Category Archives: Photography

If it can go wrong ….

Photography

…. it will!

I wrote about Paranoia as the only logical mechanism when it came to backing up some three years ago. Following up with details of my quadruplicate back-up plan I felt I was pretty safe.

Nanny nanny boo boo.

Then the tailor incident happened.

It was nothing to do with photos but the concepts – redundancy, failsafes, backups – are identical. You see, this one involved starting the car ….

I have owned my car, bought used as I always let some sucker pay for the depreciation, for almost a decade. I thought I was pretty smart about redundancy and access. If I left the key at home and lost the house keys I had this little marvel:

The Lexus wallet key. “Not for ignition”.

I kept this little hummer in my wallet and thought no more of it. Lose the regular key and, hey presto!, you are up and running so long as you do not lose your wallet. Even if you lose your car keys.

And lose the car keys I did. My boy and I dropped off a jacket at the tailor’s and proceeded home with the house Border Terrier, as good an egg as ever put four sets of pads to the sidewalk, looking forward to a nice lunch. But there was just one snag. I had left the house keys in the jacket at the tailor’s. Bah! says I to Winston, the fruit of my loins, no problemo chum. The Old Man is always prepared as, with a flourish of sheer insouciance D’Artagnan would have envied, I whipped out my 25 year old Hartmann leather wallet (OK, credit card holder) and procured the Magic Key. Yup, Lexus’s best.

Swagger was definitely present in my demeanor.

“Watch this”, quoth I, as I proceeded to pop the key from the little holder thingy to the boy’s all around astonishment at his dad’s evident genius in all things mechanical and logical. I inserted same in the door and invited the child to rest his behind in the passenger seat. Stand back, Winston, says I, we will be back at the tailor’s in a trice as dad floors it and we hit 0-60 in under 6 seconds on residential streets and hang the cops.

So confident was I that I handed the poncy wallet key to the child and instructed him to start the beast, as he always does. (He’s my Voice Activated Remote. Not cheap.) The starter fired up with that resolute commitment to all things efficient and Oriental, churned away merrily for a good twenty seconds and …. nothing happened. No burning rubber, no 0-60 in under 6, no nothing. Truth to tell, the boy’s demeanor was not a happy one, his confidence in his father severly shaken, questions about birth certificates and DNA preying on his mind and the OM sitting there wondering where he had erred in his grand plan of life. ‘Crestfallen’ does not begin to decribe my greatest fan. Indeed, his crest was somewhere around his ankles, ready to join mine in the gutter.

Not a happy moment.

The car maker, in its infinite wisdom, had determined that the wallet key would get you in out of the cold and damp, but that was the extent of its function. Start the car? Please. They do that now with microchips in the holder, but we are talking a Frugality Special here, a Y2K. No, no.

Bugger.

I had made a huge, inexcusable error of logic. I had failed to test my assumptions.

So we get on the iPhone, call the tailor and plead that he extend his closing time by 10 minutes while we beat the world and Olympic record for the 800 meters to retrieve the car key.

Just one small nicety. The house key is attached to the car key. Without the car key we are doomed to a weekend in the back yard, shooting rabbits and squirrels for sustenance and drinking from the garden hose while feasting on bloody dandelions for dessert.

The tailor, a nice warm man from wonderful, warm Greece, hears our pleas, delays for 10 minutes as asked, and after a massive coronary (mine) we have car and house keys in hand.

Which brings us back to backing up.

If it can go wrong it will. Study those diagrams in my second link above and think hard. Really hard. Because there has to be some combination of circumstance which will destroy my work of a lifetime, the thing that means so much to me. My pictures. And when you find the holes in the schema, please email me. I can always put in more failsafes, and would rather not depend on the home times of the tailor.

Meanwhile, I keep a real car key, the one with the chip inside, in the trunk. I can open the latter with the wallet key once inside the car. Of course, knowing the Law of Sod, the battery in the trunk key will have died and it’s back to dandelion dessert. Gee, I miss the days you could hot wire cars.

Mountain Lion on the Hackintosh

Hackintosh

Shades of Microsoft.

While I very much doubt Steve Jobs knew an operating system from an operating table, his tyrannical, bullying rule of Apple Corp. ensured a high level of attention to detail on the part of his workers. As the guys on the disastrous MobileMe product team, who are now holding up cardboard plaques at the corner of Atherton Avenue and El Camino Real proclaiming “Will Work for Food”, will attest.

Such were my thoughts when installing Mountain Lion on the HP100 nuclear powered Hackintosh chez Pindelski. The download price was right, as in free, as my 2012 MacBook Air had grandfathered the freebie. Getting the freebie was a mess of passwords and poor instructions for which I had to wait 48 hours, the sort of thing Bill Gates revelled in, but I got there. Installation on the MBA was uneventful and after thoroughly wringing OS Mountain Lion out with all my favorite apps (especially LR 4.1 and PS CS 5.1) I concluded it was time to give the big guy a spin.

The Hackintosh thing requires that a major release be downloaded from the AppStore and the installation files transferred to a separate bootable medium. (Minor releases are a simple AppStore download). Tonymac’s Unibeast transfers the downloaded files together with a bootloader to the partition of choice. Restarting from the new partition saw Mountain Lion installed to my boot partition in some 10 minutes (SSDs are fast!) and a restart resulted in …. another Microsoft moment. Most things worked well, but Mail was a spinning beach ball much of the time and Contacts (the Address Book of yore) refused to show. So I did a second install, identical to the first and found myself in the land of sweetness and light. Shades of Windows.

The CPU is at 4.4GHz, but 4.3GHz is as high as OS X can show.

The first Geekbench CPU performance score was a ghastly 5500 – I expected 15,000 or so on the overclocked Core i7 SandyBridge. A moment later I had installed NullCPUPowerManagement.kext using Tonymac’s Multibeast as well as the HDARollback and Realtek sound kexts to restore sound functions. Another restart and the Geekbench report was back over 15,000 and Cinebench came in at almost 30fps. Slower than the 38 I was getting in Lion, but it may be that the Nvidia 9800GTX+ GPU, ancient as it is, is beginning to show incompatibility issues. Still, for my purposes (LR and PS) CPU speed is far more important than GPU throughput, given the CPU-intensive nature of those apps.

Geekbench and Mountain Lion.

Cinebench with Mountain Lion. CPU speed is shown correctly.

So, overall performance is largely unchanged compared to Lion 10.7.3 and some handy features are added. One note – Photoshop required a large Java update when first launched, which took a few minutes. Now it loads faster than ever, under 2 seconds, and Lightroom remains as fast as ever.

Dictation works well (HP100 has a Logitech USB microphone connected), the Notification capability mimics iOS and obsoletes Growl to a large extent, and the showstopper (on the MBA) is the addition of AirPlay, a feature common to iPads and iPhones for a while. This allows you to redirect video and audio from Mountain Lion to any TV with an AppleTV connected BUT the sending machine must have an integrated GPU for this to work. Thus regular Core2Duo or Core2Quad machines cannot do this, whereas those with an HD3000 (Sandy Bridge) or HD4000 (Ivy Bridge) integrated GPU can accomplish the task. I have no need to do this with HP100, despite the presence of its HP3000 integrated GPU, but having this on the MBA, the ‘sofa’ Mac, is heaven-sent, and will create another crack in the bundled pricing hegemony of the cable TV providers. You can get it on your laptop? You can send it to your TV!

The enhancements in Mountain Lion are mostly cosmetic. It’s 64 bit only so you will be SOL if you use 32 bit apps, and now is as good a time as any to start researching the topic. Given the otherwise modest changes, the ML upgrade is a low risk proposition if you can cross the ’64 bit only’ hurdle.

This is no bleeding edge upgrade, as Apple’s $20 upgrade price indicates, and I suggest it’s a low risk update for Lion users. Stated differently, it’s last year’s Ferrari with some chrome trim strips added. With Windows 8 set to emulate Windows Vista (last year’s Trabant), there has never been a better time to abandon the Evil Empire. Let’s just hope that Tim Cook shows some tyrannical traits real soon and kicks some rear on those installation glitches.

Preserving TRIM with SSDs:

To understand TRIM – garbage management for SSDs – just search the term using the box atop this page. A photographer friend who has just built a fabulous Hackintosh using a Z77 Gigabyte motherboard and an Ivy Bridge i5 CPU advises that preserving TRIM with a user DSDT file requires the following settings in Multibeast:

TRIM and Mountain Lion.

I can confirm these work.

10 years on

Macintosh

Jony Ive’s design for the first iMac with its ghastly translucent colored plastic covers may have been a low point, but he has yet to improve on the successor, which came to market 10 years ago.

The second iMac.

While the original came with a 4:3 screen, by the time I bought mine it was stretched to my favorite aspect ratio, 16:10 in 15″ and 17″ sizes. Extra memory was strictly a factory installation thing and the hard drive but 60GB.

And, as you can see, the machine was anything but cheap:

It remains happy in occasional use, where it controls profiling of my HP DesignJet 90 wide carriage dye printer; just as well, as good luck getting HP to update their online apps to work with anything later than OS Snow Leopard.

The genius of Ive’s design was not just the unique packaging, but a screen cantilever which has yet to be improved. You could raise the display to a proper working height even if you were over 4′ 10″ tall, the optimum height for anyone buying any subsequent iMac. It runs cool as the ventilation design is not compromised, the way it is today. The current iMacs with their awful support foot benefit from a ream or two of paper underneath, which isn’t quite consonant with Cupertino’s design aesthetic.

To see the roll out with the master circus barker himself at the helm, click below. Refresh the page if it’s not visible.

Jobs rolls out the iMac G4.

My subsequent odyssey:

Along with the Powerbook G3, this was the last consumer grade Mac designed with both form and function in mind. Thereafter, form would rule and reliability went to pot, as my experiences disclose. A while back, Tim Cook, Apple’s new CEO, speaking of design, joked about the inadvisability of combining a toaster with a refrigerator. Obviously he had never used an iMac G5 which was a unique combination of toaster and computer. The fans also managed a passable rendition of an F15 at take-off. Anyway, after a long run of failed Apple hardware I approached my computer builder friend, the pseudonymous FU Steve, and had him build me a Hackintosh. So successful was the result that he would later build me two more while simultaneously upgrading the original to current specs at very modest cost. Plus you could get a decent, wide gamut, matte display to go with the box. I have never looked back. The perfect combination of reliable, easily available and inexpensive PC parts with a robust OS, Mac’s OS X. Wild horses would not induce me to buy a new iMac. I have dismantled these in many repairs of mine and can assure you there is simply no way so poorly designed a machine can withstand the long-term stresses of hard use. It’s a toy inside with proper heat management an afterthought.

To be fair, Apple has somewhat redeemed itself with the latest 2012 MacBook Air which runs so-so cool (mostly thanks to Intel’s progress with its low power consumption CPUs and integrated GPUs), is fast and if its 2010 predecessor is any guide – an outstanding machine – should prove reliable. It harkens back to Ive’s classic iMac in its design; the MacBook Air design is elegant, robust and well executed.

The Burning House

Bio, Photography

What would you take?

The author Foster Huntington has a web site requesting submissions. From his site:

“If your house was burning, what would you bring with you?

It’s a philosophical conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental. You’re forced to prioritize and boil down a life of accrued possessions into what you can carry out with you. What you would bring reflects your interests, background and priorities. People’s stage in life also dictates their selection. A father of five in his forties would grab very different things than he would have as a bachelor in his twenties. Think of it as a full interview condensed into one question.”

Click the image to go to Amazon. I get no click-through payment.

What a thought-provoking idea.

Assuming that loved ones – human and animal – are always the first priority, what would I take? You have to be able to carry it so not much can be chosen.

In no particular order:

Dr. Saba?a.

Dr. SabaÅ‚a (Sa-bow-aaah) is my first and only teddy bear, given to me by my maternal grandfather Dr. Stanis?aw Wachowiak. Once the owner of the Robur coal mine in Poland and an owner and director of Bank Handlowy w Warszawie (Warsaw Trade Bank – it’s OK, bankers were sort of honest back then), he managed to combine the skills of a Heidelberg trained economist and capitalist with those of an authority on Latin prose. No one quite knew where from his deep imagination Dr. S. got his name but he always reminds me of a skill set to aspire to. That of the donor. Smarter than most Poles (not exactly difficult) my grandfather saw the German threat coming and managed to extricate much of his wealth to Brazil where he died happy, wealthy and tanned at the age of 90. Dr. S. has had more than his share of restorative surgery but at age 60 he’s holding up pretty well.

Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse:

That same grandfather willed me his Patek Philippe pocket watch; sadly, my mum took it to a watchmaker to have it cleaned and he was coshed, and the watch stolen. This determined me to replace it some day, but that took a while as I was eleven at the time and had no wealth or inheritance. Twenty-nine years later, aged forty, I finally managed to complete the deal, a gift to self coinciding with partnership at a money management firm. I deserved both, the watch and the partnership, but it was still awfully difficult to blow so much coin on a piece of decorative art. But when you look at the sheer elegance of this mechanical masterpiece, no dials, no batteries, no buttons, you too would take it with you when your place was aflame, and hang the cost. This one says in the simplest way that if you want something it’s yours to be had.

Don Normark’s book:

Click the picture.

The art book is the sole genre which will survive the tablet tsunami unless, that is, someone makes a 21″ tablet. I’ll be first in line. But books are bulky, the flames are licking at the shelves and I can only make space for one, so this wonderful, warm book of a time past is my choice. I wrote about it here.

My mum’s Remington:

I typed my Mech. Eng. dissertation on this, UC London, class of 1973, and it remains a reminder of the magnificence of the mechanical age in which I was born. The output, of course, needed a lot of hacking as typewriters weren’t especially suited to mathematical notation. It remains an enduring reminder of the fact that you always make the best of what you have. Plus I love steam punk! (RMP – Renata Maria Pindelski).

50mm f/1.4 Nikkor S:

Easy. This gorgeous lens and the lovely images it creates is like the Patek. A reminder of a time when mechanical engineering and slide rules …. err, ruled.

Hewlett-Packard HP12C calculator:

As the gorgeous Eva Green relates to 007 (Daniel Craig) in the latter’s first Bond movie, “There are dinner jackets and there are dinner jackets. This is a dinner jacket.” Well, same goes for calculators. This one dates from my days at Salomon Brothers and I learned bond math on it. Sure, there’s a modern, infinitely faster, version to be had for the iPhone, but it’s just not the same. And it won’t last 40+ years.

iPhone:

The greatest consumer technology of the 21st century yet. We named our son after the chap on the home screen.

Letter from Ron and Old Glory:

My interest in politics is zero. My interest in great leaders is substantial. When one man rights the world’s greatest nation while simultaneously defeating the greatest source of evil in modern times, I notice. When the great man announced his illness I dropped him a line and he graciously responded. Of course. The flag is the one I was given in the Los Angeles Coliseum, when, together with 2,000 other lucky immigrants, I took the oath to be a loyal American, June 9, 1988. After my son’s birth it remains the most special day in my life.

* * * * *

What, no cameras? Well there is always the one in the iPhone. But modern digital cameras leave me cold. Competent, supremely effective, soulless. I can always buy another body and lens. No pictures or hard drives with files? Nope. It’s all backed up in the cloud.