smugmug will be presenting at the April 13, 2005, meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area. The company has been around for 30 months now and has over 60,000 customers totalling 18,000,000 images! The company is supremely dedicated to its customers and has features not seen in many of its competitors, including unlimited storage (yes, unlimited!) and a third-party developer API.

We’ll also be demonstrating the ReadyNAS 600 1TB RAID NAS box. Yes, I finally decided on my storage solution for the house. I’ll be covering details on the ReadyNAS in a future entry.

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There’s a review on the iPod Photo Connector out on Playlist. The skinny? While it downloads RAW images from digital cameras, it can’t (yet) display them. Plus, the transfer rates seem to be pretty slow (12 minutes for 250MB) and battery drain is significant. Looks like I’ll be holding onto the Epson P-2000 for a little while longer.

Here’s to second chances!

Alex has been using NetNewsWire for a couple of years now and is a big fan of the Mac OS X newsreader. Though I used it for a little bit, I found myself going back to the browser and my list of bookmarks to read news. Recently, my list of sites had grown too long and unmangeable, prompting me to give NetNewsWire a second chance. It’s paid off, as I now use the app to keep me up-to-date with the latest news.

As much as I’m on the bleeding edge of technology, I sometimes have a hard time changing my ways and letting go of the old. I was using version 1 of NNN until just a few days ago (2.0 has been in beta for over a year). Now I’m kicking myself for not having switched earlier! I held off for the longest time switching to a real CMS for the site. Though I had coded up RSS support in the earlier version of my site, I got infinitely better support when I switched over to Wordpress.

Canon has posted firmware updates for the EOS-1D Mark II and the EOS-1Ds Mark II.

1. Three new languages (Russian, Traditional Chinese, and Korean) added to the camera menus
2. Improvement in communication reliability when using some CF cards
3. The issue of communication failure between the camera and some personal computers has been fixed (1D Mark II only)

You’ll need your camera’s serial number to access the files.

Last weekend, I went over to Eric’s loft in Oakland to test his Dell 3000cn color laser printer. I’m still thinking of purchasing a 3100cn, which just happens to be on sale again. 40% off via a techbargains.com coupon! It’s very tempting, at least until you think about the high price of replacement toner!

Vienna and Jim came by a few hours later to prepare for dinner. We got a chance to look at some of the footage from Vienna’s Benefit Concert the week before. It’s now available via Quicktime streaming for those of you who couldn’t make the show in person!

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Last Saturday, Rae and I attended Cindy’s something-something birthday party at her place in Santa Clara. We had come from San Jose, where we saw film Year of the Yao, a documentary covering the first year of Yao Ming’s career in the NBA. It’s hitting theaters nationwide at the end of April. Though the documentary didn’t really tell me anything that I didn’t already know about Yao Ming, it was entertaining and well-paced.

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My trusty LaserJet 6MP, which had stopped working over three weeks ago, has finally been resucitated. Who knows how much longer it will work, but I’m happy that I can now print again from my Macs.

I originally thought that the source of the problem was the Farallon iPrint Ethernet Adapter. This devices makes a LocalTalk-compatible printer available to an Ethernet network. Though the printer works using Parallel, IrDA, and direct LocalTalk connections, it doesn’t work using the iPrint (either via a wireless or wired Ethernet connection). The strange thing is that not all functions of the iPrint have stopped working; I used it last night to transfer files from the 180 over to a Lombard PowerBook. The 180 doesn’t have an Ethernet port, so I connected it to the iPrint and was able to access its AppleShare using the Lombard in OS 9.

As they say, necessity is the mother of all inventions. After searching on the Internet, I came across my solution. LPD-Win allows me to use a Windows box as a LPD printer server on my Ethernet network. The printer attaches to the computer via the Parallel port, LPD-Win runs on the PC, and I’m able to connect via LPD/LPR printing on my Mac. Best of all is LPD-Win is free. I don’t have to buy another iPrint, a commercial/shareware LPD print server, nor a new printer (yet). Woo hoo!

Longtime readers will know that I’ve undertaken a huge task of annotating all of my images. At last count, I have taken over 70,000 images since October, 1998. I started this project at the end of 2003, and it’s taken me over a year to get to this point. Five months to go: April, June, July, August, and September of 2003.

In fact, I just finished annotating April, 2003. I toured with Vienna Teng on the East Coast. Three weeks, 19 live performances, television appearances, and radio gigs resulted in over three thousand images. The hardest part was figuring out where we were in some of the photos!

61,500 images down, 8,500 images remaining. Usually I average anywhere from 500 to 1,000 images a month, but in these last four, I’m averaging over 2,000! It’s true what they say about the last 10% taking 90% of the time. I feel like I’m riding up Montebello, Page Mill, and Old La Honda combined; the road keeps going up, up, and up, and the summit is nowhere in sight! Sure, it will feel great once I’m done with this, but it doesn’t make the process any easier or more fun.

I’ve known about the Command-Shift-3 (and Command-Shift-4 in OS X) shortcut to take screenshots of a Mac for years. That said, I always wanted a way to save the screenshot to the clipboard. The answer was right there in front of my face the whole time!

Command-Shift-Control-3 and Command-Shift-Control-4!

Knowing this would have saved me countless hours in the past!

Dell’s got another 30% off deal for the 3100cn color laser printer. I missed a 40% off deal by a week, so the price will be $384 (instead of $330) after discount. I’ve read a few reviews, and the consensus is that it’s a very good print. Cons include it being noisy and very bulky (16 x 16 x 21 inches). Anybody have first-hand experience who can comment on:

• Mac compatibility.
• Photo printing quality. What are the best papers for photo reproduction?
• Memory. Should I spring for the extra 256MB at $70? Is the extra memory required for printing photos?
• Toner capacity. What’s a reasonable number of pages to expect before plunking down $350 for a new set of CMYK toner cartridges?

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