That Pixel Geek

Andy Ihnatko has a review of the Air Sharing iPhone app at the My Digital Life Podcast & Blog.

Of particular interest to me… Andy says:

“Music and video are both formats that the iPhone OS can simply view outside of the iPod app. If I just copy it into my Air Share, I can play it with just a tap. I often put whole albums on the iPhone, if I don’t yet know if I want to throw them into my big iTunes soup. That’s a particularly big plus when it’s a 700 meg movie file and I don’t know if I want to burn up that much space on my notebook’s little hard drive by actually importing it into iTunes.”

Only $4.99. Go read the review… good stuff.

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I’m certainly no fan of the ACLU, but they do have a handy iPhone app that can help photographers (and others) understand their rights when approached by law enforcement.

Flying with Fish has the details.

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The original Jawbone headset by Aliph provides excellent noise reduction.

However, the unit has a design flaw; the charger fits too tight around the back of the unit. In fact, as I recently found out, it is SO tight that it can easily destroy the headset when removing it.

When I contacted Aliph customer service, they were cordial, but unwilling to help since I couldn’t find my receipt.

After some additional research, I found a video tutorial showing the best way to remove the charger. Apparently, this is known issue.

It’s really lame of Aliph to not stand behind their product. I definitely WILL NOT be buying my replacement headset from them.

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Feeling kinda blah? Got the winter photo blues?

Check out Zach Arias’ video post from Scott Kelby’s blog.

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I needed an 82mm replacement lens cap for my Sigma 100-300 f4. Preferably, the center pinch type since the one provided by Sigma can’t be removed or attached with the lens hood on. I found a really inexpensive version on eBay and decided to give it a try. It works great!

Search this seller’s store for 82mm:
http://search.ebay.com/_W0QQsassZjiakgong

I paid $3.60 with free shipping. It took 7 days to reach me in the US, although I assume transit times can vary widely.

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The excellent bookmark sync tool is not available for Safari. That’s great news for those (like me) who use both Firefox and Safari for different reasons.

Thanks, Foxmarks!

Download it at Foxmarks.com

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At work, I was unable to access my Ensim control panel (on RHEL4); the browser kept timing out. So I thought I’d restart it to see if that would fix it. I did the usual:

/etc/init.d/epld restart

And got this error

Stopping Ensim Pro For Linux Control Panel [ OK ]
Stopping Ensim Pro For Linux SSL Tunnel [FAILED]
Starting Ensim Pro For Linux Control Panel [ OK ]
Starting Ensim Pro For Linux SSL Tunnel [FAILED]

I checked the log file and see this:

cat /usr/lib/ensim/frontend/httpd/logs/error_log

…No space left on device: mod_rewrite: could not create rewrite_log_lock

Problem Found

A quick google search told me it was a semaphore problem. So I ran the ipcs command to check my config:

ipcs -l

—— Semaphore Limits ——–
max number of arrays = 128
max semaphores per array = 250
max semaphores system wide = 32000
max ops per semop call = 32
semaphore max value = 32767

Then ran the ipcs command to see how many were semaphores were left:

service httpd stop
ipcs -s | grep apache | wc -l

It showed 110. Not 128, but maybe enough to cause problems. PLUS, it “should” be zero with apache stopped.

Solution

With apache and epld stopped, I ran this command

ipcs -s | grep apache | gawk ‘{ print $2 }’ | xargs -n 1 ipcrm sem

Then started apache/epld again. All is fine.

service httpd start
/etc/init.d/epld start

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Lately, I’ve been seriously considering switching platforms from Canon to Nikon. Specifically, to the Nikon D300. And, I have the lens choice narrowed down to either the Nikkor 17-55 f2.8 or the Nikkor 24-70 f2.8.

So, I decided to run the numbers again to see which would be a better choice based on which focal length I shoot most.

Phil Harvey’s Exif Tool is the way to check that.

Turns out that over 76% of my shots are between 17 and 55mm. Whereas only 66% are between 24 and 70mm. Of course, I adjusted for the 1.6 to 1.5 crop difference.

For longer shots, I’m considering the Sigma 100-300 f4.

So, if you’re unsure what your next lens purchase should be… check the stats from what you’ve been shooting.

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While trying to run a YUM update on a CentOS server today, I got an error message about my /boot partition being full. I ran a df -h and sure enough, there was only 100k left. (My standard install uses 100MB for the boot partition.)

Here’s what I did to fix it.

rpm -q kernel

That returns a list of installed kernel updates. In my case I had more than 25…

kernel-2.6.9-22.EL
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.8.EL
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.8.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-42.0.10.plus.c4
…
kernel-2.6.9-67.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.1.EL.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.4.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.7.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.15.plus.c4
kernel-2.6.9-67.0.20.EL

To remove some of the older ones, run:

yum remove kernel-2.6.9-42.0.10.plus.c4

or to get several at one time:

yum remove kernel-2.6.9-42.*

I recommend leaving a few of the older ones in case you need to revert one day.

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