Martini - 83/365

Martini - 83/365, originally uploaded by morberg.

I think this image turned out really nice. Head on over to flickr for more and a setup shot in the first comment.

Horse - 50/365

Horse - 50/365, originally uploaded by morberg.

So I made 50 days of my 365 project so far. Here's hoping I'll go the distance. Nothing special about this picture other than the number...

Dinner

Dinner, originally uploaded by morberg.

I've decided to try a 365 photo project - taking one image each day. When I joined flickr and looked at my archives in calendar view I noticed I was quite active when I got my first digital camera, but after a while the images were further apart.

Having a project like this will hopefully make me pick up the camera every day even if nobody has a birthday. Should be a good way to learn more about my new Nikon D90 as well.

If you're interested you can either follow the RSS feed for my 365 project directly or drop by my photostream now and then (also available as RSS of course). Good images might end up here as well.

Shining - the other version

Brilliant alternative trailer for The Shining:

When to get a Nikon D90?

There are currently lots of rumors floating around about an upcoming digital SLR from Nikon, the D90. The camera will most likely have:

• 12 MP resolution on a DX sensor
• Active D-Lighting
• Live View
• 3" LCD
• 4,5 fps burst mode
• 1080i and/or 1080p video recording
• HDMI and GPS port

I want one. But when should I get it? I looked at historical price data for Nikon cameras and kits sold in Sweden (data from prisjakt.nu) and ended up with the following chart:



There is quite good correlation between different models (possibly excluding the D300) and the price drop, so a curve like this can probably be assumed for the D90 as well.

The introductory price for the D90 will probably be $1,000 and $1,300 with a 18-105 VR lens. I'm guessing this will translate to 10.000 SEK and 13.000 SEK. Now you only need to decide how much you want to pay and how long you are willing to wait.

I'm leaning towards getting the kit when the price drops to 10kSEK and I'm guessing this will happen around May 2009.

Streaming music to an AirPort Express

I have a SqueezeBox 3 in my living room that I'm really pleased with. But when the time came to add another set of connected speakers I decided to go with an AirPort Express (APE) instead and then stream to this from my MacBook.

The main reason for this was Apple's Remote application for the iPod Touch. With this I can control music playback from my iPod. The two drawbacks are that I can't listen to music locally on the MacBook while streaming to the speakers and I can't sync music between the APE and SqueezeBox. Since the APE was the cheapest alternative (900 SEK compared to 1.400 SEK for a headless SqueezeBox receiver or 2.000 SEK for the SqueezeBox 3) I went with that.

The APE can also function as a wireless router so I went to work and reinstalled my local network, putting my Netgear router out to pasture. Unfortunately the 802.11G performance was worse than with my old router. This was apparent when running VNC to my HTPC where I had to enable the lowest quality setting. Not a big problem, but a nuisance nonetheless.

Then I started to stream music to the APE. Thirty seconds went by and then the sound dropped out for a couple of seconds. Then it came back on. And dropped off again. Now it is a big problem. The SqueezeBox has a nice big buffer and decodes MP3 locally, the APE works by decoding the audio on the computer and then streaming uncompressed audio over the network. Combine this with a small buffer in the APE and you get a problem when you add other network traffic.

Other people had reported issues and if I shut down network intensive applications I could get streaming to work properly. A solution, but not very satisfying.

I then started thinking (I probably should have started with this before redoing my network). The APE can also use 802.11n - which is in the 5GHz spectrum. Why not use that? I went and got the Netgear and set up two networks; one 802.11g and one 802.11n. But now I couldn't access my MacBook (running 11n) from my Touch (running 11g) which was the main point of getting the APE to begin with.

More thinking and then I put the APE in bridge mode. Problem solved. I now use 11n for the MacBook and APE and 11g and Netgear for the rest of the network (HTPC, Touch, Wii, SqueezeBox, Kid's computer).

Wordle is kinda neat

I just found out about Wordle through Thomas Hawk's blog. Of course tag clouds is nothing new, but wordle does it with style and you can pour any kind of text content into it. The image shows my tag cloud at del.icio.us.

I've pretty much stopped using del.icio.us by the way. I'm now using Foxmarks for synching bookmarks between computers and that has been working out fine for me so far.