Pushing the limits or not?

On the way back to my home city on a Southwest Airlines flight, I decided to pay for Wi-Fi so I could:(no order after the first item)

• Entertain myself. I'm bored.
• See how capable their Wi-Fi is. It only cost $8 for the flight.
• See if they had restrictions on the type of protocol in use. Surprisingly, Plex wasn't restricted.
• I ran Plex and streamed a TV show fine. I stopped the play for something else, then went back and the app crashed, though I don't know if its the app or the connection.
• Started an ftp session to my Synology server to upload some podcasts I wanted to archive. They aren't very big files (mp3), being 40-45 meg apiece. Based on the transfer rate, it's indicating get about 30 minutes per file. So not great, but usable in a pinch. (~28 KBs/sec). Doing more than one at a time is an exercise in futility though, as the connection drops, so maybe I'm overloading have the connection. More an effort to see what I can and cannot do.

Obviously, if I'm posting this mid flight, blogging isn't restricted, but it's really just text and browser based.

I couldn't simultaneously ftp and run a Plex video, but steaming music over Plex at the same time did work! A little buffering once in a while, but not bad. The connection is probably fine for basic email and Web, but beyond that, don't get your hopes up. I couldn't ever get a file completely transferred without the ftp session dropping. Connection is just too slow for this.

Maybe SW didn't expect this kind of use, LOL.

HooToo

My little travel router came in handy yesterday , as the hotel limits you to three logins per room. Problem solved! Most hotels have a limited number of device connections for your wifi (3 devices). I understand why, but three is way too few for me (us).I have a HooToo TripMate Wireless N Portable Travel Router with 6000mAh Battery Charger that is a combination router and battery. It works both wired or wirelessly.

We got upgraded to a junior suite our last night in Milan, which was a nice treat, though even being a Gold member didn't get us free access to the lounge. We decided that it was worth it to buy (shudder the thought) access, since we don't leave until later tomorrow.

Even though the TV in our room has an HDMI port right on the front connection panel, conspicuously at the front of the TV with all of the other inputs, neither the menu system on the TV or remote will get you access to the external ports. No Chromecast for me. We'll have to watch Plex on the iPad. But Hotels--WHY do you have these inputs on your TVs (which you've obvioysly gone to some trouble to make available) without giving your users the ability to actually use them??

Airline WiFi

For the first time I can remember, I'm getting some (10 meg) free Wi-Fi on the plane (transatlantic) , but even 500meg is only $1.00. Now 10 Meg is good for just (a little) email, maybe, but not uploading files or streaming media. The connection is a bit flaky, maybe due to the number of people.

No photos, as there's nothing interesting here except a bunch of people jammed together. Boeing 777.

I find that 10 Meg is extremely limited, and have to open successive incognito pages and use different email addresses to continue without paying.

I received a message from my cell phone carrier about being out of the area they give free data. I'm sure there aren't any of their cell towers in the Atlantic! So, into airplane mode and all is good, except for constantly opening incognito browser Windows.

New Camera Gear

I'm going to be traveling to Europe before long and will be taking some new camera gear. I have a Canon 40D, but find that lugging the camera body, plus three lenses and the bag I carry it all in, to be pretty cumbersome after two or so weeks of traveling. The last two years, I downsized to the opposite degree with a Canon S100, but missed some of the flexibility of the interchangeable lenses you get with something like a DSLR. The S100 takes great pictures, but I wanted more, without the weight and without spending as much as I would for a newer DSLR or a full frame format camera. The S100 is a great camera, and now that it costs about half of what I paid two years ago, an even better value in a point an shoot format, but with a lot of options.

I've been eyeing the mirrorless cameras for the last year or so. Typical for me, vacation is coming up, so now is when I decide I have to at least look at a new camera. I hoped that the mirrorless format would give me the lower weight, combined with the increased flexibility I'd get with interchangeable lenses. It's unfortunate than Canon hasn't yet produced a mirrorless camera, as I have been very happy with the Canon line. I bought a Sony Alpha a6000. Since I have at least one good "non-kit" Canon lens, I wanted to see if I could find a way to use the Canon format lens mount with the Sony 4/3 format e-mount. There are some adapters, but never having used one of these, I had to explore what the impact on the resulting image was, their compatibility with the lenses I might use, and the cost. Metabones seems to be the Cadillac of the category (at least in price), but I didn't want to spend as much on the adaptor as I spent on the existing lens, or I might as well buy a new lens. I make a lot of use of the reviews on Amazon as well as product review forums when it comes to camera gear. DPReview is one I use. But reading the reviews on Amazon left me with some doubts about my particular lens' compatibility. When looking at the Signstek Electronic Auto Focus EF-NEX EF-EMOUNT FX Lens Mount Adapter for Canon EF EF-S Lens to Sony E Mount adaptor(25% of the price of a Metabones), I asked a question about whether it should work with my Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM SLR Lens.The answer was Yes! So I bought it. That, and another battery, since the Sony isn't getting great marks for battery life.

I took a few test shots and didn't notice any vignetting, which I rather expected from changing the lens mount system. Time will tell, once I take more shots and view them on my monitor. Though it certainly weighs down the otherwise much lighter camera, it potentially gives me a much better opportunity to take big landscape photos. Since I'll be traveling in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, hopefully I'll be able to take better advantage of the lens. I'll create a separate album on Flickr to isolate the photos using this camera, lens and adaptor vs. my trusty S100, which I'm also taking. I tried the lens mount adaptor with my Canon f1.4 50mm lens, but it doesn't seem to do anything special for me beyond changing the focal length, and adding some more weight to my already too full camera/gear bag.

I updated the firmware in the Sony A6000 from version 1.0 to version 1.2, and bought an app in the Sony App store. Yes, there's an app store for my camera. The camera comes with a remote control app to control the camera for shooting, which is nice if you need to eliminate some camera shake. It also has Wi-Fi and NFC, but inexplicably, doesn't have GPS (as the S100, which is several years older) does.

I don't make much money from Amazon referrals, but I do enjoy taking my payments in the form of Amazon gift certificates and buying myself a little something from my wish list. Thanks for using any referral links!

Down the Rabbit Hole

So, starting out to look into the options for photo management, I find that some users of Lightroom have their storage located on a Synology NAS, but use an iSCSI connection. I was not familiar with iSCSI, though many (many) years ago, used SCSI devices. The iSCSI connection appears easy enough to create on the Synology. But also find that the Mac does not come with a native iSCSI initiator to connect to the iSCSI target you create on the Synology.

A thread on the MacRumor discussion boards reads: 

"SCSI is a virtual SCSI channel over TCP/IP network. You may call it niche, since it's mostly used in large scale network storage system, and seldom used by home / small office users, but it's not some legacy technology.
An iSCSI target (or the "network hard-drive" if you prefer) is not necessary to be a "SCSI" device -- the iSCSI is merely a pure-virtual software level, so that the initiator host (the Computer) can tell the target (the hard-drive) where to fetch data. The storage device will translate SCSI command to HFS/EXT-3/EXT-4 file system access command, so that it may access the real physical storage. You can imagine it like an virtual hard-drive .ISO image file used by VMWare or Parallel. For example, a medium level NAS from QNAP or Synology may use 4 SATA3 hard-drives, configure to RAID 5, format main partition to EXT-4, create a virtual logic partition that takes 20% of total usable spaces, and assign it as iSCSI target. 
When you mount an iSCSI target on to your Mac OS X desktop, it's different from an SMB/AFP shared volume. An iSCSI target operates just like an ordinary USB or 1394 external disk: you can format the volume with Disk Utility, paste icons, create directory, copy files, delete files, and grab deleted files back from the system trash can."

There are solutions for Mac, the principal one seeming to be GlobalSAN, which isn't free. I have a Windows7 VM running (under Parallels) on my Mac, and Windows is supposed to have native iSCSI capability, but I'd really prefer to have any such connection running under my host OS, rather than a VM. There is another free solution from Kernsafe for the Mac. So, maybe iSCSI, could be a solution I sought for how to interface the image editor/browser with the storage solution I use.  Lightroom is still something I need to evaluate.

There's a thread on the Adobe forums about the topic of keeping the primary library on a NAS. Though there's no clear answer, some people seem to have no problem, others are wary. No one mentioned using iSCSI, which would address the speed concerns that some did raise.

Picasa Starter is for Windows, darn it. I have a Windows laptop, but this isn't really the optimal solution, since I'm mostly Mac in my workflow. Though it appears that Picasa Starter hasn't been updated since April 2012, it does mention its compatibility with the current version of Picasa (3.9), so although the lack of continued development is a concern, it might work in the short term if I decided to use my Windows laptop; it is possible to locate the Picasa database on a flash (or NAS) drive, though, so this may be an option.

CatDV isn't compatible with Yosemite unless you upgrade to version 11, but the pricing is still reasonable for a 'Standard' version; Pro is beyond my threshold in terms of price. Server is another mountain in terms of pricing though, and I'm really just a single user.

More to evaluate.