I am currently studying the possibility to change my current desktop computer for a laptop. This is the first time I am looking at these powerful laptops, as I now only use cheap laptops for small office use (email, web etc.) when traveling.
My aim is now to use a laptop for my daily tasks: picture editing, small development, multimedia etc.
read more…
Ubuntu 8.10 as a guest in VirtualBox
Though I only use Debian on all my machines, I like playing with new Ubuntu releases, just in case I have to set it up on someone else’s machine. I use VirtualBox for testing.
When trying the upcoming new Ubuntu 8.10 release, and after installing the VirtualBox clients on the guest, I had the following issues: read more…
Downtime
The company hosting my virtual server has recently suffered from big problems on their ISCSI infrastructure, leading to major downtimes, affecting all the services I run (mail, web etc.).
Things seem to have been fixed for now. Hopefully, this will never happen again. Just in case, I stopped my order to upgrade the VPS to a more powerful offer (1GB RAM and more proc cycles). I am aware of several hosting companies with cheap and reliable offers (Linode was already cited several times), but most of them are based in the US – Gandi and OVH seem to be the unique affordable alternatives with data center based in France, Gandi being a bit more expensive.
All my apologies for these issues.
Firmware update for Sony DSLR-A700
Sony has recently published an updated firmware for the DSLR-A700 camera.
Changes since oldest v3 firmware are:
- The choice to select auto exposure bracketing (single & continuous) with 3 shots in 2 EV steps has been added.
- The choice to turn [Off] the High ISO NR feature has been added.
- Improvement of the image quality in high ISO setting.
- Improvement of the auto white balance and D-Range Optimizer performance.
- Improvement of reliability for communication between camera body and vertical grip.
Though I haven’t yet tested the improvements of the image quality using high sensibility or D-Range Optimizer, I mostly appreciate the possibility to make 3 shots at +/-2EV in auto-bracketing, which eases creation of HDR or exposure-blended images.
Download link for Windows work well on GNU/Linux (using Wine to extract the firmware file): http://support.sony-europe.com/dime/digistill/alpha/alpha.aspx?site=&m=DSLR-A700&site=odw_en_GB&odw_model=DSLR-A700
Note that upgrading the firmware resets the counter for file naming.
New WP design
I have just updated my WP setup to use a new design, provided by Smashing Magazine: Fervens was designed by Elena Gafita.
I will work on adapting this theme to better suit my needs, and especially allow easy reading of “long” articles. I hope my readers will enjoy it.
I have received a brand new USB card reader.
At first sight, everything was working well “out of the box”, but when I have checked the log files, I could see the following lines repeated very frequently:
Jun 1 08:22:08 athyr kernel: [ 1412.134045] usb 6-2: reset high speed USB device using ehci_hcd and address 3
I repeat everything seems to work OK, but I can’t stand this kind of messages, especially when it deals with storage (by experience, everything works well during the tests, you simply ignore error messages, and you loose your data the first time you really use your hardware!).