Monthly Archive for August, 2008
Or how I learned to stop worrying, and love Apple’s Time Capsule. Which, with the purpose of having you empathize with the effort it took to finally find a solution to my Time Capsule woes — a device I bought to rid us of previous problems, not to cause us new ones — requires a break down of our rather intricate home network setup.
Coming into the house we have a 20mbit tube, the router of which acts as a DHCP server and then goes directly into the 500GB Time Capsule under the TV, which is the backbone for the tethered part of the network as well as network entry-point for a 250GB HDD where I mainly store my music, its internal switch hooks up to the 1TB NAS, the media center Mac Mini (Godiva) running Plex and a wire running into our bedroom — to my workstation setup — where it connects to a 1Gbit switch, which goes into an old 802.11g Airport Extreme — which is also the print-point — and my MacBook Pro (Valkyrie), when I need the speed o’ teh wire. Right next to the Time Capsule, there’s an Airport Express, tethered to the Xbox 3601 (Xuul) and a PS3 (Glortho) on wifi. And finally there’s a second Airport Express in the kitchen, again, simply for streaming music to the speaker there. Finally, aside from the consoles and the Mac Mini, there’s a MacBook Pro, an old Powerbook (Freya) and an iPhone (Monolith), plus various other devices from time to time.
Now, here comes the interesting part. I had been having some serious problems getting my money’s worth out of the Time Capsule up until this week. Not only did it suffer bandwidth degradation over time, but Time Machine would often have problems mounting the backup sparse-image on the Time Capsule (even if it was already mounted!)2, which was concerning, as I’ve come to rely quite heavily on Time Machine keeping my stuff safe. Needless to say, I was mildly annoyed that the two things I bought the thing for, speed and backup, weren’t working as advertised.
And I had tried literally everything I could think of. At the end of the day, I had the Time Capsule set up as a WDS main unit, with the other three 802.11g airports running WDS remote. WDS being necessary for bridging the ethernet ports of the airport expresses, and it wasn’t working as intended.
I had a sneaking suspicion that the g-units were what was bringing the network down in speed, but there wasn’t anything I could do about that since I really needed the g-segment. So it took me a little while, not being a networks expert, to figure out how to go about it, but what finally saved me was this:
I dropped support for 802.11g on the Time Capsule and instead tethered the Airport Extreme to the ‘backbone’ and set it up as a WDS main on its own 802.11g wifi network, with the Express’s hooking into it as remotes. Then I ditched support for g on the Time Capsule, and created an 802.11n wireless network, and set it up as 5Ghz (wide channels), and not 2.4Ghz, which is not only where our own g network is, but also a rather crowded frequency in our neighborhood.
Both wifi networks are on the same backbone, meaning I can easily stream music from my MacBook Pro to the Airtunes ports, control the MBP from my iPhone and otherwise go back and forth exactly as I please. And it’s fast enough for me to backup, serve music and even, for hobbiest levels, manage photos wirelessly.
Awesome.
- Which is fucked for two reasons. One, the Xbox doesn’t have bult-in wifi, and I’m not paying the price MS wants for their wifi module, so it has to be tethered. And two, the Airport Express is only there because the Time Capsule does everything except Airtunes. Gee, thanks Apple. [↩]
- Check out the support forums; they’re flooded with people suffering Time Capsule woes. And not a word from Apple. I’ve had quite a few friends ask me about it as a solution to their problems, and I haven’t been able to recommend it to them, not least because of Apple’s lack of support for this unit. Not at least I can tell them what worked for me, but that’s hardly good enough. [↩]
I love books. And I amass books. So much so, that between the two of us — Rikke and I — there is no doubt who is in charge of the appropriation and storage of dead trees, which might not have been so paradoxical, had Rikke not been a librarian…
Even as an experienced photography-enthusiast, people remain the hardest subject for me to capture. Not only do I rarely find myself in a situation where I’ve brought my DSLR1, the social conditions have to be right as well, for me not to be considered borderline rude. And when the stars align, I pop out the camera and…
Well, we’re all a ‘cheese’‐conditioned lot, who look into the camera, smile and wait for the ‘I release you from this spell’‐click. Sure, you get people drunk, it’s another story — rabbit-ear-fingers, cheek licking and funny hats — but the basic premise remains the same; namely ‘acting’ for the camera. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it yields nice in-focus photos of happy people who’re willing to hold still long enough for me to adjust the focal length and take it up an f-stop or two to get the shot right.
But the ones I really want and the ones that stay with me, are the stolen ones. And I don’t mean paparazzi-style 1500mm gyro-mounted zoom objectives from a hilltop 2 clicks away and down into your garden where you frolic around in your birthday suit. Just friends and family being themselves, unaware of the CCD ready to reach out and snatch away their soul.
Those shots are elusive. Real life doesn’t stop while I switch from auto to manual focus; which in turn means that when they once in a blue moon do happen, they’re that much better. In fact, out-of-focus snapshots are often even better than cheese-shots by pure virtue of the intimacy of the subject(s).
When people know they’re being photographed they stiffen up somehow, suck in what can be sucked in, squint, go from ‘listening’ to ‘listening, intellectually’2 and lose that spark of the unexpected, the serendipitous. You could go so far as to say that they lose their ‘soul’. But that’s just silly, so I won’t do that.
Then again, maybe it’s really the other way around. By virtue of my understanding of the construction of ‘cheese-shots’; that little else is happening between the portrayed than what meets the eye, which is what makes even the most pedestrian stolen shot unexplored and unexplained territory.
What I’m driving at, is that in the end, when all else fails, a chimp will never give you the cheese-look and that’s why chimps always work.
- Let’s face it, it isn’t really photography if it isn’t an SLR. In my case, it’s a Sony α100, usually with my favorite Sony 50mm ƒ/1.4 lens or the all-around Sigma 17-70mm ƒ/2.8 – 4.5. And every once in a while, when I can be bothered lugging it around, my Konica Minolta 75-300mm ƒ/4.5 – 5.6 ‘you can run, but you can’t hide’-lens. [↩]
- I do all of the above. I have checklists for it. And procedures. [↩]
Copenhagen is a treasure trove of street art, with its hip and healthy anti-everything sub-cultures. A living mosaic created in unison by hundreds of more or less talented people, some of whom take great pride in their work and then of course a large following who are satisfied leaving their mark across the city, in much the same manner as a dog would. We’re lucky, in that living in the heart of Copenhagen, we often come across some pretty interesting pieces, some of which I’ve documented. And amongst them, the above, rather obscure and easily overlooked one, is a favorite of mine.
Also check out the Little Brother project.
In laying down this new design — Kalamari — I decided to try and go with a fluid-width layout for once. Traditionally I haven’t held it in particularly high regard; but I experiemented with it for a few hours, and ended up somehow finding it a natural fit alongside the ‘book-like’ typography.
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
T. S. Eliot
There’s going to be some temporary turbulence while I play a bit with WordPress 2.6 before upgrading to Habari.
So, I’m kind of into soundtracks. And I’m kinda, sorta, maybe, a little… a little anal about my music library and album artwork and those sorts of things. So when I came across a collection of iTunes Library-grade resolution soundtrack covers that I hadn’t even seen before, I think I peed my pants a little. A little.
I think most of the ‘non-normal’ ones are fan-made; but contrary to most fan-made things on the internet, these are actually in pretty good taste. And if nothing else, they’re great as alternates for the real albums, when you have unofficial extended cuts, promos or other cover-less albums in need of some nice coverflow-friendly graphics.
Check out this one for Fight Club which matches the limited edition DVD, or this Pan’s Labyrinth by Mike Mignola, a whole slew of very cool Zodiac ones and some Life Aquatic and Lord of the Rings ones under L. A neat Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within one, which matches the artbook (good ol’ Goldenthal doesn’t let us down). And this There Will Be Blood cover certainly kicks the crap out of the one that came with my purchase.
But reigning high above all the others, is Kill Bill (I always loved the Japanese ‘Kill is Love’ series of posters) and Star Wars.
The week before last, when Rikke and I were doing what we do best — namely nothing — I read, in-amongst several other books, the 1983 George Lucas biography by Dale Pollock, Skywalking: The Life and Films of George Lucas.
Now, I wouldn’t say that I’m obsessive compulsive about Star Wars, or George Lucas for that matter — others would; I don’t flatter myself that way — but I’m certainly a fan above the ordinary, having read several biographies, not to mention a whole heap of other books related either directly to Star Wars or the industries that sprung up in its wake. So, I’ve been around the block on this… Once or twice.
Rikke and I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight today, and I thought, as the last man in the world to do so, I’d share my opinion on it, now that all the hype is (finally) dying out again.
Yeah, it’s pretty good. Rikke was less enthusiastic, but then she hated the first one, where I was only mildly entertained. But, almost as expected, we were both less than mind-blown by it. Going in, I was expecting a 7 (of 10), and that’s pretty much what I got.
I met Angelo Badalamenti on Blue Velvet and since then he has composed music for all my films. He’s like my brother.The way we work is: I like to sit next to him on the piano bench. I talk and Angelo plays. He plays my words. But sometimes he doesn’t understand my words, so he plays very badly. then I say, “No, no, no, no, Angelo.” And I change my words a little bit and he plays differently. And then I say, “No, no, no, no, Angelo,” and I change my words. And somehow through this process he will catch something, and I’ll say, “That’s it!” And then he starts going with his magic, down that correct path. It’s so much fun. If Angelo liveed next door to me, I’d like to do this every day. But he lives in New Jersey, and I live in Los Angeles.
- David Lynch, Catching the Big Fish, Hardcover ed., Tarcher/Penguin, 2006, p. 65
I’m sorry for this past week’s permission-problem-outage, but despite having vacation, it’s been everything but quiet around here. And before we get on to other business, let me just take one more opportunity to congratulate Rasmus and Anna-Vera on their wedding this weekend, it was fantastic!
