Kevin's musings

For your enjoyment, some pictures of the dogs wearing their coats
today (was nice and snowy today), and also some pictures of
hacking society and southern sun gathering:
dog coats, southern sun, and hacking at caffe sole.

Took a few
Pictures
yesterday. Some flowers have started to really bloom out with all the
snow and rain and sun we have had.

Still need to pack my backpack, but I think I have all the stuff I
need to pack into there now. Should be a nice trip. I am
leaving starting tomorrow around noon. Drive down to New
Mexico and meet folks at the cooney canyon trailhead. Will
be sure to have a ton of pictures when I get back.

Took a few shots in the backyard with the macro mode on the new
camera. Not too bad. I am learning that it will say it can’t
focus if it should be in macro mode (close up shot). The
transfer script is working great to copy pictures off.
macro shots

Reasonably quiet and relaxing weekend here. Saturday I went and saw
Kill Bill: Volume 2
Not a bad movie. It was diffrent from the first one, but it was
at least as good. It will be interesting to watch the two of
them back to back when the second one comes out on DVD. I did
get the first one on DVD and watched it later saturday.

Sunday I went and tried to get all my backpacking and hunting gear
together for next weekend’s turkey hunting trip. Pretty much
everything was easy to find and looks to be in ok shape. I did
setup my tent and fixed a ripped sleve that I remembered it
had. My stove, water purifier, backpack, sleeping bag and
thermarest were all pretty easy to find as well. Here are some
pictures I took of the tent and also some pictures of merlin. He
managed to get in a tiff with kurt in the yard and got a small
owie on his nose:
Merlin and Tents.

Poked around with
Linux Hotplug
both last night and some today. It doesn’t seem to be very easy to
debug and you would think that it could be setup by default to
handle many of the common things you would want to do with
it. For example, I wanted to have it so I could attach my new
camera via USB cable, press the USB button on the cradle and
have it copy all the pictures off it, optionally delete them,
and disconnect. By default hotplug will see the camera, load the
scsi disk driver and say that it’s /dev/sda1, and thats it.

In order to get it all working as I wanted, I had to setup 2
scripts. First of all I made a /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage
script. This script (which didn’t exist before I made it) is
called by the /etc/hotplug/usb.agent when a “usb storage” device
connects. The /etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage script gets passed a
number of things in env variables. If the $ACTION variable is
“add” then the device is connecting. I have the script look for
that and then mount the camera on /mnt/camera and run the second
script. Also, and this took me a while to figure out, I had to
run a link from the file refered to in $REMOVER back to the
/etc/hotplug/usb/usb-storage script. $REMOVER is run when the
device disconnects. The usb-storage script then catches a
$ACTION of “remove” and umounts the /mnt/camera.

The second script is just a simple script that copies the files off
the camera device and runs a program called
jhead
which can manipulate the EXIF headers that most digital cameras put in
images. In this case I have jhead rewrite the filename of the
image to YYYYMMDDHHMMSS.jpg. Then the script deletes all the
files from the camera (since they have now been copied over to
the laptop drive).

Using this setup I have been able to have a pretty quick turnaround on
pictures, which is nice. Here’s some sample ones from yesterday
and today:
Yet more dog pictures.

Now for some talk about digital cameras.

My old trusty
Canon PowerShot S100
has been getting a bit long in the
tooth of late. It’s about 4 years old now. It’s a nice camera,
very small, takes pretty good pictures, and I have a bunch of
accessories for it: 2 256MB Compact Flash cards, and about 5 or
6 extra batteries. My biggest problem with it of late is that it
takes a whopping 6-7 seconds from turning it on to being able to
take a picture. You loose a lot of pictures by waiting 6 or 7
seconds. So, I started looking around for a new camera.

The newer Canon powershot’s look quite nice. There is a
S400
(which is now discontinued) and a
S410
and a
S500
There are only minor diffrences between them. The S400 and S410 are 4
megapixel cameras, and the S500 is a 5 megapixel. They look
nice, have the exact same controls and form factor as my S100
and I could re-use my accessories. There is only one
problem. They are really pricy. The S400/S410 models are about
$100 more than any of the other ultracompact 4 megapixel
cameras. The S500 is something like 200$ more.

While looking around
Jafo
mentioned that he was selling his old (well, 3 months old)
Casio Exilim EX-Z4
It’s about 1/2 the thinkness of the Canons. It has
a 2″ LCD on the back (the canons have a 1.5″). The price was
great, even factoring in having to get a new SD card (it uses SD
or MM cards). It also takes it about 2 seconds to be ready to
take a picture (my big complaint with the S100). So, I decided
to go for it. I picked up the camera from
Jafo
when he was passing through to Colorado Springs the last night.

Overall I like the camera. There are a few things that are really
going to take some getting used to however. The zoom buttons on
the Casio are on the back below the shutter release button. On
the Canon this was a ring around the shutter release. When you
take a picture on the Canon you can hold down the shutter
release and it will show the picture you just took until you
relase it. On the Casio it will show the picture you just took
for a few seconds and then go back to the current display.

On the plus side I really like the LCD. It’s big and very easy
to look at. It does get a bit grainy at times, but it’s still
nice to read. I like the amount of time until it can take a
picture. It’s nice that it has 10MB of memory built in. I don’t
have my SD card yet, so I have been using it’s internal memory
to take pictures and then copy them off. The USB interface works
fine with my laptop. It shows up as a SCSI disk. Easy to copy
things off. The cable is really pretty short tho, so I might
look at getting an extender for it. It has a “Manual Focus” mode
which is really cool that the Canon didn’t.

So far so good, will see how it does once I get my SD card and can
start taking lots of pictures. I need to go through the manual
too and see all the things it can do.

I have been playing with a nifty little image program lately called
kimdaba
(The K Image DataBase). It’s pretty nifty, but kinda changes the way I
think of organizing my pictures. Basically you give it a
directory with all your images in it and then you go in and add
tags to them (tags in the xml database, nothing changes on the
picture itself).

So, for example, I can add a “Twyla” tag to a image that has Twyla in
it, as well as a “Broomfield” tag if the picture was taken in
broomfield, etc. Once you have all the pictures tagged with all
the people, places and other random keywords you like, you can
search on any of those tags. For example, “Show me pictures that
have Twyla and Merlin in them taken in Broomfield and are not
marked junk”. You can also tag on dates, so any pictures taken
on a specific date. It seems like this would be nice to handle
searching through your photos for something in specific. The
place where it changes things is that it’s harder to figure how
to export those to the web.

While pondering on it, here are some pictures from today (2004-04-20)
that I took. I used the search for “date between 2004-04-19 and
2004-04-21″ and then did an ‘export to html’ on them.
Random Cat and Dog Pics.

Today was doggie bath day here. It’s funny how the diffrent dogs react to the idea of a bath:

• Twyla: Was standing there waiting as I got out towels and
  was the first to go in. She climbed into the tub herself and
  was especially happy about the rub down drying part.

• Rum (the foster): was interested in what was going on,
  but really really didn’t want to get into the tub. Had to
  lift his 90lb black butt into there. Once in he kept
  trying to get out.

• Merlin: Didn’t really want to get into the tub, but
  was easy to lift in there. Once in and water was flowing
  over him, he prompty tried to lay down and relax in it,
  making soaping hard to do.

• Kurt: The last time I gave them baths kurt ran and
  hid and I had to carry him up to the bathroom. This
  time he remembered that he loves baths, so I called
  him and he ran up and climbed right into the tub.

Looks like Twyla and Merlin (the two softest ones) are loosing their
winter coats. I brushed them and got some hair off them, which
is amazing for greyhounds. Luckily it shouldn’t last very long.

I was gonna go up to boulder later and wander from outdoor pub to
outdoor pub, but none of the folks I sent email to can come (or
haven’t answered). I might just go anyhow, it’s a nice day for
such things.

Up at boulder hacking society tonight. Had a nice time at southern sun
drinking beer. That place is hopping on thursdays. Possibly all
the time. There’s about 14 folks here at caffe sole. Nice
turnout.

Took some pics of the BBQ the other night and everyone playing with
cameras. Also, took some pics the other day of rum and the other
dogs in the yard. You can find them at:
Pics of cameras, people, and dogs.

Went up to bottle beer eariler tonight. I took kurt with me this time
(giving them each a chance for an outing). Got there right at
6pm and unloaded all the bottles I brought. Waited for anyone
else to show. Washed all the bottles. Started bottling the
beer. Got about 2/3 done before anyone else got there.

Last night was the last evening that
tkil
was going to be in town, so we met up at
tosh’s
for dinner and then headed downtown for beers at
the falling rock tap house.
(Pity they seem to have switched from their old site that was
nocrapontap.com). Things were pretty scary downtown. It was
apparently the season opener for the rockies, and although the
game ended several hours eariler, there were still tons of
people downtown imbibing. We have a few nice beers… especially
a avery 10th anniversary rye.