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The Louvre Photos

Mike — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 12:59:14 +0000

My wife and I loved the museums in Paris. The Musée d’Orsay, with its large collection of Impressionist paintings, was our favorite, but the Louvre was the most magnificent, as anyone would expect. Surprisingly, the Louvre was also the only museum we’d been to there that allowed photography inside. For that reason, we have a ton of photos from the Louvre. Walking through there brought back all the art history class memories I had from college. It was amazing!

Current Album: Paris The Louvre 2010
Images:

Paris Photos

Mike — Sat, 14 Aug 2010 16:00:25 +0000

My wife and I enjoyed five days in Paris at the end of our honeymoon. Paris was swelteringly hot, because we arrived in the middle of a heat wave that the locals assured us was quite unusual. We were surprised by the pollution (all the cars, mopeds, and smokers really add up) and the how far apart the attractions were, compared to in London.We especially enjoyed the museums (the Centre Pompideau was a considerable exception, however), the street food, the cafes, and the Seine. The excessive heat limited what we could do there, so we hope to visit there again—during a cooler season, of course!

Current Album: Paris 2010
Images:

Things I Like: Calibre

Mike — Fri, 13 Aug 2010 02:00:51 +0000

I bought a Kindle 2 last month and joined the e-book revolution. I love e-books for various, practical reasons:
1. Books pile up around the house. I don’t have room to keep all of them. Selling, training, giving, or donating them is a pain. Throwing out books makes me sad.
2. Books deteriorate. I typically purchase used books, and I’ve had to pass a lot of good titles by because they were too musty, yellowed, or brittle to read (enjoyably, at least).
3. Books can be heavy. I have a number of large hardcover books that I don’t read simply because they are huge, heavy, and cumbersome to hold. On business trips and vacation, I can only take one or two books–and rarely the largest ones–or else I run out of space in my bags.

The best thing about e-books is that you can get many titles for free and read them on devices you already own (your computer, your smartphone). Dedicated e-book readers, such as the Kindle and the Nook, are now relatively cheap (about the price of 10-15 books) and offer better readability than cell phone and computer screens. I really like my Kindle, and find that I can read faster on it and focus my attention on the text far better than on non-dedicated e-readers.

Devices such as the Kindle have built-in or preferred e-book stores, but you don’t have to rely on them only to get books. Project Gutenberg, OpenLibrary, Internet Archive, Google Books, and even (if you’re inclined) BitTorrent offer a ton of free or low-cost books. Sometimes, however, the books you get from these secondary sources aren’t in the correct format to read on your device, so you’ll have to convert them (hopefully for free!) before you can read them. To convert them to a new format, I recommend using Calibre.

Calibre

Calibre is a free and open source application which aims to be, for e-books, what iTunes is for music and video files. It does a little bit of everything, and runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux OSes.

Here is a list of its most prominent features:
• Organize and manage your e-book library
• Edit and automatically edit e-book metadata and assign covers images
• Convert e-books between formats (its killer feature)
• Syncing books to/from numerous hardware devices (Android phones, iPad, Kindle, Nook, etc.)
• Supports all e-book formats, including EPUB and MOBI (though it does not overcome DRM)
• Downloads news from web sites and transfers it to your e-reader device
• Allows you to run a content server to access your e-books via the web
• Read e-books (though its built-in reader is slow and kind of horrible)

Calibre isn’t the prettiest looking software. The icons are bright and clunky, though immediately decipherable. There are too few keyboard shortcuts and way too many right-click options. There is a lot of dead space in the main window, which is the main reason, in my opinion, that it looks amateurish compared to, say, iTunes.

That said, looks aren’t everything. Calibre is free, it’s updated and improved very frequently, and it does a heck of a lot. Its e-book conversion routines are probably the best available to date (and definitely the best available for free). It’s automatic metadata and cover download feature saves a ton of data entry time. The interface is very customizable, allowing you to change the window layout from wide to tall, and to select any number of data columns. Calibre supports user-defined tags, categories, saved searches, and even user-defined data fields, which allow you to organize your e-books in a myriad of ways. All in all, Calibre is extremely powerful. That said, most of the time you’ll spend in two windows (the library and the metadata windows), and use the handful of toolbar icons to navigate from function to function.

I love using Calibre to maintain my e-book library, and to convert e-books to the MOBI format, which is one of the few open formats that my Kindle supports. E-book conversion isn’t perfect, but it is very, very good, and represents Calibre’s killer feature. In the near future, I plan to post some recommendations on converting e-books from PDF to MOBI for reading on a Kindle.

The Simple Way to Enable NTFS Read/Write Support in Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard

Mike — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 15:21:34 +0000

If you have a large external hard drive that you wish to share between your Mac and Windows machines, you’ll find yourself in a dilemma: Windows offers no support for Mac-formatted (HPFS+) drives, while Mac OS X, out of the box, offers only read-only support for NTFS, the default file system for Windows XP and beyond. Mac OS can, however, read and write FAT32 volumes. The only problem is, you can’t easily format a hard disk over 32 GB as FAT32 (at least not under Windows XP) without additional software. (That additional software, by the way, is called Fat32Format, which is free.)

Recently I found out that Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard actually has native (built-in) write support for NTFS. The catch is, write support is disabled by default. There are a number of command-line methods of enabling write access. You can also download and run a simple, free software program called iNTFS. You have to run it once (from the disc image; no install required).

I recently installed iNTFS and found that it was simple and worked instantly. You do have to unmount (eject) and remount any NTFS drives you have before you can write to them. So far it works fine and I’m happy with how easy it was to do.

Stratford-upon-Avon Photos

Mike — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 15:47:38 +0000

Two of the most fun days of our honeymoon were our visit to Stratford-upon-Avon. We came to visit Shakespeare’s birthplace and see “Antony and Cleopatra” at the Royal Shakespeare Company. Stratford-upon-Avon is kind of a tourist trap, but it is nice. We saw an open-air market, had some great tea, fish & chips, and the coldest soda in England, and loved the relaxed pace, compared to London. We stayed at the Moonraker House, a nice bed-and-breakfast that we highly recommend. Enjoy the photos!

Current Album: Stratford-upon-Avon 2010
Images:

Sapphire 1.0.0 Android ROM Is Out

Mike — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 17:03:32 +0000

Sapphire 1.0.0, a superlative custom ROM for the Motorola Droid, was just released. You can upgrade to it via ROM Manager using the steps I previously wrote. Just substitute build 1.0.0 for 0.8.4. You still have to downgrade to ClockworkMod 2.0.1.3 to update using ROM Manager (i.e. ClockworkMod 2.5.0.1. won’t reboot your phone when installing this rom).

I just upgraded (I wiped cache and data, just to be sure), and so far things are working very well.

London’s Regent’s Park Photos

Mike — Tue, 03 Aug 2010 17:20:36 +0000

Regent’s Park was one of our favorite stops on our honeymoon. The flowers are beautiful and plentiful.

Current Album: London Regent's Park 2010
Images:

London Kew Gardens Photos

Mike — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:31:51 +0000

While we were in London, the city was hot and crowded. My wife and I escaped to Kew Gardens for one day to cool off, and it was peaceful, relaxing, and absolutely beautiful. Here are my photos of the gardens. Enjoy!

Current Album: London Kew Gardens 2010
Images:

London Photos

Mike — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 15:03:19 +0000

My wife and I spent our honeymoon this summer in London and Paris. It was a fantastic trip, and we took a ton of pictures. Here are my photos from our adventures in London. These photos exclude our trips to London Parks and our side-trip to Stratford-upon-Avon, which I will post separately. Enjoy!

Current Album: London 2010
Images:

How to Install the Sapphire 0.8.4 Froyo ROM on the Motorola Droid

Mike — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 16:36:09 +0000

For the past several months, I have been a huge fan of running CyanogenMod (CM5, mostly) on my rooted Motorola Droid. Unfortunately, the ROM’s latest incarnations (CM6 RC1 and RC2)—which correspond to its move to the Froyo source code base—have not run stably on my phone. Despite my efforts to fix the problems (reflashing, wiping data and cache, fixing permissions, switching kernels), apps under CM6 keep crashing. Luckily, I found a great alternative, a Froyo-based ROM that has been much more stable than CM6: Sapphire 0.8.4. Sapphire is based on the Froyo source code, like CyanogenMod, and is completely independent of CyanogenMod’s codebase.

While CyanogenMod has more interface and application tweaks than Sapphire, Sapphire runs more stably on my phone (compared with CM6 RC1 and RC2), which is far more important. One of Sapphire’s killer features is that it integrates the basic overclocking/underclocking mechanisms found in the SetCPU app, which enables you to overclock without SetCPU (unless you wish to set up profiles). The rest of the Froyo goodness, including the JIT compiler, wifi tether, Exchange support, and Chrome-to-Phone, are all included.

If CM6 isn’t working well for you, I highly recommend trying out Sapphire. I found it a little tricky to install via ClockworkMod Recovery/ROM Manager, because you have to downgrade ClockworkMod Recovery to do so. The instructions below reflect the steps I took to switch from CM6 RC1 to Sapphire 0.8.4. If you’re new to flashing ROMs on your phone, know that it requires root access. Also, Sapphire appears to be compatible with the Motorola Droid only at this time.

Install/upgrade to the latest version of the ROM Manager app via the Android Market.
Open ROM Manager.
Due to an incompatibility of the latest ClockwordMod Recovery, Sapphire will install with ClockworkMod 2.0.1.3 or earlier. To flash this recovery, scroll to the bottom of ROM Manager’s main screen and select “All ClockworkMod Recoveries” from the “More Recoveries” section.
A recovery selection popup will appear. Choose “2.0.1.3″ and click the “OK” button.
ClockworkMod 2.0.1.3 will be flashed to your devise. (If for some reason the recovery does not install, use ROM Manager to “Flash Alternate Recovery” and then repeat steps 3 and 4.)
From the “ROM Management” section in ROM Manager, select “Download ROM”.
Select “cvpcs” under the “Free” section.
Select “Sapphire 0.8.4 (Froyo)”, which is the latest stable release at this time.
A screenshots popup will appear. Click the “Download” button.
A kernel selection popup will appear. Choose a kernel from the list. I use P3Droid’s 125-800mhz Low Voltage kernel. You may choose one with a faster top speed if you wish. Click the “OK” button.
A theme selection popup will appear. Choose a theme from the list. I stick with the “Stock (Default)” theme. Click the “OK” button.
A ROM addons selection popup will appear. Check “Google Apps” so that Google’s standard apps (including the Market) will be installed. Check the “Market Hack”, too. Until Motorola releases an official Froyo build for the Droid, copy-protected apps will not show up in the Market when you run a Froyo ROM. The Market Hack fixes that. Click the “OK” button.
ROM Manager will download the necessary ROMs.
When the downloads complete, a ROM pre-installation popup will appear. Check both of the options: “Backup Existing ROM” and “Wipe Data and Cache”. Always back up your current ROM prior to flashing a new one. Sapphire’s developers say that it is important to wipe data prior to the install. Froyo will re-download your apps from the Market after a reinstall, so it isn’t as much of a pain as you think it might be. Click the “OK” button.
ROM Manager will reboot into recovery and install all the ROMs you selected.
When the phone reboots again, you will be able to log into your Google account and set everything up. The Market will download all your previously-installed apps during the sync process. Just be patient!

I prefer the ADW Launcher to the launcher that Sapphire comes with. ADW Launcher is a free download from the Android Market.