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Grow You Own: Good News Update

So, We grabbed the two drums I have and stuff the end of the sump pump hose into the barrel. I thought that we might fill a barrel over the course of a few days. I had been monitoring the amount of water flow from the pump for a few days and while it was a good bit of water it just didn’t seem like all that much. Little did I know we could move 55 gallons in about 90 minutes.

The house we live in was built in 1899 and has a dirt basement. The water pours down the walls when it rains, and especially in the spring as the snow melts.… Click here to read more!

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Grow Your Own: Collecting Rain – Planning

Well, up here in the northeast we still have a bit of snow on the ground and it’s still dropping well below freezing at night so it’s much to early to start planting, but it’s time for my winter thinking and planning to start coming together. The first step is finding a source of water to use to water the garden. We have a well that works great to meet our needs as a family but general consensus is that it won’t be sufficient to water the garden as well. To that end I need to get water from somewhere else..… Click here to read more!

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Storage Update: Picking up the Pieces

Well, I have placed an order for the Norco DS-1220. I ordered it from Newegg.com as an open box item. It’s a bit of a gamble, for couple of reason. The first is because open box from Newegg means someone sent it back. It may have all of it’s parts, it may be missing some parts. Newegg will not help you out if the package is incomplete.. but it did save me $180. Newegg does offer a 15 day return policy on the item though so if it shows up and is missing some critical I can send it back and buy the non-open box version, albeit it at te $180 premium.… Click here to read more!

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Thecus: Dead again….

You would think I’d have learned my lesson already. I’ve been using my Thecus N5200 for a while now and, like clockwork, every 6 months it just dies. I’ve blogged about it before here, a lot, here are some of the posts.

Briefly, I had the drive in bay 1 fail again. It’s always that drive. No errors on the disk the Thecus just looses it. No errors in the logs, no bad sectors, it just disappears. So, I pull the drive out, format it, test it and put it back in. I log into the interface, tell the Thecus to use the disk I just put in as a spare which causes it to rebuild the array.… Click here to read more!

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Review: JBL Onstage II

When I ordered my 160GB Black iPod Classic I also ordered the JBL Onstage II desktop iPod speaker system. I can’t think of another way to describe it. The feature set of the device is fairly benign, drop the iPod in and you can play back music. It comes with a basic remote to handle some functions such as volume, play/pause, and track skip. Media is chosen by manipulating the iPod itself. It also has a 1/8″ jack on the back to allow for device other than iPods such as computers, ect.

The crazy thing about this device is how good it sounds.… Click here to read more!

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Progress Check In

I’ve been as busy as ever these past few weeks but I have been slowly making progress on all my little projects. Yesterday Apple posted a few 160GB iPod Classics to the refurb site so I scooped one up. Should be here next week. When I bought I considered also getting an apple dock but at $50 it doesn’t seem worth it for my needs. I did pickup one of the JBL On Stage II speakers. It’s kinda pricy at $129 but it gets great reviews and sounds much bigger then it is. I’ll review it when I’ve gotten a chance to test it out.… Click here to read more!

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Ramblings: Technology Thoughts from an Amateur Photographer

In a digital world one has to be very thoughtful of where the industry is going before making a purchase. I wish tech companies would be more transparent in this regard though I can’t blame them for being hard to read; No one wants people to stop buying because in two months a new product is going to come out.

In realistic terms this has a large effect on how I buy camera equipment. I believe that, in time, full frame image sensors with be the norm on DSLR cameras. Basically, a DSLR that you buy today uses a image sensor that is smaller then a frame of 35mm film, but high end cameras are starting to come out with an image sensor that is the same size as a 35mm frame of film.… Click here to read more!

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Underwater Photography

Why is it so expensive to outfit a camera for use in water? I understand the need for divers to have solid and high quality diving cases for their cameras but what about the normal Joe looking to take their camera into a wet environment? I’m not about to spend twice what I paid for the camera for a box made of clear acrylic with a couple of buttons! Not only does a case for the D300 cost double what I paid for the camera but a case for a point and shoot also cost twice what that camera cost!

I’ve found one company making what looks like thick ziploc bags for the camera but they look so damn unwieldy I can’t image them being useful.… Click here to read more!

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Macbook Battery Life

I’ve just replaced the battery in my first generation Apple Macbook, well worth the $129 dollars. For such a small battery I was always amazed that I was able to get more then 5 hours of battery life and about 9 months ago when it started to drop off a bit I realized how great that was.

I will admit that to get better then 5 hours use has to be pretty minimal, but if I’m in a meeting or surfing the web while relaxing with the screen’s brightness down to it’s lowest setting I have no trouble keeping it alive for 5 hours.… Click here to read more!

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Install Tiger on a G3 without a DVD drive

Here is a quick tutorial for anyone with an ancient Apple G3 Blue & White Powermac looking to install an OS via DVD. Basically, these machines are some of the first to have Firewire ports on them, the caveat is that they are plugged into the motherboard using a small daughter card. This allows them to be used in the OS normally but makes booting with the or using them for target disk mode impossible.

My first thought after discovering that was to install a generic DVD drive in the mac and use that but the drives on had on hand did not immediately work.… Click here to read more!