There has been a lot of controversy lately about the brand new Nikon Nikkor 70-200 f/2.8 VR II lens. Some folks claimed the lens is utterly unusable for wedding photography because of the changes to EFL (effective focal length) compared to the older VR I lens. As usual with expensive gadgets, the noise to fact ratio skyrocked in the ensuing (sometimes emotional) discussion in several photography related forums. Interestingly, the EFL issue went unnoticed in all the raving pre-release reviews of the new VR II lens.

I just want to point to a thread on dpreview.com which IMHO is the most accurate comparison between the VR I and VR II lens to date:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1030&message=33908735

The first three posts from user em_dee_aitch sum it up very nicely.

Just in case you were wondering if the Kirk LP-45 replacement foot fits on the new Nikon Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR II lens: yes, it does, just as it did on the old Nikkor 70-200mm f/2.8 VR. If you’re using Arca Swiss compatible clamps, this is the foot to go for, you won’t be disappointed. Read more »

Because Apple didn’t release the Darwin 10.2.0 XNU sources (the kernel in Mac OS X 10.6.2)  yet (as of 11-14-09), there’s no way to re-enable Atom CPU support on the MSI Wind (and other Atom based netbooks) once you update to 10.6.2. I’ve seen some russian bin-hacks (Tea’s kernel) but they don’t work on the Wind, the kernel panics while booting. Once the XNU sources are out it will be pretty easy to compile a modified kernel with Atom CPU support but for the time being, you might as well re-use the kernel that came with your 10.6.0 Snow Leopard installation. So far, I haven’t seen any limitations using the older kernel in 10.6.2.

All you need is the USB stick you initially installed Snow Leopard from and some basic Terminal skills.
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This is not a how-to guide, tutorial or walk-through, I just list the kexts and settings needed to get Snow Leopard 10.6.0 or 10.6.1 up and running on an MSI Wind U100 netbook. Even though I haven’t personally tested it, the kexts should also work in the Wind U100 plus model. Up to OS X 10.6.1 the Atom 270/280 CPUs are natively supported by the Darwin kernel a.k.a. the vanilla kernel. There are rumors that this may change in a later release of OS X. In fact, Apple already seeded an OS X 10.6.2 developer version with Atom support disabled.

Added 11/10/09: Do NOT update to 10.6.2 as Apple deliberately disabled Atom CPU support and your MSI Wind netbook will go into a reboot loop or simply crash! You’ll need a modified kernel to run 10.6.2 or higher on an Atom CPU! If you’re fluent with Terminal, you might as well install the 10.6.2 update and reinstall the old kernel, see this post for more information. I tried it and it works fantastic!

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The ASUS P6T is one of the less expensive LGA 1366 motherboards at the moment. It features some cool overclocking BIOS settings, FireWire, external E-SATA onboard port, and is SLI/CrossFire-capable. SLI/CrossFire is the main difference between the P6T and the P6T SE but you could always cross flash the P6T SE into a P6T to get SLI support. I put a Core i7 920 CPU in it and populated three of the six RAM banks with 2 GB Patriot Viper DDR-3 DIMMs. This baby has OSX86 written all over it, it screams to be run on Snow Leopard :-) Read more »

Here’s the ACPI DSDT (Darwin-style) for the Gigabyte P55-UD3 Intel LGA 1156 socket mainboard revision 1.0, BIOS version F4i. I’m using it with a Lynnfield Core i7-860 CPU. Created using DSDT Patcher 1e so you may need to recompile it shortening the RTC IO block length from 4 to 2 in case you get a BIOS reset when booting into OSX86 SL (once a 10.0.x XNU kernel supporting the new CPU/stepping is out). Read more »

For “compatibility reasons” Swisscom decided to not let you choose the more secure WPA2-PSK wireless encryption mode over the now insecure WPA-TKIP mode in the Netopia 7347 VDSL router. Swisscom customer service says that there are still many customers with old wifi hardware and that’s why only WPA-TKIP is selectable and WPA2 (which uses the more secure AES algorithm) has been disabled in the router’s web interface even though the router is capable of using WPA2!
WTF?! Come on…forcing clients to use insecure wireless settings just to get rid of a few support phone calls? Read more »

Today, my Mac crashed with a kernel panic. After rebooting I tried to start iTunes but it just showed this error message:
iTunes application could not be opened. An unknown error occurred (13010).

I remembered that I was in the process of updating the iTunes Genius database when the kernel panic occurred. I was able to start iTunes again after deleting the iTunes Library Genius.itdb file. You’ll find the Genius database file in the direcory $HOME/Music/iTunes.

Just like in the MMI 2G, there’s a hidden menu in the MMI 3G too. I don’t encourage anyone to enable the hidden developer menu as it’s hidden for a good reason. So, if you’re the kind of person who likes to press buttons without knowing what they do, the hidden menu may not be for you! Don’t say you haven’t been warned. Read more »

Did you know you can enable a battery capacity bar in your MMI 3G?

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Due to popular demand there’s a MMI 2G/3G VIM login-code generator application available in the download area. Windows-only. And you need .NET Framework 3.5 in order to run it. You will be asked to download it from Microsoft during the installation if it can’t be found on your system.

Now, this is something for the Audi folks. If your Audi is equipped with a MMI TV-module or a DVD-player, security restrictions have been applied to stop video-playback while your car is moving above a certain speed threshold. This feature is also called VIM (Video In Motion) lock. There’s a guy from Russia who offers a VAG-COM/VCDS based solution to disable this restriction but a) he wants your precious money for this hack and b) he needs online access to your computer and to your car to set the VIM threshold. There are also expensive, CAN-based programming cables on the market for the same purpose. Read more »

A few weeks ago, my Safari 4 beta started to behave weirdly while starting up. At first, the “fastest browser in the world” just hung a few seconds after firing it up but in the end, it displayed a spinning beach ball for almost 2 minutes until I was able to actually do something with it. Well, I had hoped the 10.5.7 Mac OS X update or the latest Safari 4 beta update would cure the problem but no, they did not. Today, I was able to finally fix it!

After noticing several PubSubAgent Foundation::NetException errors in my Mac’s system log file whenever the spinning beach ball thing was going on, I had a strong suspicion it had something to do with RSS feeds. So I opened Mail, deleted the only exising RSS feed (Apple News something) and set the default RSS reader to Mail (was set to Safari) and guess what… everything is back to normal now! I’m using Google Reader for RSS feeds anyway.

M8, that’s how Benro calls its carbon manufacturing process for its latest carbon monopod & tripod series. According to a press release, the difference between the older N6 and the new M8 process is:
“Based on Benro’ Generation ll C-series N6 Tripod , the new Generation C-series M8 Tripods use updated QIHM-8X Quasi Isotropic technology, providing 20% greater strength. Magnesium and Carbon materials are used to produce a tripod that’s 10% lighter”.

At least from the outside there’s no visible change between M8 and N6 (I also own an N6 series tripod) but then I am certainly not an expert in carbon fibers. When comparing the MC-96m8 monopod data with the older MC-96n6 model the only difference is that Benro doubled the maximum load capacity from 10kg to 20kg. No difference in weight (shouldn’t it be 10% lighter too?). Anyway, with 740g (26 oz) it’s still a lightweight. Read more »

Yesterday, Apple released a new version of it’s photo management and raw conversion software Aperture. The issues addressed include:

• Nikon images imported using a direct camera-to-computer connection now display thumbnails correctly in the Import window.
• Fixed an issue that could cause duplicate image versions to be created after rebuilding a library.
• Fixed a library issue that prevented operation of the Relocate or Consolidate commands in some circumstances.

The fixed import-thumbnails issue is great news for Nikon D700 users. Finally, we’re able to see what photos we’re about to import from our camera. I also checked if they fixed an annoying EXIF metadata export issue when exporting a photo – and to my big surprise, they did!

EXIF data

As you can see in the screenshot above, EXIF Viewer displays the latitude/longitude metadata information in an exported Aperture photo when using Aperture 2.1.3. The master image was a raw camera file which I exported as a JPEG. Unfortunately, lens information is still missing in the exported photos :(