photography, coffee, technology and more

2 times a year, we have Sales (called Solden in dutch) for a month. These are in January and July, during these periods shops are allowed to give big promotions on everything they sell. This is not always fun for us customers, but on the internet there are other rules and Solden collects all promotions they can find and even some unique to their site only. The codes can provide up to 75% discount on your order.

My experience with Solden?

I tried the codes on some of the sites listed, most codes worked and you can get up to 80% discount. However I experienced a non-working code 2 times, in retrospect, it was indicated that the promotion code for Kiabi was expired. I understand why they keep the codes up there, but it should be marked more clear that the code is expired.

Also on my iPad, I had the problem that the social media bar, kept obscuring part of the sites content. That caused that I couldn’t read the dates and see the logo’s on most of the page.

If you want to go shopping online, it can’t hurt to look at Solden and see if they have promotion code that can spare you some money.

I wasn’t forced to write this blogpost, everything in here is my own view, the content wasn’t reviewed by any departement of the brands mentioned in here. I did however receive a compensation for this post. So decide for yourself how much value you want to attribute to this post.

Update: after 5 months this Kingston 3K hyperX SSD completely died on me

At the end of june, my girflfriend (SaraVdV) got a mail from Kingston if she and I wanted to test a new SSD drive from Kingston.

After some mailing back and forth, because Sara and I both work on mac’s, Kingston send us both a 256GB HyperX 3K SSD drive. It comes in a nice package, with an external usb enclosure and it’s own screwdriver. Which is always very handy. The drives we received were 2.5″ drives, but included in the package you buy, there’s also a 3.5″ bay.

Because it would be easier from me to put the drive in the MacBook pro 15″ begin 2009 I have, than to put it in an iMac. I started with that computer, the drive is as easy to install as any drive. However when I booted the mac and started installing OS X I ran into some problems.

At first the install of OS X stalled a couple of times, when I finally managed to install it correctly, I had a 25 sec spinning beachball every 2 minutes. However, because we had review drives, I contacted Kingston directly and started to work out the problem with Mario, on of the engineers at Kingston who developed the drive. Turns out that there is an incompatibility between the nvidia SATA I controller in the MacBook 5.1 and the driver for SATA II or III SSD’s in OS X leopard or later. This makes that every time there is a lot of writing activity to the disk that the controller locks the OS for a while untill the buffers are cleared. So I ended up restoring this MacBook to it’s original config. This is not a fault of the kingston drive but an Apple problem, because I also experienced the same behaviour with another brand of SSD’s.

After my debacle with the drive in the Macbook 5.1, I also installed the drive in Sara’s iMac which is not too big of a hassle if you follow all the guides online for replacing a drive in an iMac. I have not had any problems with installing the drive and reinstalling OS X, nor has Sara experienced any problems since the drive was installed.

In July I purchased myself a new 13″ MacBook pro and installed the HyperX SSD in that computer. No problems, everything installs and works perfect.

Performance wise, everything seems a lot quicker on the iMac of Sara, boot times improved a lot. Every program launches faster and the drive behaves very well under pressure. We didn’t do any graphs or charts, because in the end it all comes down to how you preceive the change.

For the MacBook 13″ I did some testing. Without SSD it cold booted in 34 seconds, after install of the SSD it cold boots in 8secs. That’s just amazing. It feels more instant now then waking my iPad first generation from sleep. Programs are launching very fast, lightroom which is the most important program for me, launches in less then 3 seconds in grid view. It all feels very snappy and instant. I haven’t seen a beachball in months. Reboots are only necessary for updates from the OS. It just works and feels fast. It does what I expected an SSD to do.

The nicest surprise is that we may keep the drives, so I got a nice upgrade for my new MacBook thanks to Kingston.

I wasn’t forced to write this blogpost, everything in here is my own view, the content wasn’t reviewed by any departement of the brands mentioned in here. I did however receive a compensation for this post. So decide for yourself how much value you want to attribute to this post.

Sony is really good at letting me test their new cameras. A little while ago I had the chance to test the Sony nex-5n, the successor of the nex-5. I had the pleasure of photographing with the nex-5, which I reviewed over here. As I said then, I didn’t like the menus, the startup time, …

The 5n is a whole different deal, in fact it’s a great camera. Sony really listened to their users, they did a real good job cleaning up the menu-interface. It feels snappy, intuitive and very logical.

The quality of the photos is great, it can match the quality of my 5d MK II, which is about 1500 euro more expensive. The photo above is a shot of a concert at 3200 iso, with the standard jpg b/w conversion on it. There is almost no noise and the image is pretty sharp.

My other concern about the nex-5 was the that the camera was pretty slow, well the 5n is definitely not slow. It has a fast autofocus, pretty short start up time, but when you can capture a race-car in full focus on a track, I can only say that it’s really fast.

But as with every camera, there are a couple of drawbacks, the first being that you don’t have a viewfinder, that’s pretty annoying when photographing in bright light. Sony kinda solved this problem by adding a swiveling screen, a very sturdy one I have to say.

Then there is the fact that the flash is external, an sich not a real problem, except sony doens’t like standard hotshoes. They didn’t even include the typical sony hotshoe, so the only way you can use a flash is by using the included small flash, a flash I don’t like. It’s small, there are almost no way to control it and it feels pretty filmsy.

The most annoying thing, but that’s something I have found in all Sony cameras is the way, you can review your photos and videos on it. I can imagine some people find it very good, but I don’t want to go through the menu to view everything I have on my card.

Despite the few things I didn’t like that much, the nex-5n is a very decent camera. Even so good that my girlfriend and I are actually considering buying one, how’s that for a reference. I test a lot of mirrorless cameras and this is the first I really think is up to par with all DSLR’s in the same or even a bit higher price range.

Thx to my girlfriend Saravdv for taking most of the pictures.

UPDATE: in minutes of me posting this tutorial, my airport utility got an update to v6.0 and all I said is obsolete, my WDS network still works, but I don’t know yet how to set it up correctly.

Over here we have a nice setup for our wireless network and playing music in all the rooms of our house. It’s supported by Apple airports. As you can see in the above screenshot. We use an Airport extreme as the router and 3 Airport expresses as relays. Last saturday evening however, disaster struck and our Airport extreme died. Well it did not die completely, it stopped serving internet through the wifi connections and there was only connection via ethernet connections. The wifi clients however could still connect, authenticate and got an ip-address, but there it all stopped. I tried everything to restore the connections, but despite all my efforts for about 3 hours. Rebooting, resetting, hard resetting nothing worked. So I setup a temporary solution and went out today to get a new Airport extreme.

Let’s get to the technical part of this article. How do you setup a network of 4 airports across the house on the same network with wpa2 security enabled? The first and most important step is to hard reset all the airports, the only way to do that if the airports don’t come straight from the box is to hold down the little reset button while pluggin in the airport. If you don’t know how, check this support-page on the Apple.

Configure the base station or WDS main

You start by selecting manual configuration in the airport utility, don’t use the wizard, as you will not be able to setup WDS. On the next screen, you’ll see a couple of tabs, but none of them shows WDS, at least when you have a recent airport extreme.

1. Now setup your Base Station like always, fill out the name, choose a password, … under the Base Station tab.
2. The next tab is the Wireless tab, this is 1 of the 2 tabs where all the magic will happen.
   
   In the dropdown menu next to “Wireless Mode” select “Participate in a WDS network”, if you don’t see it, hold down the “option” key, it will magically appear.
3. You setup your network as always, but make sure you select the checkbox “Allow this network to be extended”, leave the Radio mode on Automatic, choose WPA/WPA2 Personal, choose a password, go to the Wireless Network Options, set your country and leave all the rest. (Hint: Write down all settings, we’ll need them later)
4. Next is the WDS tab, that has appeared after you selected “Participate in a WDS network” in the previous step. Select “WDS main” in the dropdown from “WDS Mode”. Select the checkbox next to “Allow wireless clients”.
   
   Fill in the Airport ID’s of the soon to be remotes, you find the airport ID’s on the bottom of the airport it should be a string of 12 alphanumeric characters.

That are all the steps for the configuring the base station.

Configure the WDS remotes

For configuring the remotes, repeat steps 1 till 3 exactly as in configuring the WDS main station. Make sure you have all the wireless settings exactly the same, as for the WDS main station. Make sure you did not miss any setting and if you must choose a channel set it to 11, because otherwise the remote station can’t connect with the WDS main.

To finish the setup, go to the WDS tab and choose for “WDS remote” in the drop down next to “WDS Mode”. Select the checkbox next to “Allow wireless clients” and fill in the Airport ID of the “WDS main”, update and test.

Repeat the steps for the airport remote for as many times you need it. You should now be able to use the network and if you activated airplay under “Music” you should be able to play music through every airport with boxes or a headphone connected.

A last piece of advice, if you configured a airport and it doesn’t connect or shows up, put in a ethernet cable so that you can access it again. This will save you a lot of time, because the only other option is hard resetting the airport.

Yesterday, I got invited to the logitech magic event in Belgium together with some other bloggers. We rode out to Arquennes about 30 minutes from Brussels in Henegouwen. On arrival we were greeted with a glass of champagne and a short explanation of @wimwauters.

We got a tour around all the different products and in the mean time, there was a contest organized. I saw some nice products, but the most are not suited for me, because I have a fondness of the keyboards and mice/trackpads from Apple. The keys are just nicer from apple then any other keyboard I have used. However the accessoires for the ipad were very interesting, sadly enough the most interesting ones, like the keyboard cover are not suited for my iPad 1. But I can understand why a company developing products for Apple lines, are developing for the current versions alone.

The contest had a pretty interesting take, because Logitech and Hill and Knowlton anticipated that we would cheat. So they had a guess question included, which was how many tweets with the logitechmagic tag would be posted between 20 and 22h during the evening. As everybody was working together on finding the answers to the questions this actually was the only relevant question to receive the prices.

The range of prices was impressive, there was a surround system with a value of 350 euro to mice of 30 euro. But at least everybody got a price. I managed to get a set of Logitech 600vi in-ear phones. I’m currently testing them and I have to say the are amazingly great. These earphones are from the ultimate ear line, which is the same product line where a lot of professional musician are wearing headphones from during their concerts. The pair Sara and I got have a price value of 109 euro, which for me is very steep. That price means I would have never bought them myself, because I have a very bad track record with headphones. They tend to lay around and get tangled, ripped, get loose connections and so on.

These seem very nicely and sturdy designed, so we’ll see how they handle my abuse in the long run. The sound experience is quite impressive. I get a wide range of tones without any distortion or scrambling. The nice part is that there is a whole range of foam and plastic tips so you can choose the ones that fit your ear very nicely. I have a rather small ear channel and most tips don’t fit my ears, but the ones with the logitech ear phones actually fit my ear quite comfortable. I’m wearing them already several hours in a row, without getting any problems with having them falling out of my ear or without any discomfort. So my initial experience with these in-ear phones is very positive. So thanks a lot Logitech for a quite expensive goodie of good quality.