Father’s Day is coming up on June 15, so I thought I’d give you a little help if you were having any trouble coming up with gift ideas. Purchasing links after each photo. Prices are in US dollars.
This is by no means a comprehensive guide to organizing digital pictures, it’s just what I do.
I have a Perl script that copies all the pictures from my compact flash to my HDD. Why a Perl script? Because my Canon XT splits up the pictures into different folders in sets of 100. When you have a 4 GB CF card, that’s a lot of folders to look through. The script looks in each folder and each file and sorts them by date. It creates a folder on the HDD for each day in the format YYYYMMDD.
Once the card is dumped to my HDD, I go through and rotate all the pictures by opening the folder in thumbnail view. This gives me a good idea of what I shot on that day and if they need to be subcategorized. Example: If a shot a park, then my friend dancing, then a waterfall, each of those would get their own folders. These folders are prefixed by the date and then a letter and then the subject of the pictures.
Over the years, I’ve taken about 50 GB worth of pictures. Archiving them becomes an issue. How do I retrieve the pictures from the 50 or so CDs (now I’ve moved to DVDs)? I physically metatagged each CD with the date and the folder structure. I then put this same information into a spread sheet and numbered each disc, essentially creating an index.
Why not use software? Because most software creates its own database of the pictures. I’m also not looking to tag each individual picture. This solution also makes backing up things a lot easier because it’s application independent.
You can download my simple script. ***Note: You have to have Perl installed on your machine. Download the Perl script
Thought I’d help out those who are looking to buy mum a little special piece of jewelry for Mother’s Day (May 11). Purchasing links and prices follow each image.
LTO3 (Tape)
$0.08/GB
Pros: Cheap, long life-span
Cons: High setup ($2000), sequential read/write
HDD
$0.20/GB
Pros: Fast, no setup costs
Cons: Unreliable
DVD
$0.19/GB
Pros: No setup costs, easily expandable, versatile
Cons: Slow, takes up space, medium life-span (5-10 yrs)
Blu-Ray
$0.90/GB
Pros: High capacity, Can produce HD content, reliable, long life-span (50+ yrs)
Cons: $600 setup for drive, takes up space, slow
As it stands, for pure backup purposes, DVD is probably the most practical. As Blu-Ray comes down in price, and especially if you are doing a lot of HD, it may make sense to move to the new format, especially since HD-DVD is dead, there’s no more uncertainty in the format war.
I have a Western Digital 250 GB external HDD. I was trying to copy some large video files over to the drive to back them up and it kept telling me “Error copying file or folder - there is not enough disk space”. But I clearly had enough space for it. I even tried copying other files and found that the culprit was an 11 GB HD file.
The problem is the drive is formatted as FAT32 which has a file size limit of 4 GB. To check this, right click on the drive -> properties. Under “File system” it’ll say “FAT32″.
The only way to correct this is to convert the drive to NTFS. You can either reformat the drive or try running “convert.exe”. If you choose to go this route, make sure you backup all your data first.
To convert FAT32 to NTFS:
Open the command prompt: Start -> run; type “cmd”
In the command prompt, type “convert /fs:ntfs”, where is the letter of the drive. In my case, it’s “O:”
And you’re done! Just a quick note. You can’t convert NTFS to FAT32. To go back would require a reformat of the drive.
I found that tutorial on hv20.com and uploaded for everyone’s enjoyment.
Here are the basic steps:
Set your camera to Tv (shutter priority). Func -> Camera modes -> Tv
Lock the exposure. Set -> Scroll down to Exp (for exposure) -> Press up to adjust it -> Point it at any bright light source -> Press set
With the exposure locked, you can adjust the aperture directly by adjusting the exposure. When you adjust the exposure down or down, you’ll be changing the f-stops on the camera. If you have a miniSD card, you can half press the “photo” button to check the exposure setting.
Coupled with the manual focus, you now have a great little camera with nice manual controls.
This whole Christmas thing has really got me thinking about gifts and the whole act of giving. We’ve become a generation of the gift card. Little plastic cards that hide the “shame” of giving cash. But when you think about it, why would you give someone something that isn’t useful to them? As a poor grad student, the last thing I need is a gift card to Best Buy or Banana Republic. I rather get cash so I could pay off my tuition or buy books for next semester.
Why has the gift card become so popular? Because we really don’t know each other anymore. Think about it. You get a gift card for someone because you don’t know what they like. You don’t know what they already have. You don’t know what they need. But you feel “ashamed” (there’s that word again) for giving cash. So you hide it in a gift card. You feel good, the receiver feels kinda good for being remembered, but doesn’t really put the card to use.
Ninja and I have been doing something over the last few years. Instead of trying to figure out what each other needed or wanted, we just asked. We also combined Christmas and our birthdays together to form one gift because so much about giving has to do with the monetary value of the gift. So we did the logical thing and combined them so we can get each other more expensive gifts, stuff that we would really need / use.
But there was still something missing. The thoughtfulness that comes with the surprise. That’s what gifting is really about. Putting the thought into someone you care about and saying, “so and so would really like this, I’m going to get it for them”.
So, when people spout, “it’s the thought that counts”. It’s true. They’re just using it in the improper context. It’s not so much the thought of, “hey, I remembered so I got you this”, but rather, “our relationship is meaningful. I care about you and thought enough about the things you enjoy to get you this. Thanks for being my “.
There are more girl products than guys. Sorry, fellows!
FOR THE GALS
Hesperides soap from Fresh (I am addicted to this scent) 1 Bar of Soap, $14
Hard-milled, vegatable glycerine and shea butter. Hand-wrapped, tied neatly with a wire and a semi-precious stone.
Scent:
Top layer is Italian lemon, orange and grapefruit. The middle layer is bergamot, lotus flower and transparent jasmine. The bottom is rhubarb, musk, and peach.
+ Purchase the Hesperides soap here
Bird Bath soap from Pop Ink Design by Charles S. Anderson Design
1 Bar of Soap, $6
Made in the USA with triple-milled, all-natural essential oils.
Verbena/lavender scent.
+ Purchase the Bird Bath soap here
