This is not a knock on Fujitsu, my ScanSnap is close to 10 years old; and that is longer than most vendors support old hardware. In any event, other than some minor damage to the multi-sheet tray/base of the scanner, the ScanSnap is still chugging along. I've kept an old Mac around just to scan documents as my scanner lost support starting with with OS X Mountain Lion (10.8). No more! To this point, I've not complaints with VueScan. Time will tell if the unlimited upgrades for the "Pro" version are meaningful.

Canon 5D Mk II. EF 17-40mm f/4L USM at ISO 100, 26mm, f/4, 1/350. Cropped and converted to PNG using the simplest of tools - iPhoto.

[A version of this post (July 23, 2012) has been deleted from my gaming blog. It never belonged there, but was placed there at a time when Posterous was having issues. Updating the post, and placing it here seems only fitting.]

A free iPhone/iPod Touch app - MPoD - controls the MPD service on the Auraliti PK 100 (there is a premium version of MPoD for the iPad, MPaD, that sells for $2.99/ €2.39). The good news with the PK 100 is that, if you use the right MPD client, you don't need to know anything about MPD - so don't be intimidated by MPD! There is a client for MPD on just about any mainstream computing platform, but I'm partial to MPoD and MPaD. An important concept to grasp is that multiple MPD clients can control MPD at the same time, and the view of the Playlist dynamically updates across all clients.

In many instances, one has to know the IP address of the machine(s) running MPD; but the Auraliti PK 100 will usually be auto-discovered by MPoD and MPaD (assuming your iOS device's wifi connection can "see" the network the PK 100 is connected to). Here is how a PK 100 looks in MPoD:

Once you have connected to MPD, it will update your client's copy of the MPD database and start caching album art. This can take a few minutes for the former and much longer for the latter. In any event, here is MPoD's main menu:

As you can see, you have several ways of selecting music for playback. I'll cover each of the selection options, but will start with the most useful option for me - Browse.  This is the option that allows one to directly access the folders where one has saved one's music. From this view one can select albums or tracks directly from attached USB (and some NAS) devices; and it is particularly handy if one's metadata is less than perfect or if one just prefers to view a music collection via the folder hierarchy on a storage device. I put a great deal of care into the folders where I store my music. Thus, this is the most useful way of finding what I want to play, but this may not be the case if you put your effort into tagging your music collection. In any event, here is a shot of the Browse view in MPoD (there is no search feature here):

This is the Artist view in MPoD (by pulling down on the screen, one can search in this view):

This is the Album view in MPoD (search is availble in this view):

And this is the Genre view in MPoD (no search feature here):

I skipped the Song view as it is only good for searching for a single song title in my opinion. In any event, from the Album, Artist, Genre and Browse screens one can select an album to play (or a group of albums depending on organization). As soon a you select an album for playback, it is automatically placed in the Playlist (the active queue of songs that may be played); and the song at the top of the Playlist will start playing. In MPoD, it looks like this:

MPaD works much the same way as MPoD, but is a little more streamlined due to the extra screen real estate:

As you can see, your Playlist is on the left side of the screen, and you can choose from all the selection views MPoD offered as well as selecting music from last.fm. The Info view adds a handy integrated web browser on the right side of the screen. For completeness, I'll provide screen shots of the selection views available in MPaD at the end of this post. This is probably a good time to talk about some of the weaknesses of MPD and/or MPoD/MPaD.

The greatest weakness of MPoD and MPaD is the limited space for text in any of the selection views. This might not be as big a deal as it is were album cover art always available and always correct, but this is not the case.

The Album, Artist and Genre selection views are going to be of greatest use if you have been scrupulously consistent with tagging your music collection. The less true this is, the less useful these selection views are. In my case, the tags for flac, ogg and mp3 files are not well maintained as I did that sort of thing in iTunes. In addition, I've not found an MPD client that offers anything like iTunes' Smart Playlists. Thus, I tend to look things up in iTunes if I want to browse a tagged music list; and then search for the album or artist in MPoD or MPaD.

The Playlist can be treacherous. The currently selected song in the Playlist is the insertion point for any songs or albums that you want to add to the Playlist. If the last song in the Playlist is selected, then new songs or albums are appended to the Playlist as one might expect:

However, if you want to add to the Playlist when the song that is playing is not the last song in the Playlist, you get this:

[Originally posted to my gaming blog on July 21, 2012 . . . when Posterous was having issues. Moving the post here to clean things up at the gaming blog. Also, there will be a related post here that touches on the topics of MPD and MPD clients in a few days . . . or a few weeks!  ;)  ]

What? A post about something other than gaming? Well . . . Posterous is on the fritz a lot of late; and I may just start posting some of the more random stuff here instead of hassling with the fail over there.

The Auraliti PK 100 is advertised as an audiophile grade music player. It has no storage of its own, you can hook up to 3 or 4 USB drives on the one I have. The PK 100 is a small fanless PC that decodes FLAC, WAV, AIFF and MP3 files (the latter not mentioned in the docs, but claimed to work by one reviewer - will test later). It then either processes the digital audio stream itself using its built-in DAC (outputs analog stereo via standard RCA) or sends the stream to an external DAC of your choosing via S/PDIF (it has a BNC connector for this). All of these functions work great.

The PK 100 must be controlled over your local network (and thus must be connected to it) via your PC, Mac, iOS or Android devices. The folks at Auraliti recommend getting started with the NeoMPC web app. Here is a screen shot of the Browser screen where you can select tracks to add to the device's play list [in NeoMPC]:

The conversation regarding the utility of objective measurements and audio quality continues . . . with the seductive siren call of quantitative "certainty" gaining more traction.  Certainly the research by Harman International's Sean Olive is a huge step forward, and is worth a look if you are interested in the topic or are thinking of trying to upgrade your headphones.

What is most interesting, at least to me, is how well measurements can reinforce subjective opinion and/or experience. A recent reddit post by SanjiWatsuki discusses some measurements of many of today's top headphones.  SanjiWatsuki's report is interesting because the measurements seem to track fairly well with the headphones that are most often mentioned as top performers on Head-Fi.org.  As is now common, I find Tyll Hertsens' comments a useful reality check.

Less test shots and more trying to learn how to use this lens for landscape and nature photography (not really the strengths for this lens). Anyhow, here goes . . . my favorite shots from an early fall morning around Lake Sabrina (Inyo National Forest above Bishop, California).

And a few more from the same area, this time by South Lake.

Another sale at HDtracks. This time it is a decent mix of live recordings - many in high resolution. Interesting, but no guarantee of quality I'm afraid. Still, if there are some holes in your music collection (as there certainly are in mine!), don't say I didn't try to let you know.

The standouts for me are:

• Peter Frampton's Frampton Comes Alive!
• The Kinks' One for the Road
  
• Keith Jarrett's The Koln Concert
  
• The Band's The Last Waltz
• The San Francisco Symphony's American Mavericks (Michael Tilson Thomas conducting)
  

Those that know me are all too well aware of my weakness for both headphones and surround sound audio.  To this point, I have only been able to enjoy them separately.  This is not because the technology doesn't exist to combine the two, but because it has not been done at a price that is reasonable to me and/or at reasonable quality.  For purposes of gaming, there are several serviceable options; but none of them are even remotely audiophile caliber.

The current state-of-the-art for surround sound processing for headphones is the Smyth Realiser A8.  Not only is the Realiser highly regarded, but it is still unique in responding to even fairly modest movements of your head as you listen - something we do naturally to pinpoint the source of a sound.  No matter how attractive the Realiser is, it is too rich for my blood at $3,000.

However, we may be able to get quality affordable headphone surround sound from DTS in the near future in the form of DTS' Headphone:X.  The element that they are doing "right" is compensating for headphone characteristics, but it is going to take them time to build a library of measurements for all the headphones that are available.  On the basis of what I think I heard on a recent Home Theater Geeks podcast, DTS is not prioritizing even mid-fi headphones like the Sennheiser HD-600 or HD-650 when it comes to getting measurements.  Thus, it may take awhile for Headphone:X to work with any of my favored headphones.  Equally discouraging, is that DTS is licensing the technology to OEMs; and who knows what quality of gear is going to include Headphone:X in it.  From what I heard in the podcast, at least in the near term, none of the gear is going to appeal to audiophiles. 

So. It looks like concerts on blu-ray will remain a non-headphone experience for some time to come.  Still.  At least there is hope that we are not a decade away from seeing a competent pairing of surround sound to headphones in a manner that is satisfying for more than just gaming.

Just took delivery of a Sigma 85mm f/1.4 lens, and tried it with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II.  I bought the lens for shooting indoor family events, taking portraits and maybe some still life shots.  The attraction was a little reach with decent low light performance, and this seems to be a win.  We'll see.  Reviews rightly point out some problems with relatively slow auto-focus (so this is not a great lens for indoor sporting events), and the edges of the image are not terribly sharp when shooting wide open.  That said, it is fairly easy to compose and shoot around these limitations with relatively static scenes.

Obviously, the depth of field is going to be very shallow when shooting wide open; and that is what these test shots are going to illustrate.  Since I mostly shoot landscapes, I haven't played around with shallow depth of field much - particularly as I haven't had access to a lens that lends itself to this before.

The three images that follow were shot from about four feet away and are of some old hard drives. The center drive is about an inch forward of the right drive, and the left drive is about another inch further still into the background from the right drive (or about two inches from the front of the center drive). First, a shot focusing on the center drive:

The particulars:  ISO 400, f/1.4, 1/125 sec.  For the next shot, the focus is on the right drive:

The settings were ISO 400, f/1.4, 1/250. The last shot of this series was focused on the left drive:

The settings were ISO 400, f/1.4, 1/250.

Just a shot that I also shared to flickr.  I wish for more ways to share to/from here.  Maybe in time.

I'll be the first to admit that it is hard to win my trust; and, once you've lost my trust, it is unlikely that I will ever trust you again as I once did.  Thus, it should come as no surprise that I don't trust Larry Page or Google when it comes to their promises regarding Google+.  Don't get me wrong.  I am one of the few that still stubbornly uses Google+, but I don't trust that any content posted there is going to stick in the long term.  Why the lack of faith?  I've been betrayed by Google before, and Google Reader is only the latest in a string of disappointments.  It is the most prominent and certainly the most painful of Google betrayals, but I doubt it will be the last.

And still.  I use Google+

Masochistic tendencies?  Perhaps. 

I was undecided about the whole Lightroom versus Aperture thing for something like a year.  I'm just a fairly serious amateur photographer with no professional ambitions whatsoever.  I shoot with the intention of not needing to do serious image manipulation to arrive at a satisfactory image.  That said, the lens correction feature is kind of what pushed me over to trying Lightroom.  And then, a month later, we get the whole Creative Cloud thing.  Too soon to say that I have the luck of Leo Laporte, but . . .

I just chatted with a support bot on Adobe's web site.  Adobe's bot doesn't seem to have a script for customers that only use Lightroom.  It was like the rep couldn't fathom that someone would only use Lightroom.  Looks like Lightroom is headed for "pros only" territory.  I guess I may need to reconsider Apple's Aperture . . . I can't see paying $20 a month for Lightroom.  Hopefully Adobe will offer something more reasonable for Lightroom users, but it isn't looking so good at the moment.

Old news for the tech savvy, but probably not old news to friends and family.  If you have an iPhone or other iOS device that is always with you, Apple has made it pretty easy to upgrade the security of your AppleID. This is more of a concern if you use the Apple Store and/or iTunes store, and have a credit card linked to your AppleID.

Here are the instructions. Go forth, and do something positive to improve your online security.

Time was less than 5 minutes. Credit the off-hour transfer, and maybe the lack of posts!  ;)

With a little practice even I can make Kombu and Katsuo dashi. I use a recipe I found on about.com. Cookig the noodles should need little explanation, and doesn't make for much of a picture, but the soup . . . that is another story. Here is shot of the Kombu (kelp) after it comes out of the pot:

And here is a shot of the shaved bonito (Katsuo) before it goes in the pot:

You remove the bonito from the soup with a strainer when you pour it from the pot to a storage container. I add soy sauce, sugar and mirin to the portion of the soup that I am going to eat right away, and stick the rest of the soup in the frig. Anyway, here is final product with garnish:

I have a saying: "If some grandiose adjective needs to precede something, odds are that the thing is anything other than what is claimed." For example, if you see an ad for a flat at The Royal Apartments, you can't be sure of much; but it is almost certainly true that said apartments have absolutely nothing to do with royalty.

So. With that long-winded preamble, I give you noodles with Premium Ingredients (and yes - that is the exact wording on the packaging):

In all fairness, the noodles were not that bad. However, those Premium Ingredients kind of disappeared when mixed in with the sauce and noodles. The less expensive Cup of Noodles is actually more generous when it comes to the non-noodles part of the meal.

iPhone 4 . . . a shot with challenging lighting; and the unedited image:

Cocoatech recently released Path Finder 6 for OS X.  Cocoatech has posted some youtube videos that explain the product. Here is a link to the introductory video. 

I'm not sure exactly when it was released (I think today), but it is on sale during its release week for $5 off . . . so for $35.  Cocoatech allows you to try the software for 30 days, but don't take too much time if you want to take advantage of the introductory offer.  However, if you use Hazel, you may want to be sure the additional functionality of Path Finder is worth the price of admission as there is some overlap between the two products.

In any event,  Path Finder is the best of the Finder replacements for OS X, and this upgrade is just about mandatory for any OS X power user. For anyone with a history on the PC, Path Finder is the spiritual descendent Peter Norton's Norton Commander, a DOS file utility that featured a dual pane view that allowed you to see both source and destination folders at the same time; and it included many useful tools.

A Windows app with similar functionalty is Total Commander, and it costs $44, and has no where near the polish of Path Finder. So. Even at full price, you shouldn't feel too put-off by Path Finder's regular price of $40.

I used to post favorite albums to the big blog. However, until I can redo that section to work with music that is available from sources other than just Amazon, I think this will have to do. No. I haven't fallen out with Amazon, but I do prefer better than MP3 quality digital downloads. That eliminates both Amazon and Apple from my preferred music vendor list.

Hotel California / The Eagles:  after more than 30 years, it is still an impressive album

Of the Marsh and the Moon / I Ching:  a Chesky Records classic. Ambient, World, New Age . . . I recognize the need to classify music, but I think such labels do at least as much harm as they do good.

Both links are to high quality DRM-free FLAC downloads; and HDtracks pricing is reasonable . . . especially when compared to the DVD-A or Blu-ray alternatives.

The price of these active monitors recently dropped from $799 to $349. I've had my eye on them for some time as an upgrade to a pair of M-Audio BX5a monitors for one of my workstations; and decided that the price drop was reason enough to finally pull the trigger. There is not enough room behind the workstation for even a bookshelf speaker, so monitors have had to be the way to go. Note that these won't work with a stereo receiver or AVR that lacks a pre-out; and, even then, you will need some means for controling the volume. I'm using mine with a headphone amp that has pre-outs in addition to the headphone jack.

These suckers are big . . . really big. If you don't have a large desk or don't have a pair of beefy speaker stands, then this is too much speaker for you. Here is a shot of a BX5a perched on top of a Prodipe Ribbon 8.

The back of the speaker:

As you can see, inputs include an unbalanced RCA plug (for consumer equipment) and balanced XLR or 1/4" TRS plugs for pro gear.

I'll post a review on gdgt.com in a few weeks when I get some more time with these speakers.

I have some CDs that are . . . uhhh . . . 30 years old. I last touched many of these CDs 10 years ago when I ripped them with iTunes to put on my first iPod. A couple years ago, I invested in dBpoweramp to deal with an imported CD that had one track I just couldn't rip with iTunes. Last year, I began to (very) slowly re-rip my CD collection to FLAC for use with the hard drive attached to an OPPO univeral media player in the living room. I also convert the FLAC files using dBpoweramp's audio converter to Apple Lossless (ALAC) format for use with iTunes.  Both file types are a pretty big upgrade from the 128- and even 256- bit AAC rips of years gone by.

Today, acting on one of my New Year's resolutions, I picked up the pace of the re-ripping project. I was determined to get through at least a quarter of my classical CD collection. One short-cut, for the Apple side of the house, is to rip the CDs on both the Mac and PC. However, I ran into an entire CD that I couldn't rip with iTunes. That is where dBpoweramp is really saving the day; and, while It is taking some time, it looks like I am going to get all the tracks off this failed/failing CD. We'll see . . .

LATER:  Yep. It worked!

I had more than 1GB but less than 3GB of free space on my iPhone 4 when I began the upgrade to iOS 5. The upgrade went OK, but the restore process after the upgrade went awry. And, in a most un-Apple-like manner, the dialog box is less than helpful. :(

"Continue Restore" just repeats the restore, and I got the same error. No joy there.

I opted to Google the error code . . .

There is a thread going in Apple Community Support that is more helpful than Apple's official support document regarding these sort of errors.

To avoid the error, it seems that I would have been better off reconfiguring my iPhone BEFORE attempting the upgrade. As that is what I was effectively forced into doing in the end anyway; and doing so would have saved at least an hour. In my case, the solution would have been just removing all music from the phone; as I have had to restore it all anyway.

>,<

I'll bet some of the problems reported with the upgrade have been due to impatience. The screen should not blank out . . . as it does during the lengthy restores. This could easily fool someone that is not paying attention to iTunes status messages; and a premature disconnect would probably result in lost apps and music. Exactly matching many of the problems that I have seen posted over the last 24 hours.

Yep. You have to enable the Genius feature in iTunes if you want to use Match with iCloud.

Gdgt has a better spec sheet than Apple does!

Engadget has a nice comparison chart of the iPhone 4 versus 4S