hertenberger.co.za

Born at 02:57, Sebastian has arrived.

Mom is doing well, as is the little guy.

Posted via email from mhertenberger’s posterous

The Lego Carousel is another special edition set with some nice features for building and playing. As an exclusive, this set won’t be available for very long and it is aimed at the more experienced builder.

#10196 is made up of 3263 pieces and includes a number of minifigs. Best of all, the carousel is motorized and includes a sound brick that plays music whilst in operation.

Many highly detailed horses and swing boats are built onto the platform and the tent top is made of canvas for extra realism.

The carousel measures an impressive 38cm across and is roughly 35cm high.

Rumours have been rampant that Apple will launch a new device sometime soon. Initially, reports indicated that a netbook would be available sometime in 2010, then late 2009. More and more stories of a potential tablet have made the rounds with a report in today’s Financial Times also hinting that such a device is on its way.

According to the FT article

The new touch-sensitive device Apple is working on will have a screen that may be up to 10 inches diagonally. It will connect to the internet like the iPod Touch – probably without phone capability but with access to Apple’s online stores.

Whether this is all idle speculation or true fact remains to be seen. Personally, I’d be very interested in an Internet tablet that could connect using either HSDPA or wireless LAN. I imagine it to be a large iPod Touch with a screen better suited to Internet browsing and video playback. The 10″ screen hinted at in the FT article would be more than large enough and there is no need for the tablet to provide any additional functionality over and above what the iPod Touch can provide: connectivity to the Internet, ability to play back audio and video and the ability to load applications from the App Store. It would be the ideal solution to read books and, with the colour screen, huge competition for the Amazon Kindle.

Chances are very good that such a device, made by Apple, would be sold at an absolute premium. Even so, the CrunchPad with its anticipated reasonable price, would stand no chance. Apple has the ability to define a product genre and make products previously considered ridiculous  indispensable to consumers.

Here’s hoping there is such a thing as the Apple tablet device…

via FT.com

There’s a rather annoying bug in Photoshop Elements 6 for the Mac. As you may have noticed in my post on What’s on my iPhone, the animation of the screens is a tad fast. Way too fast, in fact. Problem is, the animation interval in Elements 6 can be changed, but has no effect.

Clicking the field with the mouse is of no use. Instead, one needs to use the tab key to progress to the delay field. Type any value in and watch the animation…there is no change from the 0.2 default.

That means one is stuck with a rather frightening delay value of 0.2. It results in quick animated sequences like this:

Trying to change the delay value and seeing no effect caused me considerable frustration. A search on the Interwebs turned up some additional information:  Adobe‘s TechNote on the issue is rather useless, indicating that the value can be changed but won’t be effective.

Most annoyingly, there is no indication that the bug will be fixed anytime soon.

Posted via email from mhertenberger’s posterous

As is to be expected, a flurry of activity is underway in all parts of South Africa to prepare for the big event in 2010. Not to be outdone, a new Garmap version is set to be launched in that year, hopefully with additional mapping detail, but definitely to include addresses for businesses. If there are tourists to keep happy and provide services for, then that strategy makes sense.

To get as much information as possible, the Garmap team is providing a service to allow business owners to enter information pertaining to their services. To register and enter information that may be included in the 2010 map set, go to this link. A fair amount of information is required, specifically contact details and a company registration number.

Users are assured that certain data will be kept confidential and will not appear in the listing…

This is an excellent initiative to promote South African businesses and to give those business owners the opportunity of increasing their exposure. It’s highly likely that a large number of foreign tourists will rely on GPS devices, not only during the period the 2010 World Cup takes place, but also beyond that.

The first round of pimping my 5D Mark II involved the attachment of a dedicated battery grip and the E1 hand strap. Those accoutrement make the camera run for longer and easier to hold.

The next round gears the 5D Mark II to the task of video recording. With the inclusion of manual control during HD video recording, this DSLR is a replacement for a camcorder, provided one remembers that no single recording can extend beyond 4GB and that extended use can make the camera too hot to handle.

The first addition caters for both stills and video. It’s a simple upgrade, namely the insertion of a 16GB Sandisk UDMA compact flash card. Ultra DMA flash memory is an absolute requirement for the camera to be able to record video. With compact flash cards rated at lower speeds, the camera’s internal buffer fills up and cannot be flushed to the external storage quickly enough. Of course, the recording of photos (even in RAW format) will function to compact flash cards that are not UDMA-enabled.

Though expensive, it makes sense to plan for the eventuality that one will be utilizing all features of the camera in a single session of use. It’s not really that easy to switch from one compact flash card to another. With the 16GB card, I have more than enough space for RAW photos and the occasional video clip without having to worry too much about available free space.

Good video quality shouldn’t be let down by poor audio. Though the EOS 5D Mark II features an integrated microphone, that component has no hope of matching the awesome visual output the camera can deliver. The obvious addition of a decent stereo microphone makes sense. My choice came down to a Sennheiser MKE 400 versus a RODE VideoMic. In the end, the RODE was selected. My choice was based on a similar price for both, but the RODE package includes additional accessories that incur an extra cost when opting for the Sennheiser. The fact that I picked Australian over German is something I’d rather not get into

The RODE VideoMic boasts some impressive audio recording capabilities. Its large size cannot entirely be blamed on the fact that it requires a 9V block battery to operate. It’s sturdy, weighs almost 300g and is mounted to the camera using the hot shoe attachment.

To secure the microphone, it is simply pushed onto the accessory shoe and fastened. Next, the 3.5mm jack is plugged into the audio in port of the 5D Mark II. The 9V battery is inserted once the top mic section has been removed. Once all that is done, one of three switches on the back of the microphone turns it on. Three switches in total are available on the back the mic: pad, power and HPF. The power switch does what one would expect it to. The pad setting permits the photographer to alter the level at which the device levels audio input. Either at 0db or -10db. The High Pass Filter may be used to filter out unwanted noise, though using that setting may affect the overall audio quality somewhat.

The accessory that is included with the VideoMic that is a separate USD 40 purchase for the Sennheiser is the oddly-named dead kitten windshield. The dead kitten covers the microphone to assist with noise reduction caused by wind, for example. In any case, it adds a touch of class to the microphone…that faux fur effect

The dead kitten is best left on the microphone to assist with suppression of ambient noise. The only problem with mounting such a large microphone on the DSLR is that an attempt at peering through the viewfinder will result in a pump to the forehead. As all video work on the 5D Mark II is done using LiveView, that presents no real issue.

Performance of the microphone is very good as I’ve found in some very limited testing. The runtime the 9V battery will provide is something I can’t comment on. Should be good for a number of hours, I expect.

My fully pimped EOS 5D Mark II looks something like this when all the bits are attached.

Pretty radical for an SLR, no?

SpeckyBoy has a collection of music album covers recreated using Lego. A sample of two of my favourites:

recreating this one by Oasis:

And Moby‘s Play

from the original cover art

See more of them here.

Of late I’ve been a bit obsessed with getting various operating systems to read various file systems. The main reason for that is that I needed to migrate various systems: first the stuff I had stored on the ext3 file system on the Mandriva-based katana to the new iMac.

I had the Drobo connected to the Linux system using the USB 2.0 interface and used rsync on a daily basis to back up my data.  I wasn’t in the mood to fiddle with ext3 on the Drobo as I wanted to have access to the storage system from other systems that run Windows. The result was that my Drobo was formatted NTFS, resulting in the four 1TB drives being partitioned into one 2TB and  one 800MB partition. Certainly not ideal, but workable. With the arrival of the iMac, I decided to trash that partitioning scheme and opt for a file system that handled thin provisioning in a slightly more intelligent way than NTFS does. The result was a 12 hour exercise during which all data was copied from the Drobo to various external hard drives, a partitioning of the Drobo for a maximum possible provision of 16TB using HFS+ and then a copy back of all the data. Until my DroboShare arrives (the shipment destined for South Africa was tampered with in Amsterdam and all DroboShare units stolen), the Drobo is connected to the iMac through the FireWire 800 port. It’s fast!

From the iMac, I’ve shared the Drobo making it available to all other systems in the house via the wired and wireless network. But, Windows systems cannot mount Mac volumes natively. For a while, I’ve used MacDrive and found that it works exceptionally well. The latest version runs without issue on the 64-bit Windows 7 installation. The only disadvantage I can name is the price: MacDrive 8 costs USD 49.95 for a single system. That’s pricey, but worth it. I’m more at ease with the current Drobo configuration and have more Mac systems requiring access to the storage unit than Windows systems. To sweeten the deal, MediaFour provides two licenses for USD 59.95. That’s good value and suited my requirement for licensing two systems perfectly.

The download is small. The 5MB file installs without fanfare, requiring very little user input. It’s simply a file system driver, after all. Once the installation is complete, the MacDrive icon appears in the task bar. There’s no need to click on that unless one requires to perform special functions. Those include burning a Mac-compatible optical disk or formatting a hard drive for use by Mac OS X.

More advanced settings are available under the MacDrive options link. Once again, these are of no interest to anyone unless a very specific configuration or operation is required. This is really a run and forget utility. Once installed, I immediately saw the shared Drobo in the Windows Explorer from G2S running Windows 7.

All ordinary file operations are seamless and work without a hitch. Though this is an expensive option, it is very stable and requires no additional action to access the HFS+ drives. I was unable to find many alternatives that could perform the same functions at a lower price.