Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Pelican (170mm, f/5.6, 1/1250th, ISO: 160)

Earlier this year, we went on a trip to the Galapagos with Linblad (National Geographic) with a goal of immersing our 9 year old son, Roger, in the natural laboratory that is the Galapagos Archipelago.

And, no surprise, one goal was to bring back tons of pictures as it is exceedingly unlikely that we will ever re-visit the Galapagos.

I don’t remotely pretend to be a competent photographer, but I do OK and I have dedicated some time to understanding the science of photography and learning the limits of my equipment. One limit, in particular, was no really long lenses of great quality. The 55-250 is a great lens for the price, but isn’t that long, nor of the world class quality that a world class trip demands.

Thus, I picked up the Canon EF 100-400mm f4.5-5.6L IS USM Lens
. That is, a zoom telephoto L-series lens with a minimum zoom of 100mm @ f/4.5, a maximum of 400mm @ f/5.6 that features image stabilization.

I.e. one serious piece of glass.

All images taken with a Canon T1i
and, obviously, the aforementioned lens.

Juvenile Flamingo (400mm, f/14, 1/500th, ISO: 500)

Of course, with such a long lens, the first question is “How well did it perform in capturing images of things really far away?!?”

In short, the lens performed very well in this regard. The flamingo at left was, maybe, 80 meters away; 200+ feet.

The lens focuses quickly at that distance and the camera + lens generally do a good job of selecting an appropriate aperture and ISO to achieve a pleasant picture (I generally use a fast shutter speed when shooting wildlife that is moving about).

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Sometimes, when tracking down a bug, you’ll get a bit of console spew, an exception log, or a crash log that contains a ridiculously large number. Sometimes, that is the result of a memory smasher.

Sometimes, though, it is because of a type conversion problem.

For example, if you see a log message indicating that the value 4294967295 is causing a problem, it is probably because something archived -1 on a 32 bit system and then unarchived it on 64 bit improperly.

This has come up often enough that I like to leave the Calculator app open in Programmer Mode. Then, I can copy/paste the value into Calculator and see both the bit pattern or the hex value (which will often show patterns that base-10 does not).

An aside, I have generally tried to break myself of the habit of relying upon knowledge of magic values (like 4294967295). Sure, I’ll use ‘em as clues, but I focus much more on refining my tools to make recognition of said values unnecessary as there are a slew of different values that look non-obvious in decimal form that become darned obvious in binary or hex.

Dead obvious, I know.

As we start into the second phase of remodel where we are living in the house, there is the occasion when there are stinky fumes from the work site that I want to keep out of the livable areas.

Enter the Air Mover.

Now that I have one, I’m stunned that I didn’t pick up one before! In particular, our climate is such that it can get really damned hot during the day and still cool off at night. Even with all the windows and doors open, the interior of the house can still take a bit to cool down.

No more.

With the 1600CFM air mover pictured at left, I merely drop it on the picnic table outside our back door and put it on high. Within 20 minutes or so, the temperature inside the house is down to something quite comfortably cool.

Better yet, our garage faces south west and, thus, gets baking hot by the end of the day and doesn’t cool off until after midnight. Again, no more as the air mover does a brilliant job of pushing cool air from in the house, through the garage and out the front.

Brilliant tool. Why the hell didn’t I get one years ago?!

I picked up the one at left from Home Depot for $199 (7/17/2010).

@Ian: We have an attic fan in Missouri, too, but it tends to pull ash out of the fireplace(!!). Of course, an Eichler has neither an attic or a crawl space….

@Philippe: Push air into the house, though I’ll sometimes set it up to pull air through the house, too. As far as pushing dust in the house is concerned, we leave the doors open anyway. There aren’t really very many bugs in California (save for swarms of June Bugs this year) and the dust doesn’t seem any worse with the fan on (i.e. it is still quite dusty around here).

When remodeling our house, one goal was to move to the highest efficacy lighting while remaining cost effective. In terms of pure lumens per watt — pure efficacy — LEDs are, by far, the winner on the commercial market and have been for the last decade.

Up until two years ago (when we remodeled the kitchen), though, the cost per lumen of LED based lighting has been prohibitive outside of things like rope lights or other installations that had tons of low power, cheap, lamps. Unfortunately, rope lights and christmas lights just don’t make for good task lighting in your typical kitchen. CFLs, though, pretty much suck. After 18 months, the lamps are starting to fail, they are sometimes noisy, and their warmup time can be annoying (contrary to reports from the energy & incandescent lamp industries, CFLs are actually not terribly toxic — the amount of mercury is tiny).

I have been watching the LED market for quite a while. In particular, Best Hong Kong has an interesting selection of relatively current and relatively reasonably priced lamps. I’m using some of their products to illuminate the hand blown glass pendant lamps at the top of this picture. Thank you to EMSL for suggesting Best Hong Kong in the first place!

In monitoring the technology, the one name that came up over and over is CREE, who seems to be one of the leaders in manufacturing LEDs and LED fixtures. At least, CREE is the name that comes up most often for products targeted to residential applications (Phillips and others seem to be big names in the commercial space).

Now, if you search Amazon for CREE lamps, you’ll find a bunch of units, but the state of the art tends to be about six months behind and, frankly, comparatively expensive (of course, if anyone happens to stumble on the above link a year or two after I wrote this, I hope the prices are reasonable and the technology current).

Since the technology existed, the issue was then a matter of figuring out where to find lamps with the latest CREE LED technology integrated into a package compatible with standard home lighting fixtures. After having found some CREE 3x 1 watt GU-10 (i.e. track light compatible 120v AC lamps) and found some 3 watt CREE LEDs with the same form factor as the 1 watt LEDS, a bit of searching revealed that, in fact, if you are willing to import lamps in lots of 10 (or more), you can buy the latest lighting technology

Through Alibaba.com, I found Ledsion Lighting Technology Co. Ledsion manufacturers a ton of LED based lamps, both for home use and in various commercial applications.

Not having ordered product from Ali Baba or — frankly — ordered anything direct from the manufacturer in this fashion gave me a bit of trepidation. But, nothing ventured, nothing gained.

CFL based illumination; not as bright, no highlights.

I ordered 10 (minimum lot size) 3x3w (9w) CREE based GU-10 120VAC lamps. It took about 10 days for the company to make and ship the lamps (yes — make — a lot of the manufacturing is pretty much on-demand). It came to about $19.00 per lamp. While just about 2.5x the price of the 7w CFLs they were replacing, the LEDs generate 150% the light output and have a rated life of 50,000 hours vs. the CFL’s 8,000.

I.e. the performance and long-term cost– the efficacy — of the CREE based 3x3w LEDs completely dominates CFLs. Better still, the light quality is just stunning compared to the CFLs. The LEDs are “on” instantly and provide a very even light. Frankly, it looks better than 50 watt halogens original to the track in that the light is, for lack of a better term, more comfortable; less harsh.

The image at left was taken while the counter was illuminated by the old CFLs with considerably more light coming from other sources. No highlights on the counter, to speak of. With CFLs, the track lighting was nothing more than ambient overhead lighting. With the LEDs, it provides more ambient light and enough directed light to provide for highlighted spots.

Long term viability obviously remains to be seen, but I remain optimistic.

I returned to the Lesdion Lighting Technology to order more lamps and see if I could grab some 12vAC or DC MR-16 CREE based LEDs for other applications and, via AliBaba’s built in chat system, ended up chatting with the seller. Extremely professional, patient, and helpful. Answered a handful of technical questions and I was able to customize my order a bit to meet my needs. (And, really, I’m still a bit in shock that, through Alibaba, I can talk directly to a manufacturer to get a relative one off of a product with the custom color, lens, and wattage I desire. I feel like I just experienced a bit of Blade Runner from my living room.)

All in all, I’m extremely happy that LED technology has advanced to the state of being usable in “normal” home applications. While still slightly initially pricy, the long term costs may be significantly less and the reduced energy use is attractive. Because of the increased light output from the track lights, I’m finding that I no longer need to use the 30 to 40 watts of florescent tube under-lighting!

At left is a screenshot of the iPad application LightTrac.

LightTrac displays various information about how the sun traverses the sky in any given location, along with moonrise/moonset times.

When doing any kind of outdoor photography, it is extremely helpful to know exactly how the sun is going to track through the sky. Obviously, while in the field, you can just look up to figure this out. Having an application that models the sun’s traversal such that you have an idea of how the light will change throughout the day is tremendously useful.

On a vacation or any kind of a planned photo shoot, this application makes it easy to know what photo opportunities might be optimal in the magic light of sunrise and sunset. When visiting a city for a day tour, it can help you decide on an optimal path through a city; if you travel primarily east to west in the AM, returning in the PM, you’ll maximize time with the sun at your back illuminating what is in front of you!

Beyond photography, LightTrac has also answered a question I’ve long had about my garden plot; exactly how does the sun traverse the plot and where should I plant tall stuff to minimally shade shorter stuff (the answer is that my garden’s rows are likely to be on a diagonal to the plot in the coming years!

While there is always room for improvement — knowing where the moon is can help to plan for long exposure ghostly night shots, for example and the app “only” gives phases, moonrise and moonset — the application is intuitive, useful, and generally pleasant to use.

Update:I’m keeping a list of ebook publishers/sources for which I’ve found inFeel free to send me suggestions. This is, by no means, a complete list — I’m just taking notes as my OCD-compulsive nature kicks in and I build up a huge set of books to read.

• The Baen Free Library contains quite an amazing selection of donationware ebooks from many well known science fiction and fantasy authors.
• Feedbooks contains a ton of public domain and original content as they are also a publisher of ebooks. Their blog is pretty interesting, too.
• A one-off; Charlie Stross’s Accelerando comes highly recommended.
• In the meta-category; a weblog post claiming to point to the “top 20 websites for DRM-free Sci-Fi Books”.
• This list is impressive and also leads to cheap sources for ebooks, too. I’m perfectly happy paying for ebooks (just like real books), though I’m not at all happy about paying more than the paperback price for an older book.
• Tor books — publishers of Jordan’s Wheel of Time series — has embraced ebooks to a large degree.

I know lots of people that have picked up iPads — no surprises there. What is surprising is that just about everyone has something for which their reaction is “the iPad changes everything”.

I have several of those, but — at the moment — the biggest is reading. I used to read tons and tons of books, but gradually tapered off because I carrying around a couple of books was a pain in the ass and, for vacations, I would need to take up to a dozen, depending on duration.

That and, frankly, it has been bloody obvious for years that an e-book read that is “good enough” would provide a portable library and a decent reading experience. The Kindle was almost the one, but having 40% of the front surface area covered by a keyboard seemed like a complete waste to me. I did, however, use the Kindle app on the iPhone to read a couple of books — good, but not great.

I find iBooks to be a wonderful reading experience. Easy on the eyes, very nice user interface and — with the versatility of the iPad — I can read Kindle books, and do a myriad other things on the device. Haven’t spent much time with the Kindle app, but if it is like the iPhone, it’ll be just fine, too!

I, however, am a cheapskate. I haven’t quite brought myself to drop money on books. Fortunately, there is a large number of freely available books in both the iTunes and Kindle stores.

With a bit of hunting, I have also hit upon a treasure trove of mostly Science Fiction and Fantasy — my favorite genres — books! In particular, Baen Books made available a large number of their books in many formats! In particular, you can find a list of the participating authors, click through to their titles, then select the EPUB/Nook/Stanza Format on the download page.

Note that the books have covers as in the picture on the left, but the cover art doesn’t show up in the iBooks application on the iPad.

I donated $51 in return for a ton of books.

Our solar installation came with a neat little device that interfaces between the panels and the Enphase’s central web site.

Like just about every other device with a network connection, it offers a simple interface for monitoring power stats and seeing any recent power related events, including low/high voltage or out of phase events caused by the grid!

Interestingly, I can easily scrape the event log to grab a pretty decent estimate of when sunrise and sunset happened. The panels boot at sunrise, logging and event, and they emit a low voltage emit at sunset. (Obviously, the times will be slightly skewed by installation angle, etc… but, still, neat!).

And, of course, the interface has an “Administration” button. Password protected and the customer isn’t given the password. Hmm…. yup… it is entirely as dead obvious as you might imagine.

This allows for the network interface to be configured and gives access to slightly more raw bits of info. By clicking a link for the power meter monitoring feature that isn’t set up yet, it throws an error with stacktrace. Top frame is /opt/emu/httpd/rhtdocs/index.rb:28.

Looks like it is implemented in ruby! Neat.

There also appear to be some other URLs that lead to directory listings and the like.

Also not mentioned in the manual is that it has port 22 — ssh — open. The username/password on that appears to not be so obvious.

Because so many people asked for contact info, here you go:

Our installers were Horizon Energy Systems. Kurt Newick (408-761-2029) was our liaison with Horizon and he was wonderful to work with. Kurt seems entirely committed to the widespread deployment of Solar power generation more-so than grabbing commissions. Good dude. Do recommend.

Full disclosure: We did have some difficulty during the install. Horizon was extremely forthright in dealing with the situation and I would have zero hesitation in working with them again. Actually, we are already talking about upping our system’s generation capacity.

As of the last couple of days, our household has gone from a consumer to a producer of electricity. Our 3.2kw, 16 panel, solar generation system is now online! With a peak generation of 2.7 kilowatts, we generated about 21.6kWh today alone.

You can see both current and historical data via this this site (iPhone app, please??!?!).

Beyond being good for the environment blahblahobviousblah, the solar system will pay for itself in something pretty close to a decade (the huge rebates help alot!). If PG&E actually starts paying for surplus electricity in the next couple of years as promised under AB 920, it may pay for itself sooner (and we might add panels to accelerate the payback — more below).

As well, it is just really satisfying to watch the little dial on the electric meter run backwards. This morning as the panels started to warm up and the meter was just starting to tick backwards, I had Roger watch the meter while I toggled the electric dryer on/off. “Holy cow! That makes the dial go the wrong way really fast!”. Yup, sure does– now think about how fast/slow various devices make that dial go!

No, I don’t entirely believe these numbers… but, better than being just a consumer!

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If you are lucky enough to have a gas range, you already know the joys of a dead even heat source that can range from medium-low to blowtorch. None of that cyclic all-on/all-off nonsense of the typical electric range, for example.

However, “low heat” is not something in the typical gas range’s vocabulary. On our Viking, the lowest setting on the smallest burner will keep a small pot of water at a rolling boil and will consistently cause a cup of rice to boil over. And it is a really low flame!

Enter the heat diffuser. A heat diffuser sits between burner and your pan or pot. It effectively acts as a heat buffer and, as the name implies, diffuser.

On a gas range like mine, it allows one to achieve the lowest simmer/heat you might want. On an electric range, a cast iron heat diffuser — you want thermal mass — will nicely even on the all-on/all-off behavior of most ranges.

At ~$20, it is a worthy tool to add to your cooking arsenal!

With the release of Aperture 3, geotagging photos is now an integral part of the application’s workflow. Aperture grew the Faces & Places features like iPhotos!

In particular, the Places feature allows you to import GPS data from iPhone photos or from GPS data captured by pretty much any device that can spew a standard GPX format data file.

Tagging from the iPhone is straightforward. With the iPhone connected to your computer, go to Places in Aperture and then select Import from iPhone Photos…. Aperture will then display all the photos on your iPhone that have GPS metadata and you can pick the photos from which the GPS data is to be imported. Once picked, Aperture will apply the GPS data to photos taken near the same time as the imported data.

However, one issue with the iPhone is that it really isn’t a terribly good GPS logging device. Using it as one eats the battery and the data generated often has holes. And, because the iPhone uses A-GPS (GPS assisted by cellular signal), it doesn’t work at all when hiking in areas without cell signal. Apparently, I’m mistaken about A-GPS — it should fall back to regular GPS behavior. My experience, though, is that the iPhone just isn’t a terribly good GPS device when it doesn’t have a cell signal and has often been off by miles when in the hinterlands. It works great when on the road or near cities, though.

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