Forgetting Focus

All my lenses have a fixed aperture of 2.8 (I only have two lenses anyway!) and these lens can create good image background blurs.  What I always forget is that a 2.8 aperture will blur some of the other faces during a group shot!  I always forget to set them in a more appropriate aperture thus most of my group shots have blurry faces in them.  I must find a way to remember this! :(

Auctioned MediaHub

MediaHub NMH300

During the last Singapore I.T. show, I chanced upon a Cisco booth auctioning a product called mediahub, MediaHub NMH300 to be exact.  Now this mediahub usually costs $200+ and the auction started at $105 so I stopped, and went in to join the auction.  Eventually I won with a price of $130, not bad, I told myself.

Just a little sidetrack; Currently we do have a network drive in the house but it is already full.  We used this network drive to serve media to our xbox.  Thus the need of a new NAS is somewhat justify hence my interest to the mediahub auction.

Now, this mediahub does not have a hard disk included so I bought a $100 1TB internal hard disk so all in all the damage was $230.  Still not bad since the mediahub itself is already feature packed and it also gives me an extra empy bay that we can later expand on.

I was so sold with the mediahub until I set it up at home.  The setup was a breeze, don't get me wrong here; But hell the transfer speed rate from my laptop to the mediahub was so freaking slow I wanted to throw it away!  A 150MB movie file will take 2 hours to transfer!  That was ridiculous!!!  And so I began scouring the online forums for similar problems and there it was, it was a known issue for this device!  And Cisco is not doing anything about it!

To add to that, I initially thought that it can stream directly to my TV but it turned out it still needs a media extender, another device, to do that.  Well this one was my fault for not reading through the whole list of features before bidding.

So right now, the supposedly media hub is functioning only as a network drive.  I do not recommend this product!  It will be more rewarding to build an HTPC instead.

Laptop In, Laptop Out (LILO)

I have been using my HP Pavillion dv5 15" laptop for almost 1.5 years now.  It has served me well and in return I took care of it, I would say, quite well.  And I just sold it to a friend for half of its original price :)

There is nothing wrong with that laptop aside from it being power hungry thus the battery juice always just last 1 hour or so when unplugged.  My problem with it was that, well, it's big!  When I travel, I also bring my camera gears and the laptop along with it.  My camera gears already weigh almost 10 kilos and occupy almost the whole of my backpack, so putting the laptop along with the gear is quite heavy, cramped, and bulky!  

I travel internationally at least four times a year.

And so enter my new laptop.  Yup, I bought a new one of course!  It's an 11 inch laptop (or netbook if you must) with a nice 720p screen, with 4GB of RAM, 500GB HD space, Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 1.3GHz CPU, and a nice NVIDIA discreet graphics card good enough for playing the latest games.  Enter Dell Alienware m11x laptop!

This laptop is small and light enough to carry around and fits inside my backpack along with my camera gears, long enough battery life to go unplugged (rated 6 hours or so), and mean looking enough to intimidate in a coffee shop!  Plus I can play my favorite graphic intensive games or watch high quality videos with ease!  Although I doubt I can watch those latest very high definition videos as I heard they are quite CPU hungry.

So far, I am happy with my new purchase!