One of the cameras I own (and starting a sentence thus is a sure sign I own too many cameras), is an olympus 4/3 camera. The 400 series, which is their intro model. I considered the 500 series, which might have gotten me a slightly better sensor and in body stabilization. But after thinking about it, the lighter weight and increased portability of the smaller camera won me over. But four thirds seems to be a dying system, no matter what Olympus might say. The last four thirds camera released was a few years ago, and the lenses are getting more difficult to find every day. So while it’s a great system, it’s almost like using my old film cameras. Amazing technology & utility, but sadly no longer made.

So I was excited to hear that Canon is introducing a new camera this year, I believe it’s the Rebel SL1, or 100D. And it’s essentially one of their crop sensor cameras, except miniaturized to the degree possible while retaining an aps-c sensor. So modern sensor (win), great lens selection (win), optical viewfinder & smaller size. If I were looking for a camera this one would certainly be near the top of the list. Probably my biggest worry would be the mirror instead of prism viewfinder. Now if only I had a collection of Canon lenses instead of Nikon.

Anyways, gizmodo did a nice write-up & you can see the specs on Canon’s website.

1) monsanto develops & patents a herbicidal resistant strain of soybeans
2) they sell said soybeans to farmers as seed under the condition that the farmer not plant any future generations
3) farmer buys seed from grain elevator
4) farmer plants said seed & uses monsanto herbicide
5) some of the farmer’s soy plants grow, some are killed by herbicide
6) monsanto sues farmer for illegally using seed

Now in reality the farmer was almost certain that a reasonable fraction of the seed he purchased from the grain elevator would be resistant since monsanto crops compose about 80% of the total soybean yield in the United States. But, the farmer was employing a technique used frequently in biology to identify mutants. Organisms are grown in an environment which is hostile to normal growth, any individuals which have beneficial mutations allowing them to grow in these conditions proliferate wildly. It usually takes a few generations & some uv light to get something interesting, but at issue is you’re doing work to identify individuals with a certain trait, in this case herbicide resistance. Say he started with random seeds instead of monsanto seeds in order to do this sort of selective breeding and grow soybeans which are especially salt resistant. Would he be infringing on monsanto patents? What would the best source of seeds for this sort of an experiment be, maybe a mix of a bunch of different strains, something like what one might find in a grain elevator?

Of course, it’s kind of sad, because it does appear he’s going to lose. Which means gene patents galore, bad news bears.

Probably the high point of anything made by microsoft.  Works perfectly in wine.

Pogoplug is a new dropbox-like cloud storage solution. Interestingly, and unlike dropbox, they do not work by mirroring data on your local disks. This means that the storage space offered is truly additive. Much like sshfs.

So I was of course curious if I could have autofs mount pogoplug seamlessly on access. Now I’m not sure how stable the connection is, so perhaps it would be better advised to do this once at login and not worry about it. But, anyways, a pseudo working solution (it seems to hang the first time it’s accessed, but a ctrl+c will return to the terminal and it will be mounted). It would be a huge help if someone could help me figure out that last niggle.

I attempted to keep user credentials separate from the script, and currently this banks on them being stored in ~/.ssh/pogouser & ~/.ssh/pogopass.

My auto.master:
#/etc/auto.master
/mnt/pogoplug /etc/auto.pogoplugfs --timeout=300,--ghost,nodev,nosuid

my auto.pogoplugfs:
username -fstype=fuse,nonempty,rw :/usr/local/bin/pogoplug_wrapper

And finally pogoplug_wrapper, you need to put pogoplugfs in your path. I put it in /usr/local/bin. This does some minimal logging to ~/.cache/pogoplugfs.log. You can comment out any of those lines if you’re not interested.
#!/bin/bash
#pogoplug_wrapper

mkdir -p $1
mountuser=`basename $1`
mountuserhome=$(getent passwd $mountuser | cut -d: -f6)
cd $mountuserhome/.cache
echo "$mountuser:$mountuserhome" >> pogoplugfs.log
uid=`id -u $mountuser`
gid=`id -g $mountuser`
echo "" >> $mountuserhome/.cache/pogoplugfs.log
date >> $mountuserhome/.cache/pogoplugfs.log
chown $uid:$gid $1
chmod 755 $1
pogouser=`head -n 1 $mountuserhome/.ssh/pogouser`
pogopass=`head -n 1 $mountuserhome/.ssh/pogopass`
mountcommand="pogoplugfs --mountpoint $1 --user $pogouser --password $pogopass --fuseopts $3"
echo "$mountcommand" >> $mountuserhome/.cache/pogoplugfs.log
sudo -u $mountuser $mountcommand &
sleep 3 # give the command time to finish
exit 0

Eventually, after much futzing around, I discovered a solution. Not an ideal solution, but a passable one. Namely after the system boots use tasker to run a shell command which mount/bind’s the external sd card to the mountpoint of the internal one. On the downside you do lose the 4.5gb internal space, or at least it becomes much less accessible. On the upside this phone comes with a 32gb card I believe, and according to reports despite it being not officially supported it should work with up to a 64gb card (128gb micro cards aren’t available at the moment, so no news there). So you’re trading
4.5gb + 16/32/64 gb half working storage for
4.5gb less than half working storage + 16/32/64gb
which seemed fair to me.

How it’s done.
1) your phone must be rooted
2) get tasker. It’s a paid app, only a few bucks and totally worth it. I have it toggle my wifi off when I’m somewhere I can’t connect so it’s not futilely scanning for a signal nonstop. I also have it go into airplane mode overnight, saves a bunch of battery, and prevents the phone from waking me up (I don’t plug my phone in every day).
3) make a new task and make it run a shell command using root permissions, and the command is “mount -o bind /mnt/external1 /storage/sdcard0″ then make a new task & add the context at boot (new task -> event -> system -> device boot) & add the task you just created.
done.

The next time you boot your phone if you go to applications/storage you’ll see that where it says internal storage you have 16/32/64gb available. Though you’ll also see the exact same amount reflected in the sdcard storage. A decent trade in my opinion.

Before doing all this you might want to copy the data from your internal partition onto the sdcard (which I did for all my data, photos and so on), but for apps I found it worked a little better to just uninstall/reinstall. And on reinstall everything will be written to the sdcard properly.

1) f77split – This was probably the first one I tried, works pretty well.

2) f90split – For newer fortran.

3) Homebrewed: Fair warning, haven’t used this in a little bit, but it was useful the last time I did, and I believe this is the most recent version.  Also, it’s not pretty, it’s not really supposed to be.  It’s supposed to accomplish a fairly simple task as simply and with as little effort as possible while being theoretically simple.

#!/usr/bin/perl
use strict;

if($file_open > 0){close(SUBROUTINEFILE);}
close(SOURCEFILE);

The question is then what are my options for easily getting photos off a real camera.  And I have the feeling that this will be of temporary use given the number of cameras which are starting to incorporate connected features.  But anyways, for the moment:

At the moment there are three ways of getting photos off your camera without resorting to taking out the storage or using wires.  The best is wifi/cell data inside the camera, but this is still limited as of the moment.  Next we have the dongles, these plug into one port or another on the camera and can then connect to some wireless network.  I am avoiding these at the moment because I don’t want a dongle hanging off of or sticking out of my camera.  These also tend to be specific to a camera manufacturer or even a specific camera model.  Finally we have the networked flash storage.  These are memory cards which connect to wireless networks.  This was started by Eye-Fi, but by now numerous other manufacturers are joining in.  For me the real appeal is automation, reducing the number of steps between pressing the shutter button and having a photo online.  And as far as automation is concerned eye-fi seems to still be leading the crowd, since one can set it up to transfer files automatically.

These methods of getting photos off the camera are slightly flexible in terms of where the images end up, but it’s still not great.  Eye-Fi will automatically push photos onto my android phone (I imagine one can do the same with an iphone).  And from there I actually have a number of options of moving the photo further along.  First eye-fi offers an application, but the interface is kind of a pain to use, and requires windows (possible also osx, but in either case, no linux).  

Dispostable – This one is great, because you can choose your email address.  Clean reliable interface.

Mailinator – Seems to receive more spam than dispostable, might be because more people use it, but it means if you pick a popular name (like bobjones@mailinator.com), there might be a handful of messages already there and you have to search through them to find the one you want.  Gives neat suggested email addresses (no idea how they generate them).  They seem kind of plausible.

Guerrillamail – You don’t get to pick your own email address here, but it does seem to work. Email addresses (which are random) are at the sharklazers domain (which is awesome).  Allows you to compose messages as well, and happens over https which is kind of neat, but again someone else doesn’t need your password, they only need the address, to read your inbox.

Fakeinbox – Seems to take a very proactive approach to removing old messages, which is good in that no one else ends up with your email (granted you shouldn’t use this service for anything that you wouldn’t consider public). You do get to choose your email address.  All emails end in fakeinbox.com.

Spamgourmet – This one is a little more complicated.  Requires registration (which defeats half the purpose of a disposable email address), but you can create an arbitrary number of email address, each with a possibly different number of fowards to your true email address before it “expires”.  You should swing by to check it out.  All email addresses end in spamgourmet which is too bad.

Trashmail.net – Annoying in that it requires a forwarding address & the website requires flash.  It can provide up to 10 forwards over the course of a month, more if you register.  They offer some alternative domain names for email addresses since trashmail looks like a fake email address.  They also offer a firefox addon, though I haven’t tried it.  On the whole the site is a little too much bells & whistles for me.