I've tried a wide variety of photo sharing sites and services over the years, from home grown galleries I wrote from scratch by myself, to various PHP-based services (from dAlbum to Gallery), and the ubiquitous social services (Facebook, Picasa, and flickr). But until now, none have filled my basic needs:

• Cheap
• Unlimited
• Full-size image storage AND retrieval
• Customizable
• No ads

Last week, I took a look at SmugMug, and came away impressed.

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Since the early '90s, I've run Sophos Anti-Virus products on various systems, from my early '286 Compaq laptop, my pair of Mac II's, my Alpha NT systems, an entire office of Windows desktops and servers, and even on my OpenVMS servers (Sophos being the only vendor to provide support for the system). I've always liked their products, the relative lack of false positives (a real nightmare with some products), the stability of the tool (not incessantly crashing, or causing other programs to crash), the way it would not hog the system to itself when you had work to do (some products just go bonkers and grab all the CPU they can), and the way it always played nice with other programs (unlike some AV vendors, whose products must be turned off in order to install a new program! Some security!!)

Today, Sophos announced that they were giving away a new product for free: Sophos Anti-Virus for Mac Home Edition. Yup, free.

I just had to try it out. (more...)

There are several applications that people have created that allow you to easily print from your iPad, but being the hacker I am, I always thought they were overkill. I've not yet needed to print directly from my iOS devices, but this idea has been gnawing at me for a while, so I just had to try it to see how well it works. (more...)

It dawned on my while shaving this morning that trying to watch a video podcast while shaving was annoying. Looking down at the countertop for my video while trying to look in the mirror for my face simply wasn't practical -- my eyes just don't go in different directions like that.

If only I had one of those cool new mirrors that have video and news displayed through a partially silvered mirror.

Wait. I've got an iPad. (more...)

For my daughter's birthday, I took her to the Verizon store and upgraded her cellphone. She picked out a decent Samsung QWERTY keyboard phone, perfect for someone like her that does a lot of texting.

But while I was waiting, I took a few minutes to play around with a couple Android-based phones. No, I'm not looking to upgrade anytime soon (I've currently got an simple old LG Cosmos with a QWERTY keyboard that is more than adequate for my cellular needs and an iPod Touch for music), but I was just interested in seeing what all the hubbub about Froyo (Android v2.2) and the Motorola Droid phones was.

What I discovered left me confounded. (more...)

I recently wanted to read up on a UNIX shell, and while the man pages were more than adequate, I didn't want to have to lug my computer with me just to read one document.

A simple pipe rendered a PDF in my Dropbox folder, which then appeared on my iPad:

man -t bash | pstopdf -o Dropbox/Documents/bash.pdf -i

That's a one-liner to go from my Mac to iBooks on my iPad!

The -t option to the man command generates the output as a Postscript level 3 file; pstopdf is a standard part of OS X, and the -i option tells it to expect input from stdin. Optionally, you can add a -p option to have the program log each page as it's rendered.

Once in the Dropbox folder, I was able to view the document either in Dropbox, where I could favorite it to keep it cached on the device, or I could open it using iBooks where it would appear on my bookshelf (allowing me to then delete it from my Dropbox). Since iBooks is more functional than the Dropbox reader, I chose the latter.

It's nice to be able to so easily create PDF files, even from the command line. And it's really nice to be able to read them a full page at a time on the go!

Thirty years ago this year, I went on a hike with some friends. I'd only recently met them, and they convinced me to ride with them as they took my new wife and me on a long ride. We left from Seattle and drove over 80 miles from home. The roads got narrower as we climbed higher and higher, until we were deep in the woods, on roads barely big enough for 2 cars to pass by each other.

As the road narrowed to a hiking trail, we parked the car in a small lot and started off on foot. First through the woods, then leaving the greenery, we made our way up a glacial valley, full of moraine ranging from gravel to car-sized boulders. The altitude soon got to me, giving me a nasty migraine; at about 6,000 feet above sea level, I left my lunch behind one of those boulders. But I pressed on.

And it was worth it. Mt. Rainier is a beautiful spectacle, especially from the mountain itself. In time, we reached the glacier, stood next to it's massive face, and stared awestruck into an ice cave so huge it could fit a multi-story building.

Which brings us to today. Sadly, for all these years between that date and today, I've not known what glacier that was. Until now. (more...)

Just a short note to detail a feature that completes the move to the new server. What happens if someone has a link bookmarked or if they find one via a search engine that points to the old site on aaron.isa-geek.org? The solution was really simple: I added the following to the <Directory ...> block for the blog in Apache's httpd.conf:

   Redirect permanent /pivot http://aaron.sakovich.org/blog

This will take any URL that starts with "/pivot", extract the remainder of the line, then append that to the new URL, and send that back to the browser with a 301 message indicating this is a permanent change. Note that I even changed the top level directory of the blog from /pivot... to /blog..., which I think looks a lot nicer.

Done. (Well, almost. I still need to add the new site to my Google webmaster page.)