Apple finally introduced support for the RW2 format from the Panasonic LX-3 and the Leica D-Lux 4 compact digital cameras in the Digital Raw Camera Compatibility 3.0 update. You may have been wondering why it has taken so long to add support for these models. The reason is that the LX-3 and the D-Lux 4 use a lens with high (up to 2.9%) lens distortion at short focal lengths. Apparently, this is the price that has to paid in order to have a 24mm (equivalent) wide angle zoom lens in a compact camera. The built-in raw conversion engine in the camera corrects for this distortion and also applies other corrections for de-vignetting, chromatic aberration and sharpness when the photo is saved as a JPEG. To compensate for the distortion, the photo has to be cropped quite a bit. See here for more details. Technically, the shortest focal length is more like 21mm (equivalent). While Adobe Lightroom users were enjoying RW2 raw photos from the LX-3 and D-Lux 4 for quite some time, Apple’s digital camera raw engine didn’t have support for lens distortion correction until version 3, which was released at the 9th of this month. It supports both, Aperture 3 and iPhoto ‘09. Unfortunately, you’re SOL if you’re still using Aperture 2. Read more »

Ever since the release of Aperture, Apple only half-heartedly supported metadata in exported photo’s. I don’t know why but Apple decided not to export extremely useful metadata information like lens model and many others as well. Unfortunately, this is still the case with Aperture 3 :( Lens type is still not included in any exported JPEGs or when directly uploading a photo to flickr. When I tried to upload a photo to flickr using the new flickr button in Aperture 3, even location data from “Places” wasn’t included. Commenter Connor had the solution: I needed to check that checkbox in Aperture’s preferences web tab (see screenshot below). Read more »

The new Geotagging features in Aperture 3 are pretty cool – and very simple to use too. Just like in iPhoto, Apple doesn’t use the term Geotagging but calls it “Places” instead. There’s support for the popular NMEA format which I’m able to export from my Holux M-241 GPS logger using BT747. Aperture Places is also able to read the latitude/longitude data embedded in a photo’s metadata and displays the location on map. Places is able to show the track log if you want to see the route as well. It’s so nice to finally have Geotagging support within Aperture. This simplifies the Geotagging workflow when using a GPS logger a lot. It’s even easier if you use an on-camera GPS unit.  Read more »

I absolutely love GlimmerBlocker. GlimmerBlocker is a free ad filter proxy, primarily targeted at Safari users. It filters those annoying ads on ad polluted websites very effectively. But wait, GlimmerBlocker is more! Read more »

I’ve always fancied the Nikon GP-1 GPS on-camera receiver for its ability to directly write geotagging information to a photo, including the Nikon .NEF RAW format, thus greatly reducing the complexity of the post-processing workflow involved when using an off-camera GPS logger like the Holux-M241. The Nikon GP-1 still costs around USD 200 which IMHO is a bit overpriced. Read more »

Here are the kernel extensions I’m using on my ASUS P6T (non SE, non Deluxe) mainboard to run Mac OS X 10.6. I’m not planning to write a guide for a vanilla installation but I already summed up some important points when installing OS X on the P6T in this post from a retail Mac OS DVD. Read more »

When using the Nikon SB-900 (and the SB-600 and SB-800 as well btw.) as a remote flash and the camera as the commander, the built-in flash always fires as well even if it is explicitly disabled in the e3 menu. Even though those timing flashes are of lower intensity, they can be seen clearly if you’re photographing an object with a reflecting surface, including eyes, especially when using a macro lens. At times, this is a very unpleasant effect. Is there a way to prevent the built-in camera flash from firing when using a Nikon CLS remote flash? Read more »

My shiny, new Nikon Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR II lens seems to have a damaged thread inside. The thread coating seems to be flaking (click photo below to enlarge). I’m worried that the flaking parts are going to damage the lens over time. You need to zoom to 200mm and then check the area indicated in the photo below if your lens has a damaged thread too. The problem seems to be pretty widespread, I’ve already seen dozens of users reporting the same problem after checking their 70-200 VR II.

Read more »

I’d like to make my blog posts more share-friendly by adding buttons at the end of every post for the most popular bookmarking/sharing web sites like Twitter, Facebook, Digg and so on. There’s a wide range of social bookmark plugins available for WordPress. A plugin that immediately caught my eye is SexyBookmarks. It looks great and you can choose between several catch phrases like Sharing is caring or Sharing is sexy.

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In the just released firmware version 1.02 for the D700, Nikon added an option to sync the GPS time to the camera time and a new option to allow the camera more time to acquire GPS data. I’ll be doing a review on a Nikon GP-1 compatible on-camera GPS receiver for the Nikon D700 (and the Nikon D3, D3X, D90, D200, D300, D900 as well) later this month, so keep watching this space if you think the original Nikon GP-1 is a tad too expensive for what it delivers. Read more »

When I compiled the how-to about using Duply to backup a Linux server to a FTP account I mentioned the possibility to backup all data to an IMAP account. So, all we need for our encrypted backup is a reliable IMAP account provider with a few GB of email space. In this post I’m using Gmail which provides up to 7 GB for emails for free, but instead of saving emails Duply will store encrypted backup files on that Gmail account. Read more »

I love the tag cloud widget that comes with WordPress. There’s just one thing that bugs me: it floods every post or page with lots of internal links that a search engine crawler will follow. The SEO community says that this could be seen as some sort of artificial link generation by a search engine and eventually lead to a disadvantage in a site’s SERP ranking. Having fewer internal links on a post should also pass a higher page rank to linked posts as well. See this post from Matt Cutts detailing how it makes sense to nofollow non-essential internal links:

There’s no stigma to using nofollow, even on your own internal links; for Google, nofollow’ed links are dropped out of our link graph; we don’t even use such links for discovery. By the way, the nofollow meta tag does that same thing, but at a page level.

Unfortunately, it’s not possible to instruct the built-in WordPress tag cloud sidebar widget to use nofollow tags for the generated links. Read more »

I recently changed my website’s WordPress URL from its www-version to the non www-version: www.trick77.com changed to just trick77.com. As this may will confuse search engines and thus lower your visibility in organic searches, it’s recommended to configure a 301 (permanently moved) redirect from the old domain name to the new one. There’s lots of SEO information about redirecting domain names using mod_rewrite and .htaccess to be found on the web.

Now, some SEO experts claim that it’s important to change the internal links on a web site as well. As I’m occasionally linking to my own WordPress posts within my web site, all those links still point to the old www version of the domain name. So, is there an easy way to change all internal links from one domain name to another on a WordPress site at once? Read more »

My Linux root server’s hosting price plan includes a 50 GB backup storage option. The backup server can only be reached using FTP, unsecured. Even though the backup server is only visible from within my server provider’s local network, I still don’t want to expose all my server settings, accounts and databases in clear text to a man in the middle. Or, I don’t want an untrustworthy subject with access to the backup server’s file system to be able to read my backup. Also, I don’t want to send my entire site to the backup storage every day as this would eat up my 50 GB within days.

This is where Duply (formerly known as FTPlicity) comes in handy. Duply claims to make your incremental encrypted backups on non-trusted spaces a child’s play. It manages backup job settings in profiles and allows to batch execute commands. It supports symmetric and asymmetric encryption using GPG.

Duply is not limited to FTP, you can also send your backups to a IMAP, WebDAV or ssh destination (and even more!). I haven’t tried the IMAP method but in theory you could send your encrypted backup to a free Google mail account as long as you don’t exceed the 7 GB provided by Gmail. However, in this sample, I’m using a FTP scenario with asymmetric encryption.

Read more »

After quite a long time with no updates I just released a new version of my WordPress plugin “Must-Read Posts”. The new version adds several configurable sorting options which was the most requested missing feature. With the exception of the custom sort order they’re pretty self explanatory and include:

• Post date descending (latest posts/pages first)
• Post date ascending (oldest posts/pages first)
• Random (randomizes the sort order)
• Custom

The custom sort order allows pre-defined ordering of posts or pages and was the default and only sort option in the earlier versions of the plugin. If you update from an earlier version of the plugin this still is the default sort order. The sort ordering option can be found on the widget’s configuration area.

In case you’re using the non-widget PHP function, the sort order parameters are:

• date_asc
• date_desc
• rnd
• custom

If you don’t specify a sort order, the default is “custom”. If you’re using a plugin like WP Super Cache don’t expect the random sort order to show a different order every time you load the page.

The plugin can be installed/updated from the plugins admin page within your WordPress site or downloaded here.