Tag Archives: Photography

Fill and span DVD archives with Discspan

I have a huge archive of photos. I shoot tens of thousands of photos every year. Storage requirements for all those photos was bad enough when I shot in Jpeg but then I switched to RAW and space usage jumped! Here’s what the last 3 years looks like:

169GB of data is a lot of stuff to store. Originally I had them all duplicated on two external drives but then I bought a 500GB internal drive for my laptop for speedier access. Unfortunately that drive simply wasn’t big enough. I need to convert some of my RAW files to Jpeg to save space. To preserve the original RAW files I want to archive them somewhere permanently. I have a DVD writer so that was an obvious choice.

Burning data to lots of DVDs is tiresome. You can use tar, zip or another archiver to split the data but then you have to run through all the DVDs to pick out a file to restore. I like having the files directly accessible but that means endless selecting files, making sure they’re as close to the DVD size as possible, burning them, moving on to the next bunch. In the bad old DOS days I had a program to fill floppy disks if you pointed it at a directory but I’ve spent years searching for a similar Linux script. Last week I found one.

Enter Discspan. My 2007 archive was already burned to DVD, and I wish I had this script while doing it. I’ve burned my 2008 archive with Discspan and it was a doddle. Point it at the right directory, feed it some details about the DVD drive and let it go. 26 DVDs later and my 2008 archive is safe on DVD!

The script scans the directory, figures out how many DVDs are required and it fills each DVD with data, spanning my digital archive over multiple DVDs.

Be aware when using it that you should let Linux detect the next blank DVD before pressing return. The first time I ran it the script bombed out when growisofs didn’t see media to write to. You also need to patch it because it doesn’t detect the right size of DVD+R’s but it’s a simple one-liner.

Another Linux project, Brasero promises to span disks too but it didn’t for me. It’s the default CD/DVD burner in Ubuntu now and it’s a shame this functionality is broken in it.

Hopefully Brasero will be fixed for the next release. I’d offer to help but my C/C++ is very rusty.

Worldwide Photowalk on MU

For all you photographers out there, did you know the Worldwide Photowalk takes place next Saturday? It’s a good chance to meet other photographers in your area. It was a pleasant surprise when I realised their website runs on WordPress MU! I’m leading the Cork City Walk (still a few places left!) on Saturday and it was nice when I recognised what it was running on.

So, if you’re free on Saturday, check out the listings page. There might be a photowalk near you!

PS. If you’re running WordPress MU, check out the alpha release of the new version. It fixes a number of bugs in the original 2.8.1 release. It’s very stable but try it out on a test server first.

How do you backup to DVD?

One of my external drives failed yesterday and for an hour I thought I had lost a lot of family videos and other stuff. My photos are backed up on to another drive with backuppc, but there simply isn’t room to backup everything there. Luckily the drive came back after I unplugged it and let it cool down but I don’t trust it now. I think I need a RAID server with at least 1TB of space to be future proof for the next 2 or 3 years.

I would love an application that you could point at a directory or a list of files and directories and it would burn them onto multiple DVDs, filling each disk to it’s maximum. Backing up my photo archive has always been a bit painful, trying to find and remember which directories I had just burned, comparing file listings, etc.

Tar doesn’t cut it however. I want to be able to restore a single file or directory by looking at the DVD contents in a file manager.

I used to have a DOS app that did this. I can’t remember what it was called, but point it at a directory of stuff and it would prompt for a floppy disk, write to it, prompt again, write, and so on until finished. Simple.

Is there a Linux or Mac app that will do that? I think I’ll write a shell script to do it if nobody else knows of an alternative.

Fair use of photos on Youtube?

You probably remember the Web 2.0 bubble video that did the rounds recently. Funny wasn’t it? Unfortunately the authors of that video never asked for permission to use many of the photos featured in it. Jim asks if that was fair? Lane Hartwell is one of those photographers. She wrote of her frustration with people stealing her work. The video is viral in nature, and features the website of the creators at the end so it’s got commercial value for them.

Unfortunately the video is not available any more. Doesn’t that suck? If only they had respected the rights of the photographers involved.

Links …

  • I finally upgraded Blogs.linux.ie to the very latest WordPress MU, with caching by WP Super Cache. The version that was on there was so old the table names still used blognames, rather than blog_ids. A small shell script I wrote and a database backup made it easy to script the upgrade. Registration is disabled for the moment, and email me if you have problems logging in. On another note, if you use Tribby Board, add a few indexes to the board table. That app dragged the whole of linux.ie down with all the spam that was going into it.
  • Movabletype went GPL yesterday! That’s great news for the MT community!
  • Did you know that RTE Radio 1 is for sale? Going cheap at a 1 Euro. (via Kae)
    rteradio1forsale
  • Oh oh. mbr love note. Thanks nikolay!
  • The WordPress Podcast gave my super cache plugin a glowing review. Charles did murder my surname, but I’ll forgive him. Must put an mp3 of me saying my name on the about page or something.
  • Two amazing photos from flak photo: Moving—Eric and Many Shades of Pink

Wacky Waiters

Wacky Waiters was one of the first games I played on the Commodore Vic-20. Hands up if you ever played it? No. I’m not surprised. I’m sure there are people reading this post that were born after it was released in 1982 ..

  • John Breslin lists some of the Web 2.0 Corkonians! I wouldn’t go so far as to say I cofounded Automattic, I was the first employee though!
  • The old and new testaments compared.
  • Treasa’s amazing photo of a kite surfer flying over her head.
  • Walter announced Self Notes, an online note taker. Here’s my obligatory Hello World message.
  • Haydn wonders who has time to explore social software like Facebook.
  • I went down to the gallery in Kinsale recently and signed a few more prints there. It’s wonderful what time away from the prints does. I get a whole new perspective and appreciation for them all over again. They look wonderful! (even if I do say so myself!)
  • Asok died but they brought him back. Good thing he studied shape shifting ..
  • How to create your own planet with the GIMP or Photoshop. (via DSLR Blog)
  • The days are getting shorter as Winter sets in. Here’s some interesting ways to use shadows. That inspired me yesterday to take a couple of unusual shots.
  • Acquia is a new startup focusing on Drupal development. Another GPL project gets corporate support. Great! Good luck with the venture.

Donncha's Tuesday Links

Morgan O’Neill showed his impressive portfolio last night at the camera club. His gallery hasn’t been uploaded yet but I’ll be linking to it here when he does. Great stuff. Also, the IPF have released “Photography Ireland 2008”. I bought my copy. I think it will be available in shops but if you see it, snap it up!

  • Paul asks if professional photography is still a viable career.

    A professional photographer in the UK earns an average of £19K per year. I’ve just had a look on some job websites and seen adverts for photographers at a national chain of portrait studios. The advertised salary, £12K per year ie not that much above minimum wage.

  • Do you run more than one WordPress site? Virtual multiblog may be useful to you. It’s a very different beast to WordPress MU, but I’m going to look at it when I have a spare moment.
  • Tips for shooting family portraits.
  • Video Adsense coming to Ireland, UK and Canada. I wonder if I can use them on my The Funny Video Blog?

Some people are so considerate ..

World of Warcraft forum

Via

Donncha's Monday Links

The first thing I look at in the Sunday Times is the magazine. Just about every week there’s a feature on a photographer and a few weeks ago that was the late Bob Richardon. I can’t find the article online but I love this quote,

‘I have always photographed loneliness because that is my life.’ Richardson wrote in his memoir. ‘People say that my work is sexual. Look closer, stupid’

  • Donal noticed that Meteor updated their online texting service! Looks much better now.
  • How to communicate across domains using frames. For security reasons this isn’t a good thing.
  • XSS – Proof of Concept
  • Gamma spotted some photoshopping of Cork Opera House in the new Rory Gallagher DVD. Good catch!
  • As seen in several places, Red Cardinal has the news that Google Local is now in Ireland. If you have a store front business, you should register there to put yourself on Google Maps!
  • Gnome.org Blogs run on WordPress MU. Here are the plugins they use, including my Flickr Widget!
  • A huge collection of GIMP plugins have been updated to work on GIMP 2.4 and now available as the GIMP FX Foundary. I downloaded the package, installed them in ~/.gimp-2.4/scripts/ and only got through a couple of the scripts so far. There are loads of effects there. Cool.
  • A wedding photographer shares her workflow, including using the GIMP. (via)
  • Who cares what the bokeh looks like? As long as you love the picture. See featured comment.

Donncha's Thursday Links

I have to admit, I preferred how WP 2.2 displayed lots of draft posts on the edit and post pages. Having to go to the Write page and click on the “54 more” link is annoying. For some reason, this post didn’t show up as the newest draft. Now it does, maybe because I deleted another (newer) draft post of the same name. When I created another “Donncha’s Thursday Links” post it didn’t show in the drafts list either. I had to search the drafts posts for “donncha” and it appeared at the bottom of that list. Strange.

I should get used to having my photos ripped off, but I don’t think I ever will. It’s as upsetting now as it ever was.

PS. Ray D’Arcy appears on the Restaurant tonight on RTE 1 at 8.30pm!

Donncha's Wednesday Links

  • A few days ago I blogged without comment a video by Larry Lessig on the Creative Commons. It’s a great video, but I won’t use it to license my photography. Why? Jim covers most of my reservations about the scheme. This might come as a surprise to some but one of the main reasons I “reserve all rights” on my Flickr stream and photoblog is because I would like some say in how my images are used. I would be horrified if a picture of my son was used in a derogatory way, or if a photo of a stranger on the street appeared in an inappropriate context.
    If I was going to use one of their licenses then it would have to be the cc-GPL. I’ve released GPL licensed software for the past 10 years and at least then all materials used in any derivative works would have to be made available. Would that mean a magazine featuring a GPL licensed image would have to make PDF files of their magazine available? I hope so. I also do not want to give up my right to redistribute my image under a different license. As the original copyright holder of the work that is important to me. Anyway, my duck photo shows that many people think photos found online are there to be ripped off and used. I don’t think it matters what license you use.
  • This image would definitely not make it into the wedding album. Love it!
  • Digg’s API docs, for something I’m working on now.
  • Paul Indigo took a great portrait here. I can only imagine how bossy that woman was if he compares her to Hyacinth Bucket. Paul is so right. The number of “That’s great”, or “Lovely image” comments on Flickr and photoblogs is overwhelming. They don’t add much to the photographer’s skills. Critique!
  • Conor gets nostalgic about the Speccy for Science Week. Damien has more posts about great inventions.

Donncha's Friday Links

Anyone who knows me knows I’m an avid photographer.

  • Thomas Hawk was in a train station in San Francisco when a body was discovered on the tracks. He snaps literally *everything* and took a photo of the poor guy who died, but then he questioned if he should publish the photo? I admire how he stands up for his rights on the street. Jeremy Brooks who is featured in the previous link did the same, much to the ire of a shop keeper.
  • In Synthetic technical style in digital photography Doug has quoted a Mike Johnston piece on photographer’s style saying that digital photography lacks a distinctive style, and that it lacks integrity because it can be manipulated so easily. As Mike says in his longer piece, every image can be taken as a separate case, but I disagree that that is a bad thing. I’m not limiting myself to one technical style.
  • Paul Indigo has had some interesting encounters while photographing people on the street, but he’s got great advice if you want to do it yourself.

    This gentleman agreed to pose for me. He wanted to know whether my camera was digital or film. He said he would pose if it was digital but not if it was film. I am not sure exactly what his reasons were.

  • Avant Window Manager for Linux is like the Mac OS X Dock for our little free OS. I haven’t tried it but it looks pretty. This is a nice screenshot with screenlets too.
  • Amber Jack describes itself as, “a lightweight Open Source library, enabling webmasters to create cool site tours.” Take the tour. It’s nice!
  • Barry reveals all, about how WordPress.com serves files and pages that is.
  • This video of Vista Vs Ubuntu Makes me wish I had gone for the higher end video card for my laptop. There’s not a hope in hell the onboard Intel video will handle all the eye candy in Beryl!
  • Go Maith are experiencing technical difficulties but still manage a very entertaining dancer and fiddler!
  • Matt announced the new WordPress.com Theme Marketplace. Some sites unfairly jumped the gun before Matt posted details of the Marketplace on his blog. I love the idea that .org users get the themes for free because they have to be GPLed. That’s great!
  • If you were adding hooks and a plugin system to WP-Cache, where would you put them? wp_cache_get_cookies_values() definitely, maybe at cache generation too? What about the admin page?

What has Web 2.0 done for you then? (via)

PS. I installed Xcache and the Xcache WordPress plugin I mentioned on Wednesday. I don’t think it’s any faster than the Memcached backend I was using but I have one less service running now, and the admin stats page is nice.

xcache stats
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