Category: Personal

North Shore Road Trip

Ctein and I made a short road trip up to the North Shore Friday and Saturday. It’s a very different landscape—great tracts of solid igneous rock, with pine trees growing all over it. Rivers coming out of that are reddish brown, but at  least they’re warm (much warmer than the lake). I’m used to that kind of rocky stream being fed by snow  melt up on a mountain nearby, and hence being very cold.

Us in action

(Click through image for gallery)

Normally one makes an effort to keep one’s feet out of the fisheye view, but I liked what it was doing with the shadow, and I needed to point the lens down far enough to get the horizon distorted the way I wanted that the feet were pretty much unavoidable (a tripod is even harder to keep out of the shot; needs a boom, which I don’t have).  So I decided I’d just live with both of us being in the photo.

Photo Blogging

I’m playing with the ability to post pictures quickly and semi-automatically — not all pictures I take, just ones I select. Photos posted this way will appear in snapshot gallery entries named “Photo Blog mm/dd“.

Vertical pictures are currently being presented on their side.  Other than that, the current collection of hacks seems to be hanging together a little bit.

We’ll see.

The underlying tech: the cheapest Eye-Fi card, home, hotel (Fourth Street) or Sprint Overdrive Wi-fi, ftp upload to a special user under my Dreamhost account, a cron job to pick the photos up and post them to the snapshot album.

Other than bug fixes, planned changes include: RSS feed, latest photo thumbnail in main blog sidebar, possibly creating a blog entry when a photo blog entry is created (but not updated), web access to set photo caption and description (or delete some).

Laptop Stand

I think, for once, I got this right the first time. I’ve been casually shopping laptop stands for, oh, a decade or so I guess. It became somewhat urgent when the heat issues got bad enough that they all have vents on the bottom, fans, and still get rather hot at some points.

The Koolsink wraps neatly around the laptop in the bag

For me, the stand is primarily for use on the road.  I don’t use it at home that much; I’ve got a desktop system, with a comfortable chair and a big monitor, for that.  So one of the big issues is the space it took up in the bag. Also, I’d prefer one that doesn’t draw on the laptop batteries to run additional external fans (those also tend to be rather thick and hence hard to pack).

The laptop nestles inside the Koolsink

I finally found a company that had created the ideal solution to this problem—Koolsink. They make a simple aluminum sheet, bent into a narrow “J” shape (rather like a “j-card” for a CD jewel case), just the right thickness for the computer to fit inside it for storage, and to provide a little slant for use on a table. They make a number of sizes; do be sure to find the right one for your laptop!

As usual with such things, it’s a rather expensive sheet of bent aluminum. Worse, from my point of view, the shipping cost is nearly as high as the product (to the USA; they’re in Canada). And they don’t have retail dealers, they only sell direct.

Laptop on the Koolsink on a table

I’ve now had it for a couple of weeks, though not for a road trip. It fits nicely around my computer in the bag, and works very well both on a table and in my lap to keep the vents clear and my lap cool. I would have to describe it as doing everything I hoped it would do (I admit, my hopes did not include world peace; or a pony).

Pilot Frixion Ball Erasable Gel Ink Pen

I went looking for an erasable way to write in a contrasting color today, and ended up with two.

I got some red leads for my mechanical pencils.  This is the backup plan, because this has been known to work since around the time I was born, probably even earlier.

I remembered some tolerable erasable ballpoints from years ago, and looked for them (hoping for red or green or at least blue), and couldn’t find them (at Office Depot). However, I stumbled across the Pilot pen given in the title.

The line is finer than I like (but it’s described as “fine”, so it’s as described).  The pens started writing a bit roughly, but after a few inches of line they wrote well enough.  They’re scratchy, not smooth—but that’s why I don’t like “fine” pens, so there may not really be anything wrong with them in that regard.   The red and the black ink are quite intense, certainly good enough.

Which brings us to the erasing.

The erasing is nothing short of miraculous. I have never before had anything, including a pencil, that erased as cleanly as this pen does. Furthermore, the eraser doesn’t leave crumbs behind (it sounds like it erases by heating the ink by friction). After erasing, the space on the paper looks absolutely pristine.

This won’t become my favorite pen in general, and mostly I’m happy enough living without erasing.  But for special cases, like marking up documents or correcting homework or exams, where being able to erase mistakes cleanly is important, this will become my tool of choice.

(The packaging suggests that you NOT use this pen for legal documents.  Sounds like good advice to me.)