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Friday, May 11, 2012

Super Moon Time Lapse 2012



I have always been interested in photography and videography as a hobby.  My point & shoot Canon PowerShot SX30is has been the perfect tool for me to explore time lapse photography and astrophotography on a budget.  Typically these genres of photography require a substancial investment in professional and specialized equipment.

The SX30is is a perfect tool for beginners to explore this type of photography.  With the help of a little firmware hack called CHDK you can run time lapse scripts on the $500 camera and increase exposure times well beyond the factory default settings among many other extra features that become available with CHDK.

Of course there is no substitute for a professional DSLR with an improved image sensor, but the cost to enter that hobby with real professional gear is much higher when you factor in the lenses, intervalometer devices, remote shutters and so on.  This video is my first attempt at taking video footage of the moon.  Although the quality is not superb, a few seconds of this video made an ABC World News segment on the supermoon and I was able to do it on the cheep.

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Saturday, January 28, 2012

You're Missing Out: Personal Cloud Storage



This is a network drive so it is designed to connect to a router or directly to your computer with an ethernet cable.  The big advantage of a network drive or NAS (Network Attached Storage), is that once it is on the home network, files on the drive are accessible from any computer or device on the home network.  That means your files can be accessible from smart phones, smart TV's and other networked devices like the Logitech Revue.

You can even set it up so that you can access your files remotely with a username and password.  If you don't like Drop Box or Google Drive you can setup your own personal cloud storage with this product from Western Digital.  And you don't have to be a geek to do it.  The setup wizard walks you through the process.

DLNA compliant devices on your network will recognize the Western Digital My Book Live as a media server so that you can view pictures, movies and listen to music.  It's probably a good idea to make sure your home network is fast.  I would recommend connecting this drive to a gigabit router like this Buffalo Air Station.  This will ensure that your read/write speeds are optimized and streaming to multiple computers or DLNA displays around your home simultaneously will look crystal clear.