SnapperTalk

I had occasion to evaluate a potentially dodgy compactflash card recently, and thought I’d try a piece of free software that’s been sitting around on my computer for a while. The Card Wiper software from the company DataRescue - who also make the superb card-recovery software PhotoRescue - is a simple program designed to wipe clean a camera card.

But another function it has is to test such media for problems. It does this by writing zeros all over the disk, reading them back, followed by writing ones all over the disk, and again reading them back. This should be able to give a good idea if there are any “bad” parts to the card akin to a bad sector on a hard disk. Give it a try… but do note this program is designed to irrevocably erase a card - it is not recovery software like PhotoRescue.

Cardwiper for Windows download
Cardwiper for OSX download

NewScientist is reporting on plans for a $300 million telescope in Chile that will use a digital camera with 3 billion pixels to image the entire sky across three nights, producing an expected 30 terabytes of data per night.

The 8.4-metre Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will be located on Cerro Pachón, a 2700-metre-high peak in northern Chile, which is already home to the 8-metre Gemini South telescope and will allow astronomers to detect objects that quickly change their position, such as near-Earth asteroids, or their brightness, such as supernovae.

Security guru and leading cryptographer Bruce Schneier has an excellently-argued article on the Wired site discussing why the security versus privacy “debate” that is constantly being discussed (especially post-911) does not reflect the true nature of the choice - which is in fact one of liberty versus control. Bruce is also the author of the security-analysis free monthly newsletter Crypto-gram.

I was about to point out that whilst a good read the article hasn’t much to do with photojournalism, but on second-thought the security vs. privacy “debate” actually forms the basis for a whole host of the restrictions that are making the job of a press photographer increasingly difficult.

Whereas with AOL and other instant messaging clients such as the excellent Trillian you can sign-on with multiple user accounts, Skype has never been able to do this, limiting you to one username at a time. Here’s a useful hack I came across here that gets past this limitation if you are running Windows XP Pro.

1. Have two admin-level user accounts on your machine e.g. “user1″ & “user2″
2. Have two Skype accounts e.g. “skypename1″ & “skypename2″
3. Login as user1 and create two shortcuts to the Skype application. Name the icons “skypename1″ & “skypename2″ to remember which is which.
4. Open up the first shortcut as you would do normally and sign-on with “skypename1″. Click the box saying “Sign me in when Skype starts”.
5. Right-click on the second shortcut, and choose “run as” from the contextual menu.
6. When the “Which user account do you want to use to run this program” window pops up, click the 2nd button labelled “the following user” and beneath it select user acount “user2″ and enter the password of that account.
7. A second instance of Skype will open up. Sign-on with “skypename2″ and click the box saying “Sign me in when Skype starts”.
8. Now, all you have to do to run Skype with either or both skype accounts is to click the appropriate shortcut(s).

Clever…

Note: Doing the same on Mac OS X is a bit more difficult, but there is a solution - see this thread in the Skype forums:

With a new beta version of Skype for Windows out yesterday - 2.5.0.82 - I thought it would be worth pointing out one of the new version’s very useful features: Skype SMS. Now you can send SMS messages to any mobile phone in the world directly from the Skype application. They’re not free, so you’ll need a SkypeOut account, but they are pretty reasonably priced - complete rate-list here - and unlike a lot of the free web-to-sms gateways, it seems like it will work for all countries even the more obscure ones. You get to choose whether the recipient sees the message as coming from your Skype username or from your mobile number.

Apple’s new consumer-orientated iBook successor “MacBook” looks like a nice machine indeed. It also marks the end of Apple’s “PowerBook” line of laptops with the last remaining PowerBook model - the 12″ G4 Powerbook - having now been removed from sale. Apple’s original PowerBook 100 revolutionised the computer industry and played an important role in the history of digital picture transmission - despite a price tag of $2,500 when it was first introduced in 1991. It packed a whopping 16 MHz processor, 2MB RAM and 20MB hard drive.

Fast-forward 15 years and you have the new MacBook, sporting Intel’s Core Duo processor at speeds from 1.83 GHz to 2.0 GHz, glossy 13.3-inch widescreen 1280×800 display and full-size keyboard. The Core Duo is an impressive processor, and should of course enable dual-booting of OSX and Windows using Apple’s Boot Camp utility as with other Intel Macs. Other nice features are built-in iSight webcam, Front Row & Apple Remote capability, MagSafe Power Adapter, magnetic screen latch, user-replaceable hard-drives, gigabit ethernet, AirPort Extreme, Bluetooth 2.0+EDR, two USB 2.0 ports, one FireWire 400 port, optical digital and analog audio in/out, and a mini-DVI connector for connecting to external displays. The 5.2 pound machine is available in both white and black versions - which marks Apple’s first black notebook since the venerable Pismo. Unfortunately the top-end black model costs $200 more than a similarly-specced white version, with only a 20GB larger hard-drive in compensation.

But is it a good machine for digital photographers? Well yes and no, depending on what type of other equipment you use. In terms of speed and capabilities I’m pretty sure it would fulfil the needs of most photo-related tasks, and to those of us who have to use certain windows-only software, the dual-boot capability is fantastic. So what’s missing? No FireWire 800 or internal modem - neither of these will pose too much of a problem and are to be expected.

However… just like the iBook it is replacing, Apple has unfortunately decided to omit any sort of expansion slot - either pcmcia/pccard like the old PowerBooks, or the new ExpressCard slot as featured on the MacBook Pro. Whilst this is clearly a consumer-orientated machine, and much of the functionality one might need from pcmcia/ExpressCard expansion (digital camera card adapters, isdn modems, GSM/EDGE/3G cards etc can be replicated by other devices connected via USB, Firewire or Bluetooth… it remains an almost-deal-breaking omission in my mind. I’m sure this machine will sell like hotcakes and satisfy the needs of most users, but I think there’s a fair few people out there who were hoping for a smaller-than-15″-laptop without sacrificing full connectivity.

In other news, Apple has boosted the processor speeds on the MacBook Pro - with the base model going from 1.83GHz to 2GHz, the 2GHz model going to 2.16GHz, and all the Pro series available with an optional glossy display like the MacBook.

Apple MacBook
Apple MacBook full specifications
Apple MacBook photo gallery
Apple MacBook QTVR (White)
Apple MacBook QTVR (Black)
Apple MacBook & MacBook Pro comparison page
Engadget’s hands-on with the MacBook
MacWorld MacBook first-look
Ars Technica MacBook review