Tools, tips and more
The Economist on Feb 28:
As the sun does not always shine nor the wind always blow, better batteries could squirrel away surplus energy produced by renewable sources for when demand peaks.
Or simply charging cars at night when demand drops… This could become an interesting part of the equation for the future!
I have to copy over a file from the corporate network to my windows laptop on a regular basis. Being in the field, I don’t have a network connection very often. Hence, I opted against a scheduled task and went with a good old .bat file instead. This file sits on my desktop and everytime I log on to the network via VPN I click on that batch file. To keep a history of the files I wanted the current date in the file name. Here it goes:
@echo off
SET DAY=%DATE:~0,2%
SET MONTH=%DATE:~3,2%
SET YEAR=%DATE:~6,4%
SET MYDATE=%YEAR%-%MONTH%-%DAY%
cd “C:\Documents and Settings\USER\My Documents\”copy “F:\SRCDIRECTORY\FILENAME.EXT” “%MYDATE% NEW FILENAME.EXT” /Y
You would have to replace USER, SRCDIRECTORY, FILENAME.EXT, and NEW FILENAME.EXT with the respective values for your needs. How would you have solved that? Feel free to leave me a comment.
I shoot mostly in RAW using a Canon SLR; my other cameras are a Canon IXUS and an iPhone — either one of the three with their unique benefits and drawbacks. The SLR is precise but clunky, the IXUS goes underwater with me but is not very light-sensitive, the phone puts GPS in the EXIF tag but the quality is only mediocre. Nothing’s ever perfect…
Either way, here’s my Aperture 3 workflow. After a trip or shooting, I …
Current considerations include switching from a managed Aperture library to one with referenced files to enable a simple folder sync onto a NAS that would allow me to access the pictures via the internet. That would make things a little bit more secure (additional on-site backup) and the remote access might come in handy, too (although it is mostly a gimmick).
Alternatively, I could get a second external vault that I keep off-site. Howver, the trouble with that is “I know myself”. How often would I bring that drive home to update it?
Photography is a pretty serious hobby of mine and I wrote this down mostly to remember the process myself. However, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.
We finally did it: a few weeks ago we switched over from Windows to Mac. And, besides the good looks it did only “hurt” a little bit… However, I guess you can read a whole lot about what people like about the Mac out there. That’s why I decided I am going to tell you what I am missing the most and what I dislike at this stage. Keep in mind that I don’t have a dual boot setup or Parallels Desktop installed and am not planning on doing that anytime soon. Guess it can’t be that bad after all…
I am sure I could think of other things but that’s it for now.
No it is not about drinking etiquette or the code of the west ;-)
QuickMark is a cell phone application that lets you scan in barcodes using your cell’s camera. That code may be a bookmark or bunch of other things that are not too much fun to type on a mobile phone. I am currently experimenting with it. Here’s the URL for my homepage for example:
Apparently in Asia they have these codes on vending machines and such. Check out this YouTube video…