Tag Archives: OS X

Kemptville Flooding Panorama

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I put together a panoramic picture of the flooding of Curry Park on the Kemptville Creek. I used an application called Hugin.

Panoramic view of the flooding of Kemptville Creek near Curry Park in 2008

Panoramic view of the flooding of Kemptville Creek near Curry Park in 2008

There is an add-on application for Hugin called autopano which made short work of calculating all of the stitch points for the panorama. The only problem with autopano is there isn’t a pre-compiled OS X version so I started putting together the panorama on my Windows XP box. That was fine until it came time to produce the final panorama file as for some reason, the enblend application kept crashing on my Windows XP box.

To get around that I took the autopano generated project file and moved over to the iBook to produce the final result. Not too bad for the first time using the Hugin application and the first time I’ve made a panoramic photo. Next I’ll have to figure out how to re-balance the colours so that it’s not obvious it’s stitched together. ;)

Network Attached Storage that Supports Firewire

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I want Network Attached Storage that supports Firewire (IEEE 1394) for additional expansion. I’ve come to the realization that I could really use a Network Attached Storage (NAS) device these days. Since the Windows XP desktop is mostly dead, we’re using the iBook all the time which means the 40GB drive in the iBook just isn’t cutting it. If I had a NAS device I could plug it into my home LAN and access it from the iBook via WiFi. My external 250GB Firewire/USB drive is handy but it’s just not as portable as the iBook. I’m stuck with the iBook and external drive in a static location if I need anything on the external drive. With a NAS device I could be free! ;) Yeah, I know, 802.11g is only 54Mbps and it would suck to pull lots of stuff off of a NAS device over wireless but for most of the stuff I’m doing it would be fine.

Now, as to why I’d like Firewire on the NAS device. Firewire allows daisy chaining of devices. A NAS device could provide one Firewire port and then you suddenly have the ability to add many more Firewire external drives to that NAS device. Currently I’ve only been able to find NAS devices that provide USB2.0 connections. Yes, most offer more than one USB 2.0 connector but you can’t daisy chain using USB.

The other problem I discovered is that almost every vendor out there offering a home NAS device has to include a hard drive (or drives). For example, I really like the Buffalo Technology TeraStation Home Server NAS but I don’t need a 1TB or 2 TB device. I’d love to be able to just buy the TeraServer box and add drives as I require. Of course, you don’t get the full set of features (like RAID 5) until you have 4 matching drives in the TeraServer, but heck, I’d still like it. The only other thing that would make the TeraServer better is adding a Firewire 800 or Firewire 400 port. Yes it has 4 USB 2.0 ports but going back to my initial complaint, that’s only 4 additional devices that can be connected, and only at USB 2.0 rates. Since the TeraServer supports Gigabit Ethernet, it could easily handle having a Firewire 800 port and the performance of those additional external drives could be better.

Hmm, I wonder if I can just find a Firewire to Ethernet device that would provide the required interfaces so it would show up in OS X, Windows and Linux. I’m guessing the answer is no. Same as the answer to my search for Network Attached Storage that supports firewire.

Safari CSS and what ivany.org looks like

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CSS drop shadow effect

CSS drop shadow effect

I discovered today that Safari is one of the only browsers that supports the text shadow attribute in CSS. I found that sort of odd. Since few people use Safari (it’s the Mac OS X default browser so if you don’t have a Mac you can’t use it) I figured I’d show you all what part of this site layout looks like to me. In case you are curious, the following is how I created the shadow:

h1, h2, h3 {
font-family: 'Trebuchet MS', 'Lucida Grande', Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
text-shadow: #111 2px 2px 2px;
font-weight: bold;
}

Audiovox 8910, BitPim, OS X and downloading pictures

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Well, I finally got my USB data cable for my Audiovox 8910 cellphone. I had ordered it a while back through eBay. $10USD shipped. That’s a lot better than the $99.99CAD+tax that the Bell Store wanted for it.

Anyhoo, of course what’s the first thing I want to do? DOWNLOAD PICTURES! hehe. What else?

I tried at first to just connect it to my iBook but that didn’t seem to get me anywhere. I managed to find the BitPim application that has executables for Windows, Linux and OS X! I did get a little worried though when I saw they don’t support the Audiovox 8910. Oh No!

Now I had problems getting it to work on the iBook. I gave up and went to the XP box and had even more trouble. Finally I managed to find MAU108’s (& blu3ad3pt1’s) site which had a link to a newer version of the Curitel drivers. Once I started using those on the XP box everything started to work!

I got curious then and went back to the iBook. For some reason now it just worked. I’m not sure if this is because I was originally doing everything wrong or if it had something to do with getting it to work on the WinXP box. I had installed some ProlificUSBtoSerial driver I found on thephonemall.net and that might have been what allowed it all to work. I’m not sure because I deleted that driver and it still works. Maybe there’s something left over on the iBook from that driver install.

Anyhoo,it’s all good now! I can download all the stupid pictures I take with my camera phone now.