Posts Tagged ‘ Musings ’

Ever Expanding “Other” on iPod Touch

I had been noticing that the “Other” section of my iPod Touch’s capacity kept expanding in what seemed to be an almost exponential fashion. Looking around the web, I read several times that the “Other” included system files, thumbnails, various cache files etc and that the only way to reign it back into control was to ‘Restore’ the iPod or iPhone.. considering I have all but 5GB of my 64GB touch filled, restore is a long and tedious process which I didn’t particularly want to undertake even though my ‘Other’ had swelled to well over 2GB.

Thinking some more on it last night I though there had to be an easy way for the system to clear these caches. There is a clear internet cache under Settings>Safari but that doesn’t clear everything. Then I figured I’d try shutting it down (Hold down the top button until you see slide to power off) and seeing if a restart would clear things. Sure enough, after the restart I went from 3.6GB free to 5.3GB free. The only change being in the ‘Other’ section. So to bring the ‘Other’ section of your iPod/iPhone capacity down just restart!

Playing with the iPod touch

Last week I got a very unexpected email telling me I had won an iPod touch during a random drawing from a NAPP member survey. It arrived 5 days later and became the first Apple product I’ve ever owned. I’ve used iMacs before but have a dislike in general of products that are highly proprietary. Thus, my mp3 players of the past have been relatively generic. Ie: no Zunes, no iPods. I’m currently actively using 3 besides the new iPod. I’m going to give a brief rundown of each and then my thoughts on the new iPod.
Continue reading “Playing with the iPod touch”

Fake Outlook Security Message & Snail Mail

I wanted to spread some awareness on a new email going around. This morning I got the lovely email from a ‘malware provider’ claiming to be MS. Basically saying, “Microsoft has released an update for Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express. This update is critical and provides you with the latest version of the Microsoft Outlook / Outlook Express and offers the highest levels of stability and security.” First message I got had the ‘fix’ attached the other two have links… If you get one, don’t open it. Despite the fact that they do look real they are not – MS will never send you a link or the actual fix in an email, they will push it via Microsoft Updates. You can read more about it on SophosLabs Blog  but main point is to be aware of it and don’t open it or any others that look like it.

Off of the email topic and on to snail mail topic… really snail mail… you see back in January of 2007 I ordered a drying rack to dry hand washable etc. I watch the tracking progress and was puzzled when it said ‘delivered’ and I never got it! So I called the company and they did a search on it and couldn’t find it either so they sent me a 2nd one. Well today our mail lady showed up and mentioned she had a big package for me. I was really shocked because I haven’t ordered anything big. She opened up the back of the truck and when I saw it I started wondering if it was the long lost drying rack. Sure enough, I opened up the packing slip and it was shipped January 30, 2007. It arrived today, 2.5 years later… apparently it was sitting in a back storage room at the post office and the postmaster had someone clean it out this week.

Moving the LR previews cache folder…

I finally manage to get my new camera body… a Canon 5Dii. I noticed that B&H actually had an “Order Now” link even though it still stated ‘back-ordered’ and decided to take a chance. 2 Days later I got a shipping confirmation stating it would be delivered on Friday (Jan 16) sometime between 8am and 7pm and that it required an adult signature… So I waited around the house for the big brown truck to show up. It finally did around 5pm and then I had to wait a couple hours for the battery to charge.

All in all I’m very pleased with it. The live view is going to take some getting used to it being an option… somehow it just seems wrong in ways for a camera with a true shutter to have ‘live view’ however I have seen a couple areas where it is useful and I think it is the only way you can actually take video with it… how odd to think a SLR with video capabilities.

Mine has the newer 1.0.7 firmware on it. So apparently I don’t need to worry about any of the issues that the previous firmware had with black spots by lights and vertical banding at higher ISO. However, I quickly found out that LR2.2 and ACR 5.2 do not currently display sRAW1 or sRAW2 files created with the newer firmware correctly. Their is a very noticeable magenta shift in the shadows and the tone curves just don’t seem right either. This has lead me to shooting the full RAW files which are HUGE (24-26MB each).

This leads me to my current quest in trying to figure out if there is a way to move the LR preview cache files folder somewhere else besides with the LR catalogue itself. Currently, I have my LR catalogue on my DATA drive – however with such large files the cache is growing huge and I’d love to put in on one of the other ‘temp’ drives that I don’t regularly backup – no need in backing up a cache folder! Apparently, I’m not the only one who has come up with wanting to do this. I managed to find a post by Sean McCormack stating how to do it on a Mac OSX… now to figure out doing it on XP… apparently it can be – it is just actually doing it at this point…

UPDATE: Ok… first I checked out Junction v1.05 by Mark Russinovich which is the simple command line way of going about symbolic links on XP. However, sitting and trying to think cmd line made my head hurt. I just want to get back to playing with the shots I took this morning and yesterday of the snow.

Like mounted hard drives, for junctions, the host folder has to be empty. So I moved all the existing preview files within D:\My Documents\My Pictures\Lightroom\My Database\Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata to the new home R:\LR Preview Cach leaving the Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews.lrdata folder empty. (This might also take a while if you have of previews already created – you can alternately just empty the folder by deleting the files inside and then have LR re-create the preview files. I decided I didn’t want to recreate the previews so I just moved them while making lunch.)

Since I didn’t want to deal with command line, I next checked out Rekenwonder Software’s Junction Link Magic which has a GUI interface. Quick download. When you open it, it scans your system for existing junctions (this might take awhile if you have several hard drives with a lot of folders. XP has a couple for the core of windows and then it found the two hard drives I found mounted in folders. Then press “create” and it pops up with the create junction point host and target windows. Once you have the empty host folder, select the two folders as shown below and click “Create.”

After a warning that some unexpected things can happen using junctions (similar to mounted drives) it creates the Junction.

Open up LR and everything works fine… LR thinks the data is still in the Lightroom 2 Catalog Previews folder since the OS sees the two locations as identical… however the data only officially resides on my R: drive now not on my D: If you are unfamiliar with mounted hard drives or junctions be sure to read about some of the quarks that come with them – especially when it comes to deleting files/folders within them.