David Noelte

So you are sitting in front of your SB-600 wondering how you can get it open?

I had the same issue. Upfront I need to tell you that you might loose your warrantie if you open the Speedlight by yourself so don’t blame me if you broke your Speedlight.

Before we start I need to tell you a little story to that. A while back Cosmo and I had been on a shooting with our friends from Fast Division. Later the day it got a little windey and Cosmo’s Flash fell over and the zoom was broken. Sad story cause the Flash was only a few days old. But the really weird part was, when I came home to show Cosmo my flash my zoom was also broken showing the same weird noise and no movement. Weird cause I didn’t use the flash all day and it was also broken. So we tried to find out how we can open the flash to check what was wrong. I have to admit my flash was in the corner since this day and I haven’t touched it. So today I found some time trying to find out how to open it and check what was wrong.

To open it it is actually not that hard once you found your screws. You just need a screwdriver, knife and some glew. There is 10 screws that need to be removed. The first 2 screws are just bellow the head (PICTURE1). But now the funny part. 4 screws are hidden below the push-button (PICTURE2) and the other 4 opposite from the push-button behind a rubber cover (PICTURE4). You have to remove the push-button and this rubber cover with a small knife slowly. Bellow the covers you will find the other 8 screws you were looking for (PICTURE4). When you removed them you can easily pop the speedlight open and check what’s wrong in there. When you finished you might want to remove the old glew from your rubber covers and put some new glew on them. That’s it!

I can not tell you how to fully fix your flash cause it can be thousand different things. In my case it was quite easy cause the little electric motor was popped out so it couldn’t move the flashbulb anymore. I need to check if this is the same problem on Cosmo’s flash but I heard that often little plastic parts breaking out which you might be able to glew back on yourself or not.

Photo, Tech, Tutorials blitz, camera, fotograf, howto, nikon, Photo, sb-600, speedlight, tipps, tips, tricks

Large image sensor, developed by Nikon; 12.1 effective megapixels
The D700 employs an FX-format CMOS image sensor with an area of 36.0mm (h) x 23.9mm (v). It provides superior picture quality throughout a wide ISO sensitivity range, with advantages that include a large pixel size to ensure a higher signal-to-noise ratio and wide dynamic range, and improved circuit layout to efficiently increase the strength of the electrical signal from pixels. High-speed, 12-channel readout enables fast continuous shooting of high-resolution images at up to 8 frames per second (with Multi-Power Battery Pack MB-D10 and Rechargeable Li-ion Battery EN-EL4a/4 or eight AA-size batteries).

Nikon Speedlight SB-900 Major Features

• Multi-step auto zoom covers wide 17-200mm zoom range (24-105mm：SB-800)
• Three illumination patterns (standard, center-weighted and even) are available to match each shooting environment
• Automatically detects Nikon FX and Nikon DX formats and selects suitable light distribution
• Improved booster circuit for high-speed recycle time: Recycle time using four AA-size batteries is almost equal to the SB-800 with five AA-size batteries
• New AF-Assist illumination covers a wide 20-105 mm focal range compatible with the new Multi-CAM3500 FX/DX AF sensor
• Firmware update via Nikon D3 and D700 is possible (world’s first*)
• Thermal Cut-out function limits the number of flashes to avoid deterioration of light emitting parts caused by continuous flash firing
• Automatically detects color filters (fluorescent or incandescent), enabling camera to control color temperature according to filter information from SB-900
• Improved switch panel for enhanced usability
• Improved GUI using a large-size LCD dot panel
• Bounce capability: tilts up to 90º, down to -7º, rotates horizontally 180º to right and left
• Advanced Wireless Lighting and versatile functions for up to three remote groups of SB-900s or other compatible Speedlight controlled through the master SB-900

More information on the

Nikon D700

Nikon SB-900

Source: www.nikon.com

News, Photo, Tech blitz, camera, d700, flash, foto, kamera, News, nikon, Photo, press, release, sb-900, speedlight

Apple, News, Tech

BSD Talk #42 has an interview Karl Lehenbauer about FlightAware.com. FlightAware tracks flight information, so far example here is their page on live flights to and from Sacramento Executive Airport. There is a lot of information that they are making available for free. Here is an outline of some of the more interesting bits that were mentioned by Karl during the interview.

All of FlightAware’s systems are 64-bit AMD based computers running FreeBSD 6.x, specifically the FreeBSD/amd64 port. They use PostgreSQL for the database back end. Slony 1 is being used to replicate data. Hard drives are in a RAID 1 (mirroring) 3ware configuration using controllers.

Now for some numbers:

• Receiving the data and processing it puts them about 6 minutes behind real time
• Generating one map can be done in about 160 milliseconds of CPU time
• Capable of generating several million maps a day
• About 1 TB of stored data
• Approximately 40 million position updates on air craft per day

PostgreSQL wasn’t able to keep up with the updates so they wrote a memory resident database service queries. I’m still not exactly clear on what the relationship is between PostgreSQL and their memory resident database, which uses about 1 GB of RAM.

Nice to see a company putting FreeBSD and PosgreSQL to good use. I’m curious about the 40 million inserts per day number. Bring on the math!

• 40,000,000 inserts per day
• 40,000,000 / 24 = 1,666,667 inserts per hour
• 1,666,6667 / 60 = 27,778 inserts per minute
• 27,227 / 60 = 463 inserts per second

So that boils down to about 463 inserts per second on average. I’d expect that their actual peak requirements are much higher than that (perhaps two or three times that number?). That is just data that they are receiving, that doesn’t include the queries being run against their system to power the website. This brings up another question, how much bandwidth do they have dedicated to receiving these updates? It is possible that each individual update is fairly small (lat, long, src, dest, flight id, airline, plane type, etc) so that might not be too bad. Even at 256 bytes per update, doing 40 million of those a day adds up very quickly.

Right now their website provides the following numbers:

Currently Tracking

Tracking 4,986 airborne aircraft (224 VFR) with 21,205,488 total flights in the database.
FlightAware has tracked 48,940 arrivals in the last 24 hours.

Randomnetworks.com

News, Tech

It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE. This release is the next step in the development of the 6.X branch, delivering several performance improvements, many bugfixes, and a few new features. These include:

• Addition of a keyboard multiplexer. This allows USB and PS/2 keyboards to coexist without any special options at boot.
• Many fixes for filesystem stability. High load stress tests are now run successfully on a regular basis as part of the normal FreeBSD QA process.
• Automatic configuration for man Bluetooth devices, as well as automatic support for running WiFi access points.
• Addition of drivers for new ethernet and SAS and SATA RAID controllers.
• BIND updated to 9.3.2
• sendmail updated to 8.13.6

NOTE: It was discovered at the last minute that the errata notes that got packaged with the release are out of date. For a complete list of known problems, please see the online errata list, available at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.1R/relnotes.html
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.1R/errata.html

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng

Availability

FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, powerpc, and ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using bootable media or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all architectures are available now.

Please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies will be offering FreeBSD 6.1 based products:

• FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/
• Daemonnews, Inc. http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html

If you can’t afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO images. We can’t promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from the following sites. MD5 and SHA256 checksums for the release images are included at the bottom of this message.

Bittorrent

The FreeBSD project encourages the use of BitTorrent for distributing the release ISO images. A collection of torrent files to download the images is available at:

http://torrents.freebsd.org:8080/

FTP

At the time of this announcement the following FTP sites have FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE available.

• ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp3.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp5.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.at.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.ch.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.cz.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.ee.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.fi.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.fr.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.ie.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.is.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp1.ru.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.se.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.si.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.tw.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp2.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp5.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/

FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Amylonia, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.

Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to:

ftp://ftp..FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD

Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.

More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html

Acknowledgments

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 6.1 including The FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, and Copan Systems.

The release engineering team for 6.1-RELEASE includes:

News, Tech

A new device developed by Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology uses lasers to project “real” 3D images into the ether. A special projector can cast three-dimensional shapes of white light between 2 and 3-meters into the air — previous devices only tricked the eyes into thinking the image was 3D. The images are created by blasting the nitrogen and oxygen in the air at fixed points resulting in glowing plasma emissions which hang-out just long enough to etch an ephemeral image. The 3D images are, gulp, accompanied by a series of satisfying “tiny explosions” from the expanding air. With improved lasers, scientists say they’ll be capable of projecting images at greater distances with more color variation making the device suitable for pyrotechnics or outdoor advertising. Sure that can, but we also hope to see 3D replacements to those child-hating balloons at the Macy’s parade — complete with what must be massive explosions at that scale to drown out any obligatory marching band shrill. Then we might actually pay attention.

Pink Tentacle

News, Tech

I found in the net a really nice movie from the French AirForce which shows some really nice scenes inside and outside an Mirage 2000 Jet.

Download Link

Mirage 2000 Movie

I heard that lots of ppl having problems getting that movie as google video is not supported in there Country I have a mirror download of the movie.

French Air Force Mirage 2000 Movie

French Air Force Mirage 2000 Movie -Mirror-

News, Tech