Problems with USB3?

After ranting about backup strategies, I went out and bought a Seagate Expansion external 3TB USB 3.0 drive. Simple enough right? Turns out the damn thing doesn’t wake up when you resume the computer from sleep. Googling around shows other users with the same problem. Interestingly, it appears that users of other brands of external […]

Modern Backup for DIY PC's

TL;DR: Big external drives are cheap. Don’t over-complicate your backup setup. Even if you have SSD+HDD, just get a big USB drive and backup to it (in addition to cloud backup). If you have a smaller case with space constraints, consider a USB DVDR, since, who really uses optical media these days? See below for […]

Fujifilm X-E1 links

I’ve been researching this camera a lot. A collection of the useful links I’ve found: Fujifilm USA’s official product page Fujifilm’s official sample images Review at Luminous Landscape “My First Week Fuji X-E1 Review” by Amy Medina at Steve Huff Photo (added 10/22) Fuji X-E1 group on Flickr DPreview’s hands on preview Engadget’s hands on video […]

Beautiful Soup

I was helping my wife out with a quick script to scrape some data from a site that had a bunch of tables in it. Having only done some regex based scraping before, tables provided a bit of a challenge… Until I found BeautifulSoup. It’s a python library to which you can throw a blob […]

Maps

The iOS6 maps “fiasco” brings up an interesting question I often think about: Why is it that in the consumer technology world at least, vertical integration often competes with delivering value to the user. iOS Maps is an interesting case. Yes, it has some new stuff, but it also took some stuff away. It’s not […]

Nexus 7 backlight issue

A quick note to those who might be thinking about getting a Nexus 7: While I’ve found the device to be quite good overall, I’ve hit one hardware issue that is going to take a replacement to fix. Specifically, there’s a bit of backlight flicker when the screen brightness is on a low setting, and […]

Remote ctags with vim

Using a text editor inside a terminal really sucks. It’s really lame that it’s 2012, and we’re still doing it this way. So I resolved to try to run MacVim locally to do my work. It has a netrw module that lets you do certain things like open a sftp:// url directly, and browse remote […]

DIY quality

It used to be that building a PC yourself was the best way to get a reliable machine. Pick the best parts, the best software only, and get a solid experience. I don’t know why, but that world seems gone. I’ve had my latest build for 18 months or so, and it’s been kind of […]