I just purchased a Nokia n800 device that runs Linux by default. I'll be adding more content in the future.

My favorite state in Mexico is definitely Oaxaca. Oaxaca is second most southern state in Mexico near the Guatemala border. It's roughly about as far south as Belize and has decent climate.  It has untouristed beaches facing south, excellent ancient ruins like Mitla and Mont Alban a ancient hilltop Zapotec village with planetarium, ball court and hospital. There is just enough tourism for services to be available but not enough to be really irritating like the entire east coast of the Yukatan Peninsula or the many west coast resort towns like Acapulco, Mazatlan, and Puerta Villarta. But the real reason I like Oaxaca is for the nice people and the wonderful food. Even among Mexicans the Oaxacans excel. Oaxaca is billed as the land of the 7 moles. If you haven't had mole you need to fly to Oaxaca. Don't go to your local Azteca for it because you'll decide that you don't like it. That's about the same as going to Olive Garden and having "Italian" food (pronounced with a long i!).  If you're wanting to know a bit more about mole visit the Wikipedia page on mole.

When trying to decide which camera to get it's good to read the reviews (especially at dpreviews.com) but sometimes you just want to compare apples to apples photo quality. While digging around in dpreview's forums I found a link to this site that has photos taken by a bunch of different cameras. The great part is you can choose two cameras, then choose the same photo for each and compare the image quality. You might be surprised at what you see like the G9 being able to take photos as nice as a Rebel XTi at low ISO or how bad the photos coming out of a Panasonic (anything!) are at ISOs 200 and highers.

Imaging Resource Comparison Site

I recently blogged about the Fujifilm F50 fd as being a possibility for my next point and shoot camera. It has some great features and more importantly a decent manual mode and low light performance. I've been using Canon cameras for quite a while because they are built really solid, have a great menu system and the image quality is among the best in the industry. They also have a low noise suppression philosophy which I like because you get a photo that may need to be touched up in the Gimp but it's closer to what the camera saw. In the case of Panasonics and a few others the blur the heck out of the photo in order to suppress noise. Once the photo is mangled there's no turning back, it's done.

I've been wanting to replace my SD-500 with something better and I'd listed a wide angle lens and image stabilization as  two key features. The SD-800 IS has both of these but scored poorly in DP-Reviews test . The image quality wasn't as good as the non wide angle cameras of the same level so I scrapped that idea. The SD-870 has now been reviewed and the image quality is much improved over the SD-800 or maybe they just got a better sample. Anyway I'm considering it again as it has most everything I want outside of more manual controls. And as I've proven to myself over and over you can't have everything in a digital point and shoot camera - at least not yet.

In Japan women are attempting to stop being victims of crime by hiding from their pursuers in plain site. They wear a skirt that turns into a full size cloth vending machine!







Hopefully they don't avoid one criminal only to find another breaking into vending machines. Original story at the New York Times .

Grant

Just like I've been saying for years - the security at airports is to make us feel secure so we keep flying and the airline industry stays healthy. Whenever they pull anything out of my bag and deem it a security list I have to keep mum about the fact that I'd already gone through security at 7 airports previous to this one and they just found the offending item. I'm certain that anyone with a brain could carry enough parts on a plane and blow a hole in the side. The reality is there just isn't enough people wanting to do it. Terrorism isn't about keeping innocent people from doing things, it's about scaring them.

According to a USA TODAY article the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) had agents in plain clothes carry phony bomb parts through security at LAX and Chicago O'Hare to see which would get spotted. Seventy-five percent of the parts taken into LAX got through without detection, and 60% at O'Hare. SFO (San Francisco/Oakland)  hires private companies to do the screening and only 20% of the parts went undetected.

A test in 2002 showed they failed to find guns 24% of the time. In the late 90's they missed 40% of bombs, by 2002 they were missing 60%. In the next 5 years they might as well dissolve the TSA altogether for ineffectiveness.

This basically means that if there's a terrorist on the plane you should probably go ahead and violate the FAA's regulations and call your loved ones on your cell phone in hopes that it will mess up the aircrafts navigation system (It won't).

It seems their ability to detect completely assembled bombs has gone up though (as long as the word BOMB has been stenciled on the side in block letters using lead paint).

Grant

As some of you know I moved this year to a new house. I now have plenty of room in the garage for the servers which means my heating bill will go up now that they won't be contributing.

Anyway I'd been using Powerline networking for some time and it's worked wonderfully because you never need drivers for the network. How it works is you plug your network cable into a powerline bridge and then plug the bridge into the electrical wall socket. Do this for each location and you have an instant network! It's completely painless. Only problem is your electrical wiring needs to be perfect and mine to the garage in the new place isn't. My print speeds were so horrible that I was copying data to my laptop and carrying it down there to print. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that isn't the solution. I've always shied away from wireless outside of occasional use on the road because of the security implementations but it appears I have no choice short of rewiring my house.

The new 802.11n stuff is tempting but without more testing I'm not going to bite. I already have a Linux powered Linksys WRT-54g which has served me well. My plan was not to add wireless cards to all the machines in the garage but rather set up a wireless bridge and plug a Gig switch into it so the servers could talk to each other at 1000Gbits and the rest of the world at 54Mbits. My biggest requirementis the router has to support the Linux DD-WRT software. After some looking I settled on the Buffalo WHR-G125  available for $29 at Circuit City with rebate...

The Buffalo WHR-G125 does not come with Linux installed and from what I saw on the review forums doesn't come with much functionality in the stock firmware either. I honestly didn't even log into the stock firmware or use it in it's stock form. The first time it was ever powered on I nailed it with a tftp upload with new Linux DD-WRT firmware and it's been running Linux ever since.

The Buffalo WRT-G125 is a 240 mhz mips processor (Broadcom BCM5354) embedded device with a 5 port switch and uplink. It has 16 megs of ram and with Linux running there's about 14 free. The antennae is fixed but I found one guy solder a connection on so he could connect any external antennae.



If you don't know what dd-wrt is you're in for a treat. It's a replacement firmware operating system for many consumer based routers. It gained it's fame on the Linksys WRT-54 series and that's where I came into contact with it. The Linksys WRT-54g was a Linux router and several firmware replacement projects stemmed from it. I started using a paid for replacement called Talisman. The firmware was encoded and I lost the original file once and didn't want to go through the hassle of getting the author to give me another so I decided to look around and see what else was out there. Well, that and there was a lot of controversy about the developer's practice of stealing other people's code and then acting like a copywrite Nazi when anyone else wanted his code. I don't like supporting people like that so I switched to dd-wrt. DD-WRT adds many features to your router like ssh access, QOS, wireless bridging etc.. There really isn't any reason that I can think of for not using it.

As some of you know I moved this year to a new house. I now have plenty of room in the garage for the servers which means my heating bill will go up now that they won't be contributing.

Anyway I'd been using Powerline networking for some time and it's worked wonderfully because you never need drivers for the network. How it works is you plug your network cable into a powerline bridge and then plug the bridge into the electrical wall socket. Do this for each location and you have an instant network! It's completely painless. Only problem is your electrical wiring needs to be perfect and mine to the garage in the new place isn't. My print speeds were so horrible that I was copying data to my laptop and carrying it down there to print. It doesn't take a genius to figure out that isn't the solution. I've always shied away from wireless outside of occasional use on the road because of the security implementations but it appears I have no choice short of rewiring my house.

The new 802.11n stuff is tempting but without more testing I'm not going to bite. I already have a Linux powered Linksys WRT-54g which has served me well. My plan was not to add wireless cards to all the machines in the garage but rather set up a wireless bridge and plug a Gig switch into it so the servers could talk to each other at 1000Gbits and the rest of the world at 54Mbits. My biggest requirementis the router has to support the Linux DD-WRT software. After some looking I settled on the Buffalo WHR-G125  available for $29 at Circuit City with rebate...

Just an announcement to those tuning in. I use Joomla! for this site and version 1.5 just went to Release Candidate 3 which means it's almost done. I'm running a Joomla! 1.5 RC3 site parallel to this one and it doesn't really work but it's getting closer. As soon as Joomla! 1.5 is released and all functionality is there I'll transition to the new site.

So how this effects you is that I will be adding content here but not changing the layout or functionality unless I can do it in a matter of minutes. Joomla! 1.5 changes a lot of things so there's no need changing code when it won't migrate anyway... So stay tuned. I figure in a month or so I'll be moving over to Joomla! 1.5.

Once that's done I'll have the reviews working again and RSS feeds everywhere.

Grant

I've been soldiering on with a Canon D500 point and shoot for several years now mainly because nobody seems to be able to make a better one. There's nothing fancy about the SD500 (7MP, 3x zoom) but it takes decent pictures and is built like a tank. I thought about going with an SD800 because of the wide angle but the sensor was smaller and the picture quality suffered because of the wide angle. My G7 (electronics, asphalt = bad) died so this summer I had to rely solely on the SD500 this summer for the 14 GB or so of photos I took. It did ok but it got me to thinking about a new small point and shoot pocket camera. The SD500 would still be great if it had image stabilization and some manual controls. I've been watching Fujifilm and it's SuperCCD for quite a while and I think they might have created my next camera....