Category Archives: Utilities

Finally a Spyder3Express!

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Deep Background

Back in the early 1990s, when I was working for Kodak Electronic Publishing Systems, I was first introduced to the whole concept of total system calibration, from original artwork to finished printed publication.

In those days, very few CRT monitors could be correctly calibrated in a professional environment, and the equipment and software where very expensive.

Since then, a number of very affordable Monitor Calibration systems have come to market, and there are several under $100.

Current Background

Recently, I got a new LCD monitor, which had a much higher contrast ratio and was general much brighter, when compared to my first LCD purchased some six years ago.

Over the years, I had developed many custom profiles for my various output scenarios, and felt I had everything in control, but knew I could do better.

When I started to use my new flat panel monitor, the first thing I noticed that there was a ‘ghosting’ of letters on all my desktop icons, which made them very difficult to read.

I was happy to see, that between my video card and the monitor, I technically had more control over how images were being displayed, and I was quickly able to set up a first round of  color correction.

When I started to look at my own Photography work again, there was definitely a difference, which I tried to correct with more monitor settings and software controls, and thought I was done, until I checked on a different system.

Which Calibration System?

So is the fun with monitors and calibration, and with my recent adventures in doing HDR and Tone Mapping, I decided to finally break down and get my own calibration system.

There are many calibration system on the market these days, and for a first timer, it can be very confusing.

Having worked with high-end systems in my past, I knew the sky was the limit in regards to cost and features.

I knew that with my simple environment, I did not need to spend a lot of money.

I just wanted to get a system that could get me to an easily repeatable ‘norm’, and from there, I could tweak as needed.

Several years ago, I worked with one client who had purchased a Spyder2PRO, and it worked rather well in that environment, so I took another look at the Datacolor Spyder3 series.

It also helped that during my pricing investigations, the Spyder3′s were consistently getting high marks!

Install, Calibrate & Done

My Spyder3Express shipment arrived this morning from B&H Photo, and after installing the base software with the supplied disc, I went up to Datacolor.com to download and install the latest version. (There is a feature to check for Updates, but old habits die-hard.)

On initial launch, you are requested to register and get a confirming license code for future installations.

The main application greets you with an overview of general steps needed for a successful first calibration, and with a click of a Next button, the Wizard starts, asking you which type of monitor you have CRT vs. LCD.

On the next screen, you are asked to place the Spyder3 in an outlined area near the center of your monitor.

It was here that I noticed the first difference between the Spyder2Pro and Spyder3Express, and that was the lack of a suction cup to hold the Spyder in place during the actual color calibration, but one can get around this by tilting the monitor slightly up.

Once rested in the correction position, you click another Next button, and go and refresh your beverage.

By the time you come back, in less than 5 minutes, you get a final screen that will toggle for comparing un-calibrated vs. calibrated images.

You are done!

That is it!

Conclusion

I would be lying if I said it took less than 5 minutes, only because one should have their monitor ‘warmed-up’ for at least 30 minutes before running a calibration, and if you are very critical about your color, run the calibration again after a couple of hours of use.

I am still getting use to my new monitor colors, but have already seen a difference in my desktop icon letters (it was their shading that was getting blown out…), and I am seeing better details in my darker-mid-tones.

So far, I am happy with my Spyder3Express, and would recommend it for anyone interested in starting to explore the wonderful world of calibrated color environments.

Related Topics

As I mentioned earlier in this Post, one can spend all sorts of time and money to control their color environment, and at times, it can feel like you are chasing your tail in vain.

With that being said, some other areas of interest include:

  • Camera Calibration
  • Scanner Calibration
  • Printer Calibration
  • Color Space

A simple search engine search will bring up many articles and pages related to these subjects!

If you have any question of comments please feel free to contact me.

- Andrew
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Half-Full or Half-Empty Hard Drive?

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Seattle Anchor Shadow

Seattle Anchor Shadow

Over the past couple of weeks, I have been slowly consolidating Hard Drive space within my home-office network.

Because of my background as an backup administrator, I am especially concerned and focused on having redundant copies of data, just in case.

Murphy would be proud…

With that being said, I looked at my various existing 100GB-250GB internal and external hard drives that were sprawled all over the place, and bought a couple of TB hard drives.

Then the fun part, looking at the life cycle of the house data.

There is current local stuff, the Live Data for the house, and then the Secondary Backup.

Next was writing the various robocopy scripts, and making sure I use /e and /mir correctly…

Several more days of data transfer, I finally think I have ALL the data in a nice consolidated fashion!

For the first time in 5+ years, I have everything on one Hard Drive!

Yeah!

But now, as I now am analyzing the capacity of the Live Data drive, I find myself evaluating the situation.

Is my new Half-Full or Half-Empty?

In my 30 plus years of IT, very rarely, have I heard of a hard drive referred to as Half-Empty.

Seems that the when we talk about technology and storage, we tend to be optimistic!

When was the last time your thumb drive Half-Empty? or that CD/DVD that you just burned… Half-Empty?

When was the last time you checked your backup?

Thoughts?

- Andrew
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flickr Award Counter – Backup, Restore and Transfer

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If you get involved with the Flickr photography groups that have awards, you will notice that there is no really good way to track what you have, until flickr Award Counter (fAC) by Andy Felton (PhazeShift).

flickr Award Counter can take some time to initially setup, because you have to enter in each Award Title (think of a naming structure), and the URL to the Award image for the greasemonkey/javascript counters to work, but once it is done, fAC works great!

But beware, once done, there does not appear to be a direct way to back up all your filter/counter work.

Backup

After some hunting, I found a thread on the Flickr Hacks – “Award Counter – backup?“, which suggested that one backup the Firefox “prefs.js” file, which can be found (example: Win XP):

C:\Documents and Settings\%profilename%\Application Data ¬
\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\dm24ria8.defaults\prefs.js

where

%profilename%

is the current user, and

dm24ria8.defaults

could be “any-name.defaults” within this path, and includes “prefs.js”, and all the more fun if there are multiple users! A-)

The simplest backup, is to copy/duplicate the “prefs.js” file within the same directory and adding the “.bak” extension (“prefs.js.bak”) or copy the file to another location, and leave yourself a reminder of where!

Restore

To restore, just replace the damages file with the backup from above.

Transfer

Many times, all you want to do, is to transfer your filter/counter information from one machine to another.

If you use the Restore method mentioned above, one of the immediate down sides is that the destination machine, will inherit the “prefs.js” settings from the source machine.

In some cases, this might be sufficient, but what if you ONLY want the filter/counter information.

about:config

On the machine that has the Main/Source of filter/counters, launch Firefox, and type about:config in the address bar.

You will get a warning screen, and just agree.

[Technically, you are on your own now, so...]

Scroll down to the following filter:

greasemonkey.scriptvals.http://www.phazeshift.co.uk/download//flickrAwardCounter.awards

Double click on the entry, and a new window will open up.

In the “Enter string value” window, copy the string value.

Move to the destination machine, and find the similar entry, and paste in the source filter information.

Quit your browser, and re-launch Firefox, and check your work.

This has been done transferring an existing series of Firefox 4.0 XPro filters to Firefox 4.0 Win7Pro (destination):

C:\Users\%profilename%\AppData\Roaming ¬
\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\x5lnhhwl.default\pref.js

with out issue (“x5lnhhwl” will change).

Your mileage may very.

Feature Request(s)

  • Ability to Export/Import filter/counters
    • These could be “traded” via Flickr

Please feel free to add Comments or Feedback.

- Andrew
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Finding a Wireless Signal (inSSIDer)

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A friend of mine, was recently having some trouble finding a wireless signal at an airport, and asked what tools were available for his Vista laptop.

Since he travels frequently, I suggested that the next time he had real Ethernet connection to download NetStumbler, to help him locate wireless Access Points (APs).

He did, but was unable to get it to work on his Vista machine.

At the time, NetStumbler had always enjoyed a good reputation for be a great free utility, and a ‘Must have application’ for any techies involved with wireless networking, so I was a little surprised to hear there were issues.

Wanting to help my friend out, and felling bad about giving him a poor recommendation, I did some searching, and found MetaGeek’s inSSIDer.

inSSIDer is a free Open Source software utility, that also supports an array of additional paid products that could be an inexpensive alternative to commercial products such as Fluke Networks’ AirMagnet.

After inSSIDer installed and launched, the first thing that one notices, especially coming from NetStumbler environment, is that the graphs are in color, which is invaluable when trying to figure out multiple sources of signals.

This is not to say that color is the best part of inSSIDer, but it also uses the native Wi-Fi API to group ‘clients’ by MAC Address, SSID, Channel, RSSI as well as “Time Last Seen”. Since inSSIDer also supports GPS devices, this can very extremely valuable when mapping a wireless network environment.

Bottom line -

If you are looking for a very useful wireless network discovery tool that is free, then I would suggest that you look no further then inSSIDer.

inSSIDer was also the 2008 winner of InfoWorld’s “Best of Open Source“.

- Andrew
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Backupify.com – First Look

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One of my readers pointed this out to me last week. (Thanks Steve!)

Backupify, which uses Amazon “cloud” as the backup medium, so everything is done online, and quickly!

What makes this service unique, as compared to services like iBackup, is that Backupify only backs up your online life.

As of this blog entry, Backupify supports the following services:

  • Flickr
  • Twitter
  • Delicious
  • Zoho
  • Google Docs
  • Photobucket
  • WordPress

and is in Beta for:

  • Basecamp
  • Gmail
  • Facebook
  • FriendFeed
  • Blogger
  • Hotmail

with the following “soon to come“:

  • Youtube
  • Xmarks
  • RssFeed
  • Tumblr

Now until February 15th, Backupify is offering a “Free Account Giveaway”.

Setup

Sign up is quick, and does not require much more then a Name, eMail address and a Password, and your in, but you will need to Verify your email address.

From there, you are presented with a “Dashboard” of services to configure.

Setting up a Flickr was a simple as using the wizard to connect, basically UserName and Password (going through your Yahoo account). Done.

With WordPress, I had to download a zipped (.zip) plug-in, and up-zipped it.

There is no “Read Me” file, or simple what to do next.

I opened the enclosed “wp-backupify.php” file, and in reading, it appears at first glance that this type of backup is if you host your own WordPress environment.

It would have been nice if Backupify had said something along these lines. (Will investigate later… maybe…)

Gmail is another enter UserName and Password, with a “Please read this before setting up your Gmail account”, that when followed, only states that “Gmail Backup Temporarily Disabled” which was posted December 23, 2009. (Merry Christmas!)

When I checked my email later, I did get notification that: “Gmail backup has been throttled back to once every 3 days until we finish implementing new changes to support the high volume of Gmail backups“

Facebook is the standard “Connect to your Facebook account”, asks for permissions, and then allows you to choose what you want to backup: Photos, Friends, Statuses, Links, Notes and Events. You also have the ability to add another Facebook account.

Since I do not have any other accounts offered, I went down to “Backup Settings”, which is very primitive.

You only get a frequency: Weekly vs. Daily, and a Notification email settings: Every time, Daily, Weekly or Do Not, then you click “Save”. My settings are the Default: Daily & Daily.

From the main Dashboard, you can select the “Archive” tab and which service to look at.

I found that my Flickr images have already been backed up!

When I check Facebook, it only appears that my images have been backed up, even though, I had selected the Default settings of everything (see above), upon further review, there are other files, namely XML files.

The Dashboard “History” tab says everything was successful.

Restore

On the surface, it looks like that information is available, but trying to Restore your online life is going to take some time.

Images are readily available from Flickr and Facebook backups, but your content from Facebook is saved as a XML file (.xml), but as of this writing, I am not sure how one would integrate this back into a Facebook account.

Conclusion

The Backupify does do what it says. It backs up your files. Period.

The question that I have, and you should also, how does one do a Restore?

The Testimonials only talk about Backing up, but that is only half of the issue.

Having been a Enterprise Backup Administrator for several years, I would like to see some more controls, and some more documentation.

To be fair, I have not spent allot of time trying to find this info at the Backupify site, but at the same time, the info is not right in front of you, and trust me, when you are facing potential data lose, you do NOT want to be running around trying to figure out what to do.

Another thing that is not easily apparent, is the cost of the Service.

I did find one link that suggested I could find Costs, but it made me sign up, and I still can not easily find an answer.

In searching the FAQ, the word “Cost” only appears once, and if you carefully read the FAQ, it does hint at some of my concerns with a Restoration.

To me, there is also a feeling of scare tactics, but this might be the way that I personally handle my data.

My Facebook data is disposable. I have a backup of my images in my local environment, and if there is something important, I deal with it locally.

In regards to the backup from Images services (Flickr, etc.), at least in my work-flow, I have everything Local, then I post, so I already have a backup so to speak.

I maybe missing something here, but at this point, I am not sure how long I will keep my Free Backupify account.

Please let me know your thoughts.

- Andrew
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