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Archive for October, 2011
Scary xeno crab is scary, originally uploaded by echeng.
We’ve had a day full of fantastic critter dives here in Alor, Indonesia. The first dive site was reminiscent of the muck at Laha in Ambon–a sandy slope with rubble patches–which was filled with photogenic subjects: rhinopias, seahorses, nudibranches, and more. We dove across the bay for the next 2 dives, where we saw at least a dozen species of nudibranch.
The xeno crab (pictured here) isn’t particularly rare, but they are one of my favorite subjects to photograph. There is no need to leave Planet Earth to look for alien life forms!
Sent from mobile. Apologies for brevity/typos.
Good bye, Hong Kong! See you next time. Thanks to everyone who made time to see me while I was here, including the AsiaD folks; Rae Chang, Adam Tow, and his family; Winnie Cheng; Ryanne Lai; Timothy Redel; Edward and Jacqueline Lai of Nauticam; Aey Komson, Mean Mora and Jan; Tammy Loh.
I’m off to Indonesia tomorrow for the Wetpixel Ultimate Indonesia Expedition 2011. I’ll have sporadic access to email while I’m away, and almost no image-sharing ability (except for posts to my journal via Flickr). See you when I’m back!
Timelapse video taken with Canon 7D and Tokina 10-17 fisheye zoom lens from 29th floor of the Grand Hyatt Hong Kong in Wanchai. 1 frame taken every 8 seconds from 16:05 to 18:48.
Support us: download the podcast on iTunes ( find “Shark Diving French Polynesia!”)
In July, I went to French Polynesia with Fabrice Charleux of Plongeur.com to capture stills and video of the incredible schools of gray reef sharks that call its remote atolls home. At that time, I posted only a few still frames from the trip—not because I didn’t want to share, but because I had something larger planned. When I returned home, I called up Mary Lynn Price of DiveFilm and asked her if she would be interested in collaborating in a podcast episode. Luckily, Mary Lynn was excited about the project, and together, we have finally finished and published a new DiveFilm HD episode on the sharks of French Polynesia. To see the video, please download it from iTunes. DiveFilm is currently the only ocean-related podcast featured by Apple, and the only way to make sure it stays there is to have folks download and view it through iTunes!
Links to podcast: DiveFilm HD on iTunes. The episode is called “Shark Diving French Polynesia!”
Special thanks to Fabrice Charleux (gracious host and organizer; translator; subtitling), Mary Lynn Price (editor; podcast goddess), Don Kehoe (grumpy photo assistant), Dave Patchen (supporting friend), Adam Tow (interview camera assistance) and Rae Chang (interview assistance). This would not have been possible without all of you!
Footage taken with Canon 7D, Canon S95, and GoPro Hero camera in Eye of Mine flat-port housing.
Pam and I went out on the water yesterday to photograph the Blue Angels, who flew for about an hour during Fleet Week festivities. A friend had invited us to enjoy the show from his incredible boat, which was stable enough for me to be able to use a tripod-mounted Canon 7D and 500mm f/4 lens. I’ve never photographed planes before—it was a lot of fun!
The full album is here: http://ech.cc/fleetweeksf
I’ve recently moved my local Dropbox folder to a folder that lives in an encrypted sparse bundle. I have nearly 50GB of data in Dropbox, and it was starting to take a toll on my startup volume, which is small—a 250GB SSD. I changed the folder from within the Dropbox preferences area, and it moved my files over successfully.
This setup only works if the encrypted volume is mounted before Dropbox loads (Dropbox complains, otherwise). In particular, this is an issue if Dropbox loads on startup (and the encrypted volume has not yet mounted). I solved the problem by using an AppleScript that mounts the sparse bundle, waits a few seconds, and launches Dropbox. I added the AppleScript to my Login Items, and it is all working perfectly. You must save the sparse bundle password to your keychain for this to work.
do shell script ("hdiutil mount \"/Location/of/sparse/bundle/volumename.sparsebundle\"")
set theAppList to {{name:"Dropbox", vis:false}}
set theDelay to 5
repeat with currentApp in theAppList
tell application (name of currentApp) to launch
delay theDelay
tell application "System Events"
try
if background only of process (name of currentApp) is false then
set visible of process (name of currentApp) to (vis of currentApp)
end if
end try
end tell
end repeat
Note that one can use the same script (without the “hdiutil mount” part) to launch an arbitrary number of applications after a delay. Delayed launch script source: MacWorld Hints
WARNING: This setup can really screw up applications that sync using Dropbox. Your Dropbox will no longer always be available because it can be unmounted. Do this at your own risk.
I recently added a solid-state drive (SSD) to a 2011 MacBook Pro 15″ to use as a new boot / applications drive.1 The MacBook Pro came with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion installed, and I installed the new SSD using the same method I’ve used with every other machine I’ve owned in the pas:t
- I partitioned the SSD into a single volume with a GIUD partition table, choosing Mac OS X Extended (Journaled) as the file system.
- I used SuperDuper! to clone my old drive to the SSD
- I used Disk Utility.app and ran Repair Disk on the SSD (In the past, I have had problems booting from newly-cloned SSDs in the past without first repairing).
I rebooted the MacBook Pro, and everything seemed to work perfectly—the Mac booted quickly and was immediately an order of magnitude more responsive (as is normal when using a machine with SSD storage). However, when I went into the Security & Privacy preference pane to enable FileVault (FileVault 2), it gave me an error message:
FileVault can’t be turned on for the disk XXX. Some disk formats don’t support the recovery partition required for encryption.
It turns out that FileVault cannot be enabled on drives that do not have the Recovery HD partition that is created when Mac OS X Lion is installed. Because I had cloned the bootable volume to the new hard disk without actually installing Lion first, no Recovery HD partition was every created. To solve this problem, I had to first install Lion onto the destination hard disk (the SSD). The installation process creates the necessary Recovery HD partition. After installing Lion, I again cloned my old volume onto the new volume (on the SSD) using SuperDuper!.2
I have just completed this process, and FileVault is now encrypting my SSD.
Useful links/information:
- To download the Mac OS X Lion installer without installing it, run App Store and hold the Option key down while you click on the Purchases tab, and when you click on “Install Mac OS X Lion”. The Install Mac OS X Lion app will be downloaded into your Applications folder. When you run the installer, it will self-destruct, so be sure to back it up somewhere. [more info]
- To burn your own Mac OS X Lion install DVD or USB drive, follow the instructions here.
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