Ad Terras Per Aspera

Well, I haven’t posted in awhile; I really haven’t had much to talk, rant, or otherwise bitch about. I’ve recently gotten a new camera (a Canon Rebel XT), and a new printer (a Canon i9900) and I’ve been pretty happy with them.

The Rebel XT takes wonderful 8 megapixel low noise pictures, infact, a local neighbor convinced me take her kids’ Christmas photos (something she does every year at either Sears or Walmart) using my new camera, and she said the quality beat anything she’s ever seen. So, either I’m a good photographer, or that’s a good camera.

And its not just the camera, the i9900 is an amazing printer, best printer I’ve owned. Its a wide format printer that can do 13×19″ edge-to-edge prints, at a maximum of 4800×2400dpi, using 8 different color (supposably pretty fade-proof, but ask me in 20 years) inks.

Of course, I’ve been pairing it with Canon’s line of Photo Paper Pro inkjet paper, and I haven’t had any problems yet; I’ve printed one 13×19″, a 8.5×11″, and almost a whole box of 75 4×6″s and I don’t think I’m even half way through on any of the ink carts…. all 8 of them. Those things are a bit expensive too, about $8-10 a piece; then again, its better than buying a $30 ink cart for some low end printer every 20 pages.

Though, the problem with a camera is you always want to buy stuff for it. So far I’ve bought another CompactFlash card (1 gig, enough to do about 135 pictures), I got a decent tripod for Christmas, and I’ve also bought a second lenscap because I keep misplacing mine.

I also got a $350 telescope for Christmas too and I’m getting the necessary parts to turn that into a giant lens for my camera to do astrophotagraphy with, which requires this EOS T-Ring and matching T-Adapter.

I’ve also upgraded my workstation, but I’ll leave that for another post tommorow or so.

LEGO has their 2006 Star Wars sets out already: Slave I, V-wing Fighter, B-wing Fighter, A-wing Fighter, and the TIE Interceptor.

As I mentioned earlier, a group called the Protomen made a rock opera about Megaman… and it’s finally available on CD!

I was having a discussion in #ubuntu-devel about bootchart and in how well in detail it measures the boot up process, so I suggested that it should be added to LiveCDs as to measure a ’stock’ setup more easier. The IO records wouldn’t be valid against anything but other LiveCDs, but doing this could make testing random machine’s performance a lot easier.

Jeff Schroeder wants this to be an option on the boot menu, and thinks that it should “have a little wizard to email the bootchart back to ubuntu.org” and Brandon Hale wants Oliver Grawert to add the ability to use bootcharts to hwdb.

206… well, on my machine at least. And the funny part is, thats slow; must be the apache2, mysql, openssh, and distcc adding ten seconds (from Dapper’s default 35) to it.

I could switch from openssh to dropbear, but dropbear doesn’t support fuse’s sshfs correctly (to my much dismay, seeing as I can’t openssh to my openwrt and use a real vi locally on my workstation because of that…), and seeing as I run a local copy of gallery2, I can’t drop apache2 or mysql. Oh well.