Week 9 of 52:
Naptime
Fifty-Two Weeks – Week 9
March 3rd, 2010Fifty-Two Weeks – Week 8
February 25th, 2010Here is week 8 of 52:
Game On
Fifty-Two Weeks – Week 7
February 18th, 2010Here is week 7 of 52:
Reflections
Fifty-Two Weeks – Week 6
February 9th, 2010Here is week 6 of 52:
Rock On!
Fifty-Two Weeks – Week 5
February 4th, 2010Here is week 5 of 52:
Chucks
Photo Phun
February 3rd, 2010We’ve had a set of off-camera wireless flash triggers for close to a year now, and until fairly recently have had few problems with them. Lately though, the triggers were operating at about a 25% successful fire rate. Last week we hacked the triggers to add an external antenna to the transmitter and better batteries to the receivers, and now they’re working much better. The tutorial we followed can be found here.
We did a small shoot after modding the triggers to see how well they’re working, and a few of those shots were pretty good. Here’s a few of my favorites:
We got a little silly while we were shooting:
Here’s my personal favorite from the shoot:
Fifty-Two Weeks – Week 4
January 28th, 2010Here is week 4 of 52:
Thumbs Up!
Fifty-Two Weeks – Week 3
January 18th, 2010Here is week 3 of 52:
Road To Nowhere
Back It Up – To The Cloud
January 14th, 2010A couple of new contenders have entered the fray and are vying for my backup business. Not new contenders in the sense that they haven’t been around long, but new contenders in that they are only now being considered as a possibility for backing up my home network.
The first option is Mozy, and at just shy of $5/month for unlimited backup, it sounds pretty good. Data stored on their servers is encrypted, and so are all connections to the server. The only problem is that Mozy only has client software for Windows and OS-X. There is no Linux client. So, using this solution would require that I install the Mozy software on both the iMac and my laptop, and each of those machines would back up over the internet to the Mozy servers. My Linux server would be completely left out of this solution, a fact that Bailey isn’t happy about, saying that I wasted all the money I’ve spent putting it together.
The second option is CrashPlan, which offers unlimited backup for one computer for $4.50/month, slightly better than Mozy. All the data is encrypted, just like the Mozy option. There are two major benefits of CrashPlan over Mozy: The first being that there is a Linux client, so I can use my existing server to back up the iMac and laptop, then back up the server to the Crashplan servers. The second benefit of CrashPlan over Mozy is that a single installed instance is capable of backing up to multiple locations, including attached USB drives, other systems on the LAN, CrashPlan’s servers, or even a server owned by you or a friend located anywhere in the world with an internet connection. The downside to Crashplan is that the free software only runs each backup set once per day, and is ad-supported. Continuous, non ad-supported software will cost you $60. Not a terrible price to pay for peace of mind knowing your data is safe and secure, no matter what happens to your computer, or even your whole house.
For my needs, I think I’ll be going with CrashPlan. I already have a good local backup system. The only thing lacking has been my offsite backups, relying on visiting my in-laws to move backups to the offsite location. CrashPlan will let me keep my local backups, but add a more reliable offsite backup, and I can spend $4.50/month for that. Plus, when I finally manage to get a server built at the in-laws’ house, I’ll be able to do my backups to their server and have them backup to my server, at a cost of $0 beyond the hardware in the servers.
Fifty-Two Weeks – Week 2
January 10th, 2010Here is week 2 of 52:
Snowpocalypse Now