Secret Sauces....

TPMG visits Canadian National Exhibition (CNE)

This is a bit of a backlog clearing job. The Toronto Photography Meetup Group recently visited The EX (Canadian National Exhibition) in Toronto. I thought it was a good chance to try out my Lens Baby Composer Lens and do some weird black and white pics. Here are a couple of the good ones.....

The complete flickr set is here.

A couple of test shots with Minolta Rokkor 50mm/f1.2

So the other day I had a bit of time and decided to paint the back of my Rokkor Lens. The lens originally had a Monilta mount, but with a lot of patience and tons of sanding I've modified it to fit the Canon EOS mount. The only thing that bugged me about the conversion was the fact that I was getting these weird flares in some of my shots and most of my "good" shots had really low contrast (washed out colours).

To remedy this I decided to grab some black car touch up paint from canadian tire and carefully touch up the inside of the new mount (which was silver since I sanded the aluminum down). Well I'm happy to report that everything went well (ie: I didn't destroy my baby) and the image quality has improved considerably. Here are a few test shots:

As you can see the depth-of-field is razor-thin, but once the contrast goes up the images are quite pleasing. The complete flickr set is here.

gksudo: Or how this old dog learned new tricks :-)

Okay if you know about gksudo, fine. I just found out about it a little while back when I was trying to run ethereal. You see under Ubuntu (and a lot of other Linux distros) the concept of root user has been removed. There is no root (well there is, but you can't access it), unless you specifically modify your system to activate it. That's fine (most of the time), since you can use sudo to accomplish almost anything as the administrator. One thing that doesn't work properly are the graphical applications that need root access. So here is where gksudo comes to rescue. In the case of ethereal I would issue the following command to get it to prompt me for sudo and run as root user:
gksudo ethereal
So next time you get tempted to open up that root account on your Ubuntu install, don't, use gksudo and get those gui apps running as root.

How to change the default command line text editor in Ubuntu....

I love Ubuntu, but there is one thing that really bugs the hell out of me. The default configured editor in Ubuntu is nano, a Pico clone. I hate Pico, therefor I hate nano :-). So how would you go about fixing this and changing the default editor to vi (or vim):

1. Issue the following command: sudo update-alternatives --config editor
2. Enter the superuser password when prompted.
3. At the following screen choose the number beside the editor you want as default or alternatively just press Enter to keep the default the same.
   
   

   There are 3 alternatives which provide `editor'.
   
     Selection    Alternative
   -----------------------------------------------
             1    /usr/bin/vim.tiny
             2    /bin/ed
   *+        3    /bin/nano
   
   Press enter to keep the default[*], or type selection number: 1
   Using '/usr/bin/vim.tiny' to provide 'editor'.

   
   

That's it.....Have fun.

Apples and Oranges.....

TechPosters: Technical Posters and Cheat Sheets for the NERD in you.....

Title says it all.....head over to TechPosters (kinda slow right now) and snag your favourite cheat sheet/reference card. There are also more of this kinda stuff over at Cheat-Sheets.org as well.

Toronto Buskerfest 2009.....

Okay so chronologically this post should come before the Airshow post, but hey better late than never right? Anyways, I had a couple of days off in august and decided to check out the Toronto Buskerfest again this year. For those of you who don't know, since its inception the buskerfest has featured hundreds of the best street performers from around the world, hosted hundreds of thousands of amazed spectators and has helped raise close to one million dollars for Epilepsy Toronto. Not only is it now the largest festival of its kind in North America it is also the largest Epilepsy awareness raising event in the world! The festival turned 10 this year and as part of their 10th anniversary celebration, the festival featured some of the best performers from it's past 10 years. Here are a few pics to give you a taste.....

The full set can be viewed here, as usual.

Canadian International Air Show.......

Celebrating Canada's centennial of flight and it's own 60th anniversary, the CIAS roared across Toronto's skies last weekend. It was a great show and it was made even more special, since it also marked the return of U.S. Navy Blue Angels to T.O. I was there on Saturday and came away with the following images......

As usual you can find the complete set of pics here.....