Daily Life
Hello Post 100 :)
I can’t believe this already is the 100th post here. Also over the past 6 months visitors have doubled. Awesome!
Welcome new readers 
I don’t have much to say today, just a quick preview of some upcoming topics I have in mind:
- Night Photography
- Long Exposures
- Filters (especially the ones you can’t reproduce in the digital darkroom)
- Digital Life
Backup! Backup! Backup!
I managed to carry my gear for the entire last month without any damage, but Sunday night at the train station my camera back fell off my other baggage down on the ground. I hurried and checked my camera gear… everything O.K. *phew*.
Today I wanted to copy my images from the mobile HDD that I had to carry with me (because I didn’t have a Laptop with me, Thanks Dell!!!) to dump my images from the cards to it whenever possible. But… Click – Clack – Clack – Clack. DAMNIT! Headcrash!!!
Well, you can imagine that I was about to throw the HDD out of the window, but then decided to make a copy of it using ‘dd’ first. ‘dd’ went through the first 50GiB without any problems… but then the HDD started clicking again. I was able to recover some photos from the unfinished dump and there is still 4GiB of photos on one of my SD-Cards, so cross your fingers! Hope it’s just the video clips on another partition that I lost!!!
What does this tell us? Always have a backup!!!
On my past trips I always had one copy on my Laptop and then dumped the photos to an external HDD which I carried in another bag. But without a Laptop this wasn’t possible this time.
Here’s what worked best for me in the past:
- Import and copy your images to Lightroom as usual
- Close Lightroom, go to Finder/Explorer and copy your Picture & Library folder to an external HDD
- Store the external HDD somewhere safe
- Now you may format your memory cards
This way you always have two copies of your photos. I also usually formatted the external HDD every night before I copied my backup over. If you’re running Mac OS X you could also use TimeMachine to automate it.
Mobile Office 2.0
I am back home! Well, at least until June
After 6 weeks without a Laptop I am finally mobile again. The new MacBook Pro has been delivered last Saturday and I am totally happy with it. I sold my Dell XPS M1530 because of it’s unreliability and the ignorance of Dell, and switched back to a Mac. Build quality is so much better, and let’s not talk about the Touchpad, I don’t think I’ll need my Bluetooth mouse any longer!
The new MBP with it’s Intel Core i5 also feels much faster than my one year old Mac Mini. And the display seems to be more accurate than my old 22″ Samsung LCD, so until I get to replace that one I think I’ll edit my images on the laptop. (Display calibrator is next on my shopping list)
Take care. I’m now going to copy last months images from the mobile HDD.
Eyjafjallajökull and my Travels
I’ve been on the road the entire April so far and faced some issues due to the Volcano eruption in Iceland two weeks ago myself. But from a photographic point of view it must have been awesome to be there.
There is a gallery over at Boston.com with many awesome pictures. I know it’s been hard for our local economy, all the tourists that couldn’t come back and especially the Icelanders, their animals and their agrarian economy, but man I really wished I had been there. Here’s a quick time-lapse of the flight situation over Europe I came across at the Intelligent Travel Blog
Stay tuned! April has been silent, I know. But my Birthday, travels and the fact that I’m without a Laptop since six weeks and my new MacBook Pro arrives next Monday the earliest (yeah 
) made it quite hard to blog. I’ll post some articles and pictures in early May.
Take care and enjoy the great weather. Chris out.
Blogging about this Blog – The sixth
Wow this march was the busiest month ever at this blog
I think that was it with the technical topics for the next time. I’ll be on the road for at least the entire April, but I’ll post some of my travel photos and other stories as often as possible to keep ya’ll up-to-date. And I’ve already drafted some photography related posts.
So stay tuned. Subscribe to the new enhanced rss-feed and please click on my Ads! Chris out.
Blogging about this Blog – The Fifth
There finally is a full rss-feed. If you subscribe in a feed-reader like Google Reader, you will now see the entire post which is great for offline reading. You might also notice that feeds are now being redirected to FeedBurner.
Switched my Hoster… again!
After a full year with OVH and it’s shared hosting I switched my hoster once more.
During the last two hours I moved every single of my domains from OVH to Hetzner.
It feels like the entire site loads much faster. Nice
Take care.
My blogging ideas for the next weeks…
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the biggest buzzwords when it comes to blogs or websites at all. I’m not a SEO guru and so this blog sadly doesn’t get many hits for my travel or photography articles (in fact it’s just 15% of total hits), but my geeky topics are what gets me many readers. For example: My Article about Xen on Ubuntu Intrepid gets about 150 hits per day. Having mostly technical readers isn’t a bad thing at all, but I didn’t post many technical articles this year and since I currently have many issues with my computers, I decided to post some of the interesting stuff to this blog in the next few weeks. My goal is to get more total readers, which might then also read my travel and photography articles. Some posts I have in mind are:
- OpenBSD on the Intel D410PT
- OpenVPN as a Layer2 VPN on OpenBSD
- Nginx performance as a reverse-proxy on OpenBSD
- Goodbye Xen, Hello KVM
- Fast MacOS X remote desktop (without VNC)
- Ubuntu Lucid as a TimeMachine server for MacOS X
Take care.
Spring Cleaning Time for my Setup
Last month really was a bad month for my IT. In just two weeks, my gateways CF card died, my server’s PSU and HDD died and my main switch now has 4 of it’s 8 ports failing so I finally had to send it in for service. I had no Internet, I had no eMail, no Intranet and no VPN, but at least I had backups of my personal stuff!
The one good thing about all that is that I now had time to re-organize everything. A few years ago I was very paranoid and decided to put everything I need on my LAN. Storage, eMail servers, Bookmark synchronization, Calendars, Contacts and so on. To get that but still keep my LAN secure I used SSH tunnels, reverse proxies, virtual machines, subnet and vlan separation… My LAN consists of many single points of failure: A single Internet uplink, a single gateway, a single switch and a single server. Internet uplinks can go down, gateways can fail, switches can fail, servers can fail… all this leads to SSH tunnels going down which leads to services being unreachable even when the rest is back up.
Today I’m no longer that paranoid. I learned a lot and now decided to outsource the important stuff. I needed a solution suitable for a poor man which means I can’t afford redundant dedicated servers or even co-locations.
I already got to work with Google Apps and so I decided to mix it with shared-hostings and someself-hosting.
I’m mostly back up. My gateway is re-installed, serving me Internet access, firewalling, VPN and a reverse-proxy.
Sometime next week I’ll restore my Server to serve Files and the Intranet website, Databases and an internal Mail-relay, do backups and some other things using KVM instead of Xen (more on that to come!).
What do I want to tell you with all that? Be prepared. Have backups. Keep it simple.
Stay tuned. Some new tutorials and ideas about VPNs, certificates and my new little love nginx will follow.
Chris’ World Reloaded
Hey folks! Welcome to my new Blog.
Why the redesign? Well… during new year I thought to myself: “Damn, your blog looks crappy!
And here we are now. This is the third revision of Chris’ World. Last month I put almost every free minute into the redesign of this blog. Why did it take so long? First of all, because very strange things happened with my computers & infrastructure and I had to put a lot of time to get this back working first. (More about that in the next post)
Then I encountered so many problems with WordPress, that I almost gave up the ghost! There were issues with my CSS customizations, the contact form didn’t send anything, the embedded videos were all gone and my articles were all bold so I had to review every single post because of the theme change. All in all it was a heck of work. From now on I’ll try to give my posts a cleaner structure and I won’t use the Visual editor in WP anymore, just causes too much hassle. But now it’s done and I’m happy it is.
Here’s what’s new:
- Page should now be W3 conform
- New Contact Page
- New Travel Page with interactive map
- Some other new pages and minor changes
- Advertisings (Sorry for that)
While I was reviewing all the posts I found it rather funny how I evolved. I was about to delete some of my very first posts in this blog, but then decided to keep them for archival reasons.
That’s it for today. Stay tuned and check back soon.
Ahh wait… in loving memory to the old layout: (Just kidding)
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Hi, my name is Chris. I am a wannabe photog, traveler & geek that lives in Hesse, Germany. more about me...
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