It Seemed Worth Saying

Long overdue update/roundup of the events of the last year or so. Those who follow along regularly will no doubt be familiar with much of this material, but today’s recollections will be delicately adorned with details gleaned thru the perspective of time. I’m pretty sure it’d be labeled as a sermon if I was in one of those lunatic cults. And no, I’m not denigrating religion just because they haven’t formed one around me yet! I’m in a college town now. Let me think…if I grow a beard and quit pulling errant hairs out of my ears I WOULD look more properly prophetic. Hmmm. But I digress.

I’ve been here awhile now. Year and a half? In that zone. Two winters and one summer. Second summer staring me right in the face. To those of you who watched me scratch and claw my way here, those of you who helped, those of you who just rode along on my social media clown car, I salute you. Getting here to The Free People’s Republic in the time and manner I did involved crazy insane stupid risks that could have gone horribly awry at so many different levels, but didn’t. Any honest accounting of the many possible pitfalls will require an advance in quantum computing. So if you ask me if it was worth it of course I’ll answer in the affirmative because everything ended up going affirmatively well. At least in the aggregate.

Colorado is everything I remember it being, memories built from both a youthful summer spent in Loveland to my early adult career in the Air Force in Colorado Springs. Everything good that I remember about Colorado is just as it was, only better. There is a catch. The fly in the ointment. It’s an expensive place to live because so many people want to live here. If I wasn’t a fabulously radiant young widower making his abode in a 93 Dodge Minivan, my bon vivant lifestyle, let alone time for musings upon it would be nil. I live on squat and I live well on it. I didn’t realize what an art form that really is but I’ve always harbored an inner confidence of my artistic ability, at least in the Autism-Alzheimer’s spectrum. I’m pretty sure I got at least a little bit of both of those going on by now.

I miss my dog. I miss my wife. All in all. I’m still loving life.

Enjoy.

2014 in Review

The WordPress “Stat-bot” prepared a 2014 annual report for my blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 30,000 times in 2014. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 11 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Yosemite Junction

One Button Upgrade

There are aging and arthritic tree sloths with quicker reflexes than the memory/processor/hard-drive combo in my MacMini!

In under a minute I will be starting the ugrade process for my MacMini, to move it into Yosemite Valley OSX.  I am nearly completed with the backing up of what is going to get backed up. I am a bit nervous since my barely tolerable MacMini is crippled by whatever minimum RAM memory configuration it came loaded with.  Curiously, I have not “user-servicable” upgraded it.  It also has a mechanical hardrive that probably came out of the Apollo era.  Live-bogging the upgrade after the jump.

Sony DSC QX10 – First Month Review

Good day to all my friends and frenemies alike!  I’m taking a minute here to update the situation in regard to my feelings on the most expensive bit of electronics I’ve added to my collection in the last sixty days.  It was just under a month ago that I finally got my Sony DSC-QX10 for “Christmas” and I now have a fair amount of use under my belt since my earlier initial review here.  I’m happy to say that my initial positive impressions have held out over the longer haul, but that said, there are a couple quirky things I would like to point out regarding ownership of this excellent bit of cutting edge camera technology.

Minor Perturbations

Since my earlier review, I have had time to play with the movie functionality of the lens a little bit more.  I mounted it to the top of my moped helmet as a kind of poor man’s GoPro yesterday in hopes of documenting my first moped ride of the new year. My past moped videos have been taken with my iPhone, and lacked both a proper mount or any video stabilization.  I could hardly contain my excitement at the prospect of testing this new Sony cam movie setting if for no other reason that the added video stabilization feature!!  Upon arrival at my first destination, Aldi’s, I found the Sony PlayMemories app had gone haywire somewhere along the route of my initial filming of the trip to Aldi’s.  I was forced to physically shut off the Sony lens power to make sure I had ended the video.  The red recording light on the Sony was ON at the time of my forced shutdown.  I encountered a similar problem later in my travails as I attempted to document the ride from our horse stable to another local grocery store near my house.

Expounding upon the Issue

I found I had a real problem when I got home and tried to import the video files off the microSD card.  Videos do not stream back to the iPhone via the ad hoc wifi connection like photos can be made to do, nor can they be offloaded via USB cable from the camera itself.  You must use a card reader to transfer captured video off the QX10 to move it to another device.  I found both my memory card readers unable to make heads or tails (or even recognize that the memory card was inserted) when trying to import them into iPhoto on my Mac Mini using the full size SD card adapter that came with my micro SD card.

This tiny memory card is absolutely necessary for the Sony Cam to record video and is not included with the purchase of the Sony camera (Shame on you Sony!!).  By using the full size SD card adapter that came with the 16G micro SD card, I have been able to transfer files, both video and stills, with no issues in the past month.  I figured I had buggered the micro SD card somehow when the PlayMemories app went haywire on the moped ride video.

The Solution

I had to make a choice on whether to buy and test a new micro sd card for twenty euro or spend twenty nine euro and get the “SD card reader to lightning connector” accessory for my iPad Mini.  It is something I was planning on adding to my blogging bugout bag anyway, so I figured I might as well go ahead an make the investment and see what happened when I placed that ‘buggered” micro sd card into the full size adapter and plugged it into my iPad.  Bottom line.  It worked flawlessly, and I was able to import and clear the card through the iPhoto interface on my iPad.  Look forward to an upcoming moped ride video coming to my social stream any time now!

Here’s a sampling of the photos I’ve taken with the QX10.  These are downsized a bit for my website.  Most, if not all of them are available in full size on my Flickr account, the link to which is accessible (as are all my social media links) on the SOCIAL tab on this website.

Commando Mode Handheld Lens Only

Commando Mode QX10 handheld w/o iPhone

Last Commando Shot QX10

Walking on Water

Real Kings of the Castle

Portal to Paradise

Escargot Outlet in Ahaus

Downtown Interactive Brass Fountain

One White Duck

Dutch Bike Storage at Train Depot

Nighttime in Enschede

Romantic Holland Night Street Scene

For Sale: rodenbach.nl

Hotel Rodenbach – Enschede NL

Zoom into Solar Power

Enjoy.

Wednesday Tech – Part 5S

The iPhone 5s and 5c have arrived.

Meanwhile, my iPhone 4 is still going strong, and if I’m lucky, by the time it blanks out, Apple might be shipping the iPhone 7. In the meantime, I’m excited at the prospect of moving to iOS7 in the next couple weeks whenever Apple drops the final consumer release to the public.

Technicolor

There have been numerous tech improvements since the iPhone 4.  Processor and camera-related upgrades are de rigueur.  Now we have colors, though to be honest, it’s a brave soul who doesn’t already armor their iDevices in some sort of protective colored condom.

It’s market genius for Apple to promote customers NOT using a case in order to show off their fancy new colored gadgets.  Lots of broken phones to be replaced means more profit. You pay your money and you take your chances.

Aside from the fingerprint reader, the beltway press seems dinterested in the latest chip improvements or hardware advances in Apple’s new offerings, and much more interested that they didn’t drop the price of the colorful plastic model (5c) enough to make a dent in the Android-awash smartphone markets in central Bangladesh.  That’s something I never would have wondered about, let alone contemplated happening, but then I live on planet Earth and don’t get paid big bucks to write deep insipid analysis like Farhad Manjoo.

Tech Thoughts

To be fair, tech improvements beyond the iPhone 4 are far less critical to me than the operating system that runs on it (and the app environment it supports). For most of the world, anything beyond the iPhone 4 is more than adequate technology. That level of tech has now dropped to a zero price point (on contract).  If you want the added bling of color or the latest in Apple smartphone tech it’s available for a couple hundred bucks more.

I’m hard pressed to come up with a defensible reason why upgrading to the latest model iPhone, just to get the bells and whistles of fingerprint scanners, faster chips and camera magic is worth it.  The camera upgrade intrigues me, but I’m savvy enough to know from experience that at the end of the day, it’s still a “phone cam”.

Enjoy