Saturday, June 27, 2015

Amazing Grace

I was blown away by the incredible rendition of this song by the leader of the free world …

If a great man and gifted speaker like President Obama cannot tame the inherent insanity of their governmental processes and of their right wing, then what hope is there for the USA?

On the other hand, I cannot imagine for a moment that our current Prime Minister could inspire more than a few right wing nuts with any speech of any kind at any venue these days … so at least they have that.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

Mikey the Blind Rescue Pug

Great story here …

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/06/16/mikey-blind-pug_n_7593700.html

I was struck that all Pugs do this pretty much the same … and really often Smile

That’s Sabrina Johnson with Mikey. She is the district judge for Inkster, Michigan and obviously a very kind person.

Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Published! Ottawa Citizen Ourtown Section

As always, I recommend you look for it on the news stands on Thursday of this week – 18 June 2015. The section is filled with tons of things to do … you get a wee taste of it here:

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This image was shot at a relative’s house some years ago … one of the cutest faces you will ever see. Published with the permission of the parents.

Monday, June 8, 2015

Inateck USB 3.0 Tool-Free FE2005S Hard Disk Drive Enclosure

Introduction

This is a brief review of the Inateck tool less disk enclosure. The enclosure was sent to me for review purposes and I wanted to try it with a standard laptop hard drive at 7200 rpm.

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It spends its time installed in my ultra bay extension adapter …

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Ergonomics and Installation
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Nicely packaged of course. Everything is plastic wrapped for a very professional look.

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Installation was trickier than I had expected. The top half of the box slides open, but the little manual does not tell you to slide the lock switch open first, so I ended up forcing it. It looked like a power switch, being right next to the LED, and was not obviously a lock.

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Once that got sorted, I plugged the drive into the box and closed it, sliding the lock back into place.

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I then tried plugging in the USB 3 with its proprietary shaped plug. It would not go, so I opened the box again and pulled the drive, then slid the USB 3 into the box while open. It felt clunky but it went in and after that it was smoother.

So once I got the drive in the box I plugged the box into my laptop USB 3 port and it came up instantly.


Performance Comparison

The performance in the laptop ultra bay port is far from earth-shattering:

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Enter the Inateck tool free hard drive enclosure:

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The enclosure on a USB 3 port is also not much to write home about, but it did outperform the ultra bay across the board, if only by a hair … maybe 1%.

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Now to compare against my more powerful home machine …

First on a USB 3 hub …

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About the same … I’m a tad surprised.

How about on a full USB 2 hub?

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Wow … that’s pretty brutal, but then it is a USB 3 device and so should be expected to slow down on a USB 2 port. By the way, it took a long time to connect on USB 2. But it did and ran fine after that.

So how much faster is the same kind of drive as C: with a direct connection to the SATA controller?

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Looks like about 30% faster to read, but somewhat slower to write. Color me really surprised …


What about comparing against a serious disk? A 3.5” Caviar Black 3 TB 7200rpm?

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Faster again to read, but again slower to write in some cases. Interestingly, this disk writes faster than it reads across the board. More surprises it seems.


Conclusion
Performance is very good and while the difference between this drive and a main drive is there, it is not all that significant.

All in all, this is an inexpensive solution that is light weight and looks great.


And just for fun … my SSD C drive on the main machine …

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It’s not even a fast SSD but still crushes all the regular drives …

Friday, June 5, 2015

Ornamental Gardens

We have a pretty nice ornamental garden as part of the experimental farm that cuts through the city, and I like to visit now and again to see what is there to shoot. I went this last evening and shot with the sun already casting very long shadows. I shot this series exclusively with the G6 and the 100-300 and I must say that these two work amazingly well together, even as the light faded.

Here is the link to the whole series in my gallery:
http://letkeman.net/Gallery/Nature/flowers/Ornamental-Gardens-4-June-2015

I was able to block the sun in many cases in order to get images without nasty shadows, but some of the earlier images did have full sun. This is an example of a beautiful Iris shot with tons of light …

Nice tones I think. I processed the series pretty hard with lots of shadow around the flowers, and I am still having some problems with ProPhoto color space being boiled down to sRGB color space for the web, as these images seem to suffer from strange posterization in shadows. It’s perplexing and I need to figure it out … but for now I will live with it.

Here’s a pretty Iris that I shot in the shadow of my body. Works great …

There were other flowers that you can look at in the gallery, but the real show was the myriad Peonies that are everywhere in that garden. The variety is incredible.

Of course, pink is everywhere …

And so is white …

Shades of red and purple …

As I left, the sunset was looking pretty good … of course, this is accentuated a bit …

There are 122 images in the gallery … have a look:
http://letkeman.net/Gallery/Nature/flowers/Ornamental-Gardens-4-June-2015