My previous post was about how AA batteries have taken over my life. Â The 800s charges NiMH & NiCd batteries (not that anyone used NiCd anymore). Â It reconditions and deep charges the batteries. Â In addition each battery is charged on an independent channel, so you can charge multiple sets of batteries at varying levels of charge, and they will all be optimally charged. Â I use this in conjunction with my MB-D10 and well, it just works. Â I use 8 eneloops with 8 backup eneloops, I have never had to dip into the backups, and I shoot a lot. Â There is also a small LCD screen on the front of charging unit that shows the status of the charge. Â No more guessing whether red is good or blinking green means charging.
Tag Archives: Technology
A(A) Rechargeable Existence
When I bought my MB-D10 battery grip for my D300 I opted to go for the AA option, which uses 8 rechargeable NiMH batteries.  Then I got to thinking about the Wii. Each remote utilizes 2 AA batteries.  The wireless sensor bar uses 4 AAs as too.  As a photographer I also use two speedlight flashes. there is 8 more AA without a change, up it to 16 for total functionality.  There are also the two pocket wizards that use 2 AA a piece, there is 4 more.  That is something like 36 AA batteries total.  The next review that I will write will be about the Maha MH-800s that I just purchased to accommodate this AA powered life.
Time Machine/Capsule (The Sort of Cheap Way)
Exciting news for stingy mac nerds.  Well, realistically kinda mac nerds, because a true mac nerd would either know about this already, or would not care because they don’t need time machine.  I have a headless Macintosh running in my home, with an array of external hard drives connected to it and served using AFP.  I originally had an old Windows XP machine running as a Samba share to my mac to host my movies.  That said, AFP and OS X are far nicer to work with.  Anyhow with one simple copy/paste command line cue one can use a shared volume to automatically backup their computer every time said computer connects to said network, and all without a single wire.  That command that needs to be entered is:
defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1
(to undo the command one would enter the same command with zero in place of 1)
From there you simply use the Time Machine interface to setup your backup.
Fantastico!
Silverlight: Not so bad
Today Laurelin and I decided to try Netflix instead of Blockbuster Online. I must say that although it was nice to be able to peruse the Blockbuster store, there is no contest about this. First of all, Netflix is cheaper for what we really need. We currently have the 1 movie at a time plan with unlimited streaming. As we are both Mac users, Netflix Instant was not an option until relatively recently.
As with all things there are always strings attached. The string with this, at least to me, seemed more like barge rope than thread. I would have to install a Microsoft plugin for it to work. I grumbled about DRM and the fact that I was sure Microsoft would begin spying and snooping immediately, as well as being wholly un-mac-like. Gladly, however, I was wrong. The install was smooth, painless, and did not appear to break anything. Although the selection of movies available to watch instantly is not immense it is still useful. There are older movies and the like available for instant watching.
Quality of Streams
Let us establish that I am not a videophile in any way shape or form. I felt that the quality of video was quite nice. The quality does seem to vary based upon individual videos. The only issue with quality is that in some dark areas there is some blocking, however, if the movie is worth watching, the small quality drop is well worth the trade for convenience.
Bandwidth might be an issue for some users and I have yet to establish a benchmark of size per film. It would also be nice to have greater control over quality, i.e. being able to control the quality for both bandwidth limited customers and those who dont mind a longer buffer time but would prefer higher definition. One last preference, which would be a DRM nightmare, would be to store, for limited time, offline films to watch so that one could watch them on planes and trains and in automobiles and the like without needing to get the DVD and rip it.