Photography

DIY Vagabond II Power Supply

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I got the inspiration for this when I was searching around looking for portable power for my mono-bloc strobes.  I ran across this blog post and thought I would give it a try.  I’m collecting up the costs associated to see how closely I can get to the cost to what Jacob describes.

Vagabond II Carry Case
$19.95 + $7.80 shipping = $27.75 from Paul Buff online store

PowerSonic 12v 18ah AGM Sealed battery
$49.98 local retailer

Samlex PST Series 150W Pure Sine Wave Inverter, 12VDC 120VAC
$94 + $11.86 = $105.86 online

GFCI plug
$12.95 local Home Depot

Battery Tender adapter
(2) $6.99 = $13.98 local Batteries Plus retailer

Grand damage
$210.52

I did make a design change that actually reduced the cost by a bit. I went with the two Battery Tender connections for simplicity, instead of the wire/connector that he indicated, as that will easily hook up to my Battery Tender that I already own.

This is enough more than Jacob’s $170 ($40.52) that I have to mention it, but in the grand scheme its still $90 less than the retail price of the Vagabond II, and $110.57 less including shipping (which they quote as $21.14 to my area)

FWIW YMMV

I have not had a chance to hook this all up and test yet, I will make another post with my results shortly.

Blogging, Technology

WordPress 3 Upgrade

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I’ve been struggling with getting the new version of WordPress to auto-install.  I have been getting a stalled upgrade with no error or feedback.  The process would just fail at ‘Unpacking Files’ and nothing else would happen.

After a bit of searching I found a tip that finally worked.  It seems to be due to php4 and php5 being enabled at the same time like my hosting company 1and1.com has.  After updating the .htaccess file at the root of my WordPress installation with the following code the upgrade worked seamlessly!

Add

# Ensure PHP5 being used
# For WordPress auto upgrade
AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

To your .htaccess file and you’ll be in business!

UPDATE: 8-3-2010 1:40pm

Either the upgrade to v3, or my hosting company (I suspect the hosting company)_ wiped out my .htaccess file.  This prevented me from upgrading to v3.0.1.  Once the settings were *back* in place I was able to upgrade as expected.

Backup Exec, Technology, VMWare

BackupExec 2010 AVVI

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I’ve been working with Symantec’s new VMWare agent for Backup Exec 2010 for the past couple of months.  We were excited to have differential backup of VMDK files through vSphere when they announced the new version of the software.  In practice however this is a bit more involved than we bargained for.

Continue reading BackupExec 2010 AVVI →

Technology

Downgrade iPhone 3G(S) from iOS 4.0, back to iPhone OS 3.1.x

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I recently upgraded my iPhone 3g to the new iOS version 4.  I wasn’t terribly impressed with the limited features that are available on the 3g handset, and found the new OS to be slow enough to drive me nuts.

I resolved to go back to the old OS and get my speed back.  (There wasn’t anything I would miss anyway on my old phone)  It turns out it was harder to downgrade that I had thought.  I spun my wheels for a while and ended up asking my buddy Ian for ideas about it.  He pointed me to this blog entry which ended up being exactly the trick I needed.  Now I’m back on the prior OS and working as expected again.   Thanks for the tip Ian!

Downgrade from iPhone OS 4.0 Beta, Back to iPhone OS 3.1.3 | Mac|Life.

Technology

iPhone battery and Exchange Email

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I think I’m a relatively light user of my phone.  I check email periodically during the day and talk only a few minutes a day.  I usually get down to maybe 60%+ battery before I get home after work.  I plug in every night out of habit so my phone is rarely at risk of running out of juice.

Recently my battery started dying really quickly.  I would unplug when heading out the door to work, and before lunch my phone had shut off due to dead battery.  I had rebooted the phone to make sure that it was in a clean state with no luck.  Then I went through and turned off wireless, bluetooth, push notifications, and everything else I could think of.  Same situation.  I even tried a factory reset of my device and restored the backup.

Now I was getting desperate and considered taking it back to the Apple Store and seeing what they thought.   As a last ditch effort  I started removing applications.  I had it back to pretty much out of the box with no extra applications on it.

The only thing that was left on there that was configured specifically was my email account using the Microsoft Exchange Active Sync connection. I didn’t think that all this would be caused by that because that should just work right?  As my last resort before going to the store I deleted that account having it remove all my data, and then set it up again fresh.   Sure enough, battery life restored.  I loaded all my applications back and it was back to normal.