Just the thing the 5D ordered.
My last sensor brush - for the Canon 5D’s eternal love affair with dust - gave up the ghost so a new one was called for.
I splashed out major coin ($9.95 actually) at B&H for a Pearstone brush.
The brush retracts and clicks at both ends of its travel. The capped end conceals a mean looking rubber pad which I would be reluctant to use.
A nice piece for getting at the innards of the 5D’s mirror box and that pesky sensor.
No, not the planet.
Everyone knows this one:
And here’s today’s version:
Maybe not as powerful a rendition as with that Raphael but a good effort nonetheless, the towel replacing the hair. Notice how the towel has been cleverly sculpted to imitate the shell in the original.
And if you are wondering where you saw that backdrop before, look no further than Hearst Castle’s pool:
Storage is power.
A few years ago when we upgraded our servers at work to greater capacity - some 200 gigabytes (gB) if I recall - I asked our head of IT what the word was for the next greater unit of storage.
Why, a Terabyte (tB), came the reply. That’s 1,000 gB.
Who would ever need that sort of storage? Our main use for storage was to keep the politics of greed at bay. As an investment management shop we religiously kept, and backed-up, all our emails to prove that fundamental research drove our investment decisions, not illicit methods used by ne’er do wells. And as most government regulation exists to punish the successful (high marginal tax rates, phased-out deductions, AMT, asset managers with market-beating returns, etc.) we would always be ready when the SEC, NYSE, NASDAQ, Commodities regulators, IRS, you-name-it, came running, cap and lawyers in hand, to try to extract more of our legitimately gotten gains.
We would simply produce the related thousand pages of research emails on a stock and send them packing, never to be heard from again.
Now that was many years ago. Today, terabyte storage farms are the standard for most businesses and the home user is next.
Storage and processing power continue to fall in price and I, for one,would hate to be in the hard disk or CPU making business, as your product is obsolete within a few weeks of hitting the market. On the other hand, as a consumer, I love how cheap these two essentials in life have become.
So the other day when I decided to go up an order of magnitude or so in hard drive storage, it was no big deal to find two one terabyte drives and a fan cooled enclosure to store them for some $550.
Two of these are a simple plug-and-play installation in the enclosure:
While configuration options for the drives permit use as a RAID array, I’m a simple fellow and prefer to dump data files on one and make a clone back-up to the other overnight. Thus configured (as two partitions) you see two separate drives attached to your computer. Then if one goes down, the other is immediately usable without the need for any magic incantations or arcane instructions on recovery from a RAID failure.
Why the redundancy? Because hard drives are like motorcyclists - those who have crashed and those who will.
While you can talk at me until you are blue in the face that modern electronics are heat resistant, (the Apple TV, without any cooling fan, runs at a too-hot-to-touch temperature, for example), I graduated engineering school back in the day when men were men, women were men and computers were liquid cooled. So call me hidebound, but I continue to believe that the life expectancy of electronics is inversely correlated with their operating temperature. So a fan cooled enclosure it is. My research of this enclosure disclosed that the fan is exceptionally quiet and, in use, I can confirm it really is. You really don’t want a noisy fan in your work environment, and poorly designed ones are legion. And OWC’s designers nailed it - air is sucked out the back and a piece of paper will be suction-held to the front where the airstream enters. I know as I tried it. The drives are mounted vertically, their spin axes horizontal, so that heat from the device can rise up. Horizontal mounting is most certainly not optimal in this environment.
As the enclosure comes with Firewire 400, 800 and USB2, I’m not about to run out of connectivity anytime soon. One of these standards, I like to think, will survive for a while.
You can’t be too rich, too thin or have enough storage. And while the first two take considerable eff