def __init__(self):

Last week I read an article about photographing water drops with a single remote flash. I recently purchased a Nikon SB-600 flash that can work as a remote unit to my Nikon D90 DSLR and decided to try it in action and make it a weekend project. Here is the result:

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The setup included D90 on a tripod with its flash covered, SB-600 as a remote flash placed to the left of the camera pointing on a white background behind a scene. Water dripped from a plastic bag hanging from a lamp into a pan filled with water. By changing depth of water I either got an upwards stream or a crown when the droplet hit the surface. Here is the setup:

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Third week started without cable television and I’m never running out of stuff to watch. Hulu is great! I discovered an older British show Green Wing. German SaveTV and Polish TVPolonia also provide enough stuff to watch. I watched only two Netflix movies.

And the plan that I will turn off the TV to read or do something else did not really work. That requires more than disconnecting cable TV.

One thing about my MacBook made me think: why does it take so long for the laptop to go to sleep. When I close the lid the laptop goes into the sleep mode but it takes some time before the power light starts pulsating. My wife’s older iBook G4 sleeps immediately after the lid is closed. I want an immediate sleep on my MacBook!

After researching I found out that Apple secretly enabled hibernation on newer laptop models which means the entire memory content is written to disk before the laptop enters the sleep mode. Hibernation is good because in case of power loss the laptop can still wake up from sleep. This, however, happens very rarely to me and I don’t need hibernation. It also uses disk space. I have 4GB of RAM so the same amount will be used on disk.

I found a great utility that helps to disable hibernation: SmartSleep. Better yet, it uses sleep until the battery level drops to a preset value and then enables hibernation. The best of the two worlds. I immediately installed it and it works as designed. It even recovers the space used by the hibernation file – the whole 4GB I can use for something else.

I got a slim aluminum USB keyboard from Apple for my Linux workstation running Ubuntu 9.04 at work. It’s great: small, low-profile, and quiet. I use the same, but wireless for my media center at home and love it. I own a MacBook and want to have the same typing experience on all computers I use every day.

I also tried the bluetooth version of that keyboard with a partial success. The keyboard paired and worked until I rebooted the system. After that I needed a wired keyboard to log in and connect with the keyboard again.

The keyboard is small and does not have all the keys available. A small Alt key is very annoying and I decided to map an unused Command key to Alt. Another drawback is that there is no Delete key (although a Backspace key is labeled ‘delete’). Eject button is a perfect candidate for Delete.

I used ‘xev’ tool to read the keycodes of various keys and came up with a mapping that can be applied with xmodmap command. Here is my ~/.xmodmap file:

clear Mod4
keycode 133 = Alt_L Meta_L
keycode 134 = Alt_R Meta_R
keycode 169 = Delete

In Ubuntu desktop, Eject key is mapped using Keyboard Shortcuts preferences applications and that mapping must be removed first.

What I can’t do is map the Up and Down keys with a modifier to get PageUp and PageDown. Once I find a solution to that I’ll post it here.

I’m also using the Mighty Mouse by Apple. It’s OK but has some annoyances. Pressing the middle button, the scroll-wheel, causes the wheel to turn and scroll. The side buttons are oversensitive and just by touching them when using Firefox the back button is invoked sending you back in the browsing history. The later problem can be fixed with xmodmap by shifting the button order. The side button has a number 8. Replacing it with 15 solves the problem. Add the following line to the ~/.xmodmap file:

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 15 9 10 11 12 13 14 8

I also disabled horizontal scrolling by moving 6 and 7 to the end of the list just like above.

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 13 14 15 9 10 11 12 6 7 8

pointer = 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 15 9 10 11 12 13 14 8

The third evening without cable TV went just fine. We watched some over-the-air and internet TV (Polish and German). It was just enough.

I went on hulu.com on Monday evening to check for the new House episode just to find out that they are two weeks behind. There is no such problem with abc.com where shows can be watched a day after. Can’t wait for ABC to put their programming on Hulu. It may prompt CBS to change their online show placement.

I’m also busy writing a script to download shows from TV Polonia. They are using Windows Media Player plugin which does not work on Mac that well. I can open a stream in either VLC or QuickTime Player but there is a substantial delay for buffering. I already scripted SaveTV (German online DVR) and it simplifies watching a lot. The shows simply show up in XBMC.

At the moment, having no cable TV is not so bad but it will take more time to find out if internet TV can replace it.

Yesterday, on Sunday, May 3, 2009 I disconnected my cable TV leaving only an internet connection.

The reason behind it is mostly money. I’ve been paying $100 for HDTV service with DVR box and one foreign channel (TV Polonia). I was recently thinking about my watching habits and came to the conclusion that $1200 a year is a bit too much for what I’m watching. I watch shows on the network channels (ABC, FOX), NBC in the morning, and few shows from TV Polonia. I watch mostly recorded shows, almost never live TV. I also enjoy Discovery Channel.

Now, I can get the networks for free over-the-air (I will need either a room antenna or use the cable connection).  I can also watch the shows on abc.com and hulu.com. I can pay $7 for TV Polonia and watch it online, with a lower quality but I’ll live with that. The only channel I will miss is Discovery, but I’ll simply pay for Dirty Jobs on iTunes. All still less than $100 a month. And I know my wife will miss E! – no solution here yet.

And there is Netflix – mailed DVD’s and instant online viewing when there is nothing else left to watch.

I also hope that without cable I will turn off the TV unit more often. After a daily watching ritual, there will be nothing else left, except life over-the-air TV, which sucks anyway, so I hope to turn the TV off and read something.

More on life without cable coming soon…