Eric Cheng's Journal

Scam: traveling, mugged, and need cash

echeng — Thu, 25 Apr 2013 17:43:35 +0000

I’ve gotten this email from more than one person in the past. If any friend asks for cash via email, please make sure you talk to them directly on the phone before you even think about helping them. Usually, it means that their email account has been compromised, so they should also immediately change all of their passwords.

Hello

I’m sorry you’re getting the mail from me at this Point in time,my family and I came down here to Manila(Philippines), for a short vacation unfortunately we were mugged at the park of the hotel we stayed,all cash credit cards and cell were stolen off but luckily for us we still have our passports with us.

I have been to the embassy and the Police here but they’re not helping issues at all and our flight leaves pretty soon from now but we’re having problems settling the hotel bills and the hotel manager won’t let us leave until we settle the bills.Please be so kind to reply back so I can tell you what to do and how to get some cash to us.

I’m freaked out at the moment

Here’s a helpful snopes article that talks about this scam. Also, all the telltale signs of scam from non-native English speakers are there: poor grammar, arbitrarily capitalized words, missing spaces, and the use of the word, “kind” or “kindly.”

Setting your PATH in Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

echeng — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 19:25:29 +0000

In older versions of Mac OS X, you could set your PATH variable in terminal by adding to your .profile in your home directory. Recently, a bunch of my scripts started to fail because I use a lot of tools that are located in /opt/local/bin and /opt/local/sbin, and those paths were no longer in my PATH environment variable.

As of the latest updates to OS X 10.8.3 (Build 12D78), Terminal.app no longer seems to parse .profile when it starts up. What works, now, is to edit “/etc/paths”.

I just tested it, and it works.

Quadcopter discussion at rotorpixel.com

echeng — Sat, 06 Apr 2013 19:07:10 +0000

Keri Wilk and I have started a new site called Rotorpixel. We are both relatively-new in the RC multi-rotor aircraft hobby, but finally feel like we have amassed enough knowledge to start to share with others, publicly. Both of us will be posting about our journey, and Keri will be designing, fabricating, and selling multi-rotor imaging accessories like gimbals. My writing will be found at my Rotorpixel blog.

Northern Lights / Aurora Borealis in Alaska, March 2013 (Timelapse)

echeng — Tue, 26 Mar 2013 01:39:18 +0000

Timelapse video of the Northern Lights / Aurora Borealis taken during the evenings of March 18 and 19, 2013. Canon 5D Mark III and Canon 14mm f/2.8L USM II lens. Shutter speeds from 5s to 15s at ISOs between 2500 and 6400. Music courtesy mobygratis.com.

Special thanks to Mike Knott for his company, and to Ronn Murray, Casey Thompson and Marketa Stanczykova Murray for their incredible, local hospitality!

Pictures of Death Valley

echeng — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 08:53:26 +0000

I went on a fantastic whirlwind of a photography trip to Death Valley at the end of January, 2013, with my friend, Dan Kitchens (of Kozyndan). We spent 2.5 days seeing all of the big sites. I’m an ocean and city person, so I was fascinated and took pictures of pretty much everything. Special thanks to everyone who gave me advice before and during the trip: Alice Kao, Andy Biggs, Phil Colla, Eric Hanauer, Curtis Leo, Mark Braden, James Moskito, Dave Hunsinger, Angela Filose, Merlin W. Phillips Jr., Kelly Raymond Bracken, George Vincent, Jane Call, John Moore, and Phil Sokol. Thanks also to Sue Chen for the use of her car and home, and to Dan Kitchens for his company and ability to act as a catalyst for great imagery.

The right way to share a file or bunch of files using Dropbox

echeng — Sat, 02 Feb 2013 19:41:11 +0000

Let’s say you want to share some assets you have on Dropbox with a friend. Easy, right? You just “Share This Folder” to your friend’s email address.

“Share Link” and “Share This Folder” are very different

If your goal is to get the file(s) to your friend—and not collaborate on a project together—”Share This Folder” is probably not be the best way to do it. Consider the steps your friend must take, once you share the folder:

from the email notification, click on the share link and login to Dropbox using the web
make sure that the recipient email address is actually the correct Dropbox account (for me, it often is not, since I have multiple email addresses)
sign in, and possibly, authenticate using 2-step authentication using iPhone app
click to see outstanding sharing requests
accept the share (at this point, every machine current logged into that account will start downloading the file(s))
get the file(s) by explicitly downloading them or by waiting for the current computer’s Dropbox instance to finish the download
leave the shared folder

Also, as the sharer, you are subject to a large side effect from your folder share: the recipient can change the folder contents, including adding to, changing, and deleting its contents. Are you trying to collaborate with the recipient, or are you just trying to get them a file? Do you trust the recipient not to alter the contents of your shared folder?

If you’re trying to get them a file or folder, you can easily grab a Dropbox share link via the web interface, or via Finder’s shortcut right/control-click Dropbox menu. Use “Share Link” instead of “Share This Folder” to get a link that allows access to the file(s). Copy the link and send it to the recipient, or use Dropbox’s built-in “Share Link” feature from the web.

Dropbox’s web interface for “Share link”

From the web, you can copy the link with “Get link,” or share it directly from the interface.

By using “Share Link” instead of “Share This Folder”, your recipient can just click on a magic link to download the assets. Dropbox will even automatically zip up the contents of the folder for download, if a folder was shared. The risk here, of course, is that anyone with the link can access the file, so be careful about sending the link around.

Once you’ve shared a link, the link is alive forever. When you’re done sharing, you can go back to the Dropbox web interface and remove the links. Dropbox shows a link icon next to every folder or file that has an active, shared link.

Dropbox shows a link icon next to files or folders you’ve shared links to

To remove the shared link, click on the link icon to navigate to the shared link, click on the gear icon in the upper right, and select “Remove Link.”

Remove links when you’re done sharing them

This process is more work for you, but makes it easier for your recipient and doesn’t leave you open to someone deleting or altering your content.

Safari won’t save or print PDFs: how to fix

echeng — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 05:29:46 +0000

If Safari won’t save or print PDFs (but views them without any problems), you probably have an Adobe PDF plug-in installed. In Safari, go to Help->Installed Plug-ins and do a search for “PDF.” If you have anything with “PDF” in it other than “WebKit built-in PDF,” that is probably the culprit.

On my computer, the problem was “AdobePDFViewerNPAPI.plugin”. To remove it, I quit Safari, did a Spotlight search (Command-Option space) for that file name, and then dragged it to the trash. When I restarted Safari, I could print and save PDFs again. You can also manually find the plugins by going to the system “Library” folder (the one at the root of your hard disk, not in your user folder) and looking in the “Internet Plug-Ins” folder.

I’m on OS X 10.8.2, running Safari 6.0.2 (8536.26.17).

How to disable Getty licensing in your Flickr account

echeng — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 02:41:34 +0000

Last year, I watched Craig Peters, a SVP at Getty Images, nearly get booed off of the stage during his talk at Luminance 2012. He said that Getty was focused on creating the best return for their stock holders, and most photographers I spoke to after the talk were really upset at some of the numbers Peters claimed during the talk, which they believed to be fabrications.

On December 6, Google Drive announced that “5,000 new photos of nature, weather, animals, sports, food, education, technology, music and 8 other categories are now available for your use in Docs, Sheets, and Slides.” A couple weeks ago, an iStockphoto forum post started an avalanche of negative articles after an iStockphoto contributor said that he received $12 for the Google Drive platform licensing deal mentioned in the announcement.

Photographers are hoping that Getty, who owns iStockphoto, and Google release full details about what is actually going on, but photographers are already starting to remove pictures from iStockphoto, in protest. Personally, I’m glad that I never licensed my pictures through Getty. Don’t get me wrong—I give away plenty of pictures to NGOs that I support; licensing your pictures for free is something only you can decide you want to do.

My Flickr pictures that Getty editors are interested in licensing

If you don’t want to support Getty and are a Flickr user, you can opt out from the entire process by logging in to Flickr, going to your account’s “Privacy & Permissions” page, and changing the settings for “Make your photos eligible for invitation by Getty Images?” to “No thanks…”.

Select “No thanks” at the “Eligibility for Getty Images invitations” page to opt out

File storage and backup for photographers

echeng — Sun, 06 Jan 2013 02:53:39 +0000

I spend way too much time thinking about data storage and backup. I’ve been a professional photographer for nearly 10 years, and have accumulated over 10 terabytes of pictures, video, and project data. I have finally implemented a storage and backup scheme that I’m happy with. It took a long time to set up, but I have direct access to all of my media now, and have comfort in knowing that it is securely backed up.

Can I back up to the cloud?

A lot of normal people (non-photographers) are starting to store their pictures exclusively on the cloud, and while there are some great cloud storage services out there that cater to photographers, none of them are really suitable for storing or backing up multiple terabytes of data. Also, uploading to the cloud is slow. A fairly-fast DSL or Cable connection will probably allow you to sustain upload speeds of 200KB/s (I’m being generous). At that speed, uploading 1TB takes about 2 months. Uploading 10TB would take nearly 2 years, and a mainstream ISP will likely throttle you before allowing you to use that much data. So cloud backup is out.

Simplicity

Over the years, I’ve had crazy backup schemes involving multiple computers, multiple software products and services, and custom scripts, all requiring coordinated (but automated) execution to keep my data safe. All of these schemes required that I create flow charts to track how data moved during backups; without that documentation, I might have forgotten how things work, over time.

I’m sick of these crazy schemes, and have finally settled on something much more simple.

Kinds of data

As someone who collects pictures and video files, I think of my data as living in two different categories. I’ve had to simplify my thinking a lot in order categorize data this way, but that’s OK. It’s got to be rough to be simple.

Working data: all system files, applications, documents, email, and project data (including temporary or intermediate files and final output files)
Raw data: pictures, video, audio and other media generated by cameras or capture devices

The main difference between the two is that Raw data doesn’t really change after it is captured. After a single photography trip, I might have 300GB of pictures and video, which I consider to be Raw data. I may then create 50GB of additional data in project data over time (e.g., slideshows, produced videos, edited pictures saved as TIFs). I consider all of this to be Working data. Even if it doesn’t change in a long time, I may decide—at any time—to re-open and tweak a project, which will result in a need to back up again. It also means that I might accidentally screw up a project, so saving multiple versions of Working data is desirable.

Backup requirements

Working data should be continuously, incrementally backed up in a versioned manner so I can roll back to a prior state for any given file
Raw data should be backed up in a versioned manner as well, but doesn’t need continuous backup. I can kick this off manually, but need to have the discipline to do so regularly.

All data also needs to be stored offsite, so I don’t lose everything is there is a fire or flood.

So here’s how I’ve implemented backup:

My main machine is a mid-2010 Mac Pro. Inside, I have:

1 x 500GB Samsung 840 Series SSD (boot, applications, fast data)
4 x Seagate Barracuda 4TB 7200RPM 3.5″ drives in a RAID 0 stripe (16GB volume)

I am currently using 10TB of the 16TB available space, which gives me 6TB of growing room. 6TB should last a long time… unless I suddenly get a RED camera and start shooting RAW video. :) About 9TB of this data is picture / video data (Raw data), and 1TB is Working data.

I connect a Sans Digital TowerRAID TR5UT+B, which is a 5-bay, USB 3.0/eSATA box that features hardware RAID. The box has 5 x 3TB Seagate Barracuda 3TB drives in it configured as a concatenated array¹ (15TB volume). Accessed over a single eSATA port (port-multipled), this setup sustains around 90 MB/s, but when using something like rsync, I see transfer speeds between 30-70 MB/s. You can also configure the box to use RAID 0² or RAID 5³, if you so desire.

For the 1TB of Working data, I use Crashplan for incremental backups to two locations:

a Mac Mini, which has a 3TB drive attached to it via USB 3.0 (backup set includes entire boot drive, as well as Working data)
Crashplan Cloud (Working data only; no system or applications, nor Raw data). The initial backup seed is still in progress: the Crashplan app tells me it will take 5 months to upload 1TB, so I will likely mail in a drive to seed the backup (a service they offer).

I backup the 9TB of Raw data to the TowerRAID using a custom rsync script that supports incremental snapshots (a modified copy of Mike Rubel’s script). It took about 40 hours to do the initial backup (9.3TB over 40 hours is an average of 64.5MB/s), but successive backups take less than an hour. I keep 4 daily snapshots, 3 weekly snapshots, and 3 monthly snapshots. I may add a semi-yearly or yearly snapshot as well. For those of you who are more technical, the script uses hard links for files that have not changed, which means that I can effectively copy those files to a snapshot without using any additional drive space. Only files that have changed are actually copied to the backup during each incremental backup process.

I actually backup my entire computer, including both Working and Raw data, to the TowerRAID. Why not? I have the space to do so, and it doesn’t take that much more time.

Why snapshots?

Why use a crazy snapshot script to version files instead of just cloning a drive using SuperDuper!? Recently, two of my photographer friends discovered that they had some corrupted pictures. Both their master and backups were corrupted because once the master copy was corrupted, future backups were also corrupted. Luckily, both of them had very old backups that they used to restore good versions of the files. With versioned backups, the backup will notice that the file is different (potentially, corrupted) and make a new version. It keeps the old version so you can always go back.

Other notes:

For much of my active data, I work out of Dropbox, which is a fantastic cloud sync service. All data in Dropbox is instantly backed up, versioned, and accessible to any device. It works very well, and nearly everyone I know uses the service.
I use SuperDuper! to maintain a bootable clone of my machine’s boot disk. If the drive fails, I want to be able to boot up and be productive immediately. I do this every once in awhile, but am not too rigorous about doing it frequently. If you’re a Windows person, try Acronis True Image, instead.
I actually have two of the TowerRAID boxes, each with 5 x 3TB drives installed. One is configured as a concatenated array (as described above), and the other, as a RAID 0 stripe. One is stored offsite, and the other lives at home. I backup regularly to the box at home, and periodically swap it out with the one that is stored offsite.

There is a full list of all of the hardware referred to in this article over at my refer.ly page. Full disclosure: I get referral fees for many of the items on that page. Feel free to click through from there if you’d like to, but don’t feel obligated to do so.

Backups in the field are another topic, which I’ll write about at a later date.

What do you use to backup your data? I’m very interested in how other photographers—or people with large data sets—keep their data secure.

In theory, a concatenated array, which the box supports via switches, results in the loss of only a single drive’s worth of data if a drive fails. In practice, I’ve never had to deal with a failure in this kind of array, so I’m just guessing. ↩
A RAID 0 stripe is an option as well; I see 130 MB/s from a RAID 0 stripe over a single eSATA port, and real-world rsync speeds of 80 MB/s. This is much faster than using a concatenated array, but you lose the entire set if a drive fails instead of losing only a single drive’s worth of data. ↩
You should think of RAID 5 as a way to not lose your data if 1 drive fails, but I wouldn’t assume that you can rebuild the RAID successfully if you have a lot of data. If a drive fails, copy the data off as soon as possible and start over. Considering that RAID 5 performance degrades a lot once a drive fails (by up to 80%, according to stuff I’ve read on the internet), this may take a long, long time. In my opinion, it’s to assume the entire volume is toast when a single drive fails, so multiple backups are necessary. I much prefer newer, proprietary RAID implementations like Synology Hybrid RAID, which are dynamically expandable and allows for 2-drive redundancy. ↩

Photoshelter Luminance talk about Lytro light field cameras

echeng — Mon, 19 Nov 2012 19:04:03 +0000

Eric Cheng speaks at Luminance 2012 from PhotoShelter.com on Vimeo.

In September, I went to New York to give a talk at Luminance, a fantastic event organized by Photoshelter to celebrate and explore the intersection of business, technology, culture and photography. The talks were almost all really interesting, and the discussions that happened in the break area between the talks were equally as interesting. I hope Photoshelter puts on another event next year. If you’re interested, please let them know!

Also, Photoshelter is running a Lytro camera giveaway through the end of November. All you have to do is sign up for their newsletter to be in the running to receive an 8GB Graphite Lytro camera.