More camera stuff! I picked up a stationary (non-zooming) 50mm f/1.8 portrait lens this week. I figured it would be a real nice add-on for when the little one arrives. It’s meant to give a super clear image of the subject and blur the background. Well it works, and works very well! Check out the test shots here. I know, more pictures of cats. I don’t have any other subjects at the moment…
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All posts for the month March, 2008
After talking with John for a bit (on IRC of course), he convinced me that I really need to looking into purchasing a new flash for my camera. The advantages of being able to bounce flashes off bright walls and/or ceilings are great. At first I didn’t think I would notice the difference, but really, tell for yourself:
Without speedlight.
With speedlight.
I am very happy with my Nikon D50 (with a standard kit lens and a zoom lens) and I started researching a Nikon speedlight that would work with the camera. It didn’t take long, enter the Nikon SB-600. After just a few minutes of trial and error, I started taking some pretty decent pictures. See the above links. Now, I need to sit down, read some manuals, and actually do a bit of Google work to make the pictures even better.
That’s my cat Ping by the way…
I noticed there was an Openfire (OSS Jabber server suite) upgrade in Gentoo’s portage, so that gave me the shakes to upgrade. I don’t know why, I just like to upgrade things. I guess I like the challenge of fixing things if/when they break. Sure enough, it was broke.
So for any of you openfire users out there, here is the fix. I tried messing with a bunch of settings (backing up my original MySQL database first) and nothing seemed to help. After scrolling through all of the settings in the admin console, I noticed that the server no longer liked the self rolled SSL certificates. A quick click and the server generated new ones. Restart the openfire server and I was back in business.
I am still one small version behind (3.4.4 versus the current 3.4.5), but I was just to lazy to create a custom ebuild today…
So, as we all know, I’ve used several tools to scrobble music to last.fm via the console. The problem was that it worked, well, sometimes. The old post.fm script would work great for hours, then just outright stop submitting tracks. Other times it would never work, and then submit 2 or 3 songs out of 10. I poked through the source a bit, but the extent of my perl knowledge consists of adding the line “#!/usr/bin/perl” to the top of the script. Seriously, that’s it. So thankfully Eric (who knows a LOT more then I do about perl) was poking around trying to figure it out as well. At any rate, we were both stuck, until he stumbled upon another script that works with cmus. The new script is called shell.fm-cmus and seems to be working MUCH better then the other. So far so good anyway…