just seems like geography plays into their favor way more than I would have realized a year ago if you had asked me about the relative fairs.

I guess maybe I should re-emphasize my point both fairs are largely ag shows, with food and some live music. I have no idea what would draw someone to spend more than one day wondering around eating a corn-dog looking at sheep. I had always assumed the “successful” fairs had some amazing special things that made them awesome, and Lincoln was lacking. Unless we missed it, they don’t.

-Jordan

Weekend Grilling

Posted on by Jordan

Heather has been out of town for a few days thanks to a work trip.

A few notes from the odds and ends I stayed busy with:

It is possible to cook bacon on a grill:

If you try it, be aware that your going to have to give the grilling process 100% of your attention, as there is going to be a lot of fire. Maybe have a bottle of water handy or something.

This is exciting because Heathers primary objection to bacon (well ignoring the packing-plant episode) is the fact that it makes our entire apartment smell like grease for days. I may have found a work-around. 🙂

I went to the local gun range for a little target practice. If your like me, and maybe don’t shoot as well as you would like with a pistol, you might feel self conscious with all the other shooters around you. I realized though, if you just keep shooting the same set of targets, eventually you look pretty competent. Also I think I was improving rather quickly as time went on… still nothing to brag about, but improvement.

I thought I had a third point for this list but it seems to have escaped me… Hope your having a good weekend! 🙂

-Jordan

State Fair (The Story)

Posted on by Jordan

Well, somehow the entire week got away from me before I sat down to write down some of what we saw at the fair…

Better late than never I hope!

Heather, a friend of hers and I went to the state fair over the weekend.

The fair here is a big deal! I haven’t ever lived in the city that hosts a state fair before, so maybe some of that is normal. When I say “a big deal” I mostly mean that the majority of the people I talk to have plans to at least visit the fair. Often those people speak highly of the fair, again not something I typically saw a lot of in other cities. (I guess I have really only lived in 3 cities, despite my habit of frequent moves) The website for the fair promised 57 different foods on a stick, among other attractions. I didn’t really dig into the website just figured people were positive on it, I would just show up and be amazed.

We set out for the fair late afternoon Saturday, with only a vague idea where the fairgrounds even were. Once we started seeing people hawking their lawns as parking we figured we should find something and start walking, eventually settling on the local VFW chapter area, selling their lot at a slight discount to the average yard (three dollars instead of five!) They made their money back by selling us all water on our way out of the parking lot, but it was warm, and they promised it was cheaper than on the fairgrounds (turns out this wasn’t strictly speaking true, but at least they weren’t over-charging)

Another ten dollars a head got us onto the grounds, and we were at the Iowa State Fair! First up… empty lots, and some combines. I was trying to let the ladies guide our trip, but those combines looked pretty cool. I guess they came up with some neat features in the (20?) years that have passed after the manufacturing of the combine I last had a chance to really look at the internal workings of.

We then headed to a large building that had tiles all around it vaguely hinting at quilting or crafts of some sort. Once inside, we found out it was an arena, and something having to do with horses was currently in progress. There weren’t any signs, and the guy wanted us to buy a ticket or leave so we left, not sure what we missed.

Then we found our way into the adjacent barns, full of the horses not currently participating in the unknown event. I kind of forgot how big horses can be! I also started to realize how much domesticated animal knowledge I had that was new to Heather. We then headed over to a cattle barn, apparently full of dairy cattle. I don’t know if it was heat stress, or something about dairy cows, but practically every cow in that barn had visible ribs and extreme hip-points. I think it kind of set off my subconscious “there is plague and pestilence here, get out!” warnings… so I was glad to leave that barn, but we got to see lots of cows, and again I found I knew the answers to more questions than I would have guessed.

(update, I just did a quick search for “dairy cow” pictures, apparently they all look like they are starving… weird)

We then found our way into another arena, this one free, featuring a two-horse-team pulling competition. I have no idea how it really worked, but  it was kind of fun to watch! Eventually that got old though, so we headed out in search of new things.

We found the 4H steer auction. I have vague memories of going to a stock-auction with my dad when I was a kid. It was kind of fun to see one again. It was also another first for Heather, and technically a first for me as I hadn’t seen an auction where they did it one bovine at a time before. As with the team-pulling the novelty wore off quickly, and it wasn’t like we were planning on buying beef-on-the-hoof.

Somewhere in transition to the 4H craft barn I found an ice cream cone, and we walked past the Iowa Pork booth, featuring the one and only “pork chop on a stick” however the line for that was probably 75 people long. I figured there would be other exciting “on a stick options later”

After the craft barn, full of nice but not really noteworthy fruit, vegetables, flowers, and craft type things, we headed to a nursery barn. The barn featured young examples of most of your stereotypical farmyard animals. To be honest, my thoughts when I walked in were basically “eh, I have seen this before” but I figured it would be fun for the rest of our little group. They had video playing of a live sheep birth, not the most photogenic thing you can imagine. I think it kind of shocked Heather. I don’t know if it was the video or just the fact that we had been browsing a lot of barnyard animals, but we didn’t give that venue much coverage, and then headed out again.

We stopped to get a Falafel for our guest in the main vendor area, then headed over to the non 4H food building to see if we could locate some winning sticky-buns a woman from church had entered. We saw a lot of tasty looking food, but the sticky-bun entries were no longer on display.  A little more wonder-by sight seeing and it was starting to get late. I realized I hadn’t actually tried any foods on a stick, so we headed back to the main food vending strip, to see what we could find.

I have no idea where the exotic options were, maybe I was just being overwhelmed by choices and didn’t notice them, but it appeared that everybody in the area we were in only sold corn-dogs as their “on a stick” option. I didn’t really want a corn-dog so I searched a little and eventually settled on cotton candy. Not really exotic, but it was on a stick, and I thought it sounded good. For the record I don’t really like cotton candy… I don’t know if that happened because I haven’t had it for so long, or if I didn’t like it that much before and just forgot.

After our last pass of the food, we headed back to the car, feeling like we saw at least a good swath of the fair.

-Jordan

P.S. Sorry for the mammoth post, I just wasn’t sure this was interesting enough to warrant splitting into several posts.