The Adventures of Daniel Kwan

9:00 PM last night, thirteen hours after the iPhone 3G went on sale and 30 minutes before the mall closed, there was still a long line to get into the Apple Store at Valley Fair (a huge mall in San Jose). Didn’t look like a lot of people from the front, but the bulk of the line was around the corner.

I took the pics with my iPhone OG. I’d like to get the new version but it’s $600 without a service contract, and the GPS (the new feature I’m most interested in) probably wouldn’t be too useful for me when I go back to Shanghai anyway.

Some more photos of the AMS Venus T5 to show the fans and sides and stuff. Go here for my previously posted pics and general review.

I’ve been using this unit for almost three months now, and so far so good.

Success! I got my recently purchased Epson ME 1+ (sold in China only) working with my Mac. It was made for Windows only, and Epson doesn’t have a Mac driver for it. Thankfully there are people who play around with Linux and make free software. So if you’re in China and bought the cheapest Epson printer you could find, here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to this page and download Foomatic-RIP and Ghostscript.
2. While they’re downloading, go to this page and download usbtb.
3. Install Foomatic-RIP and Ghostscript first. Administrator privilege needed.
4. Then with your printer on and plugged to your Mac, install usbtb.
5. Let usbtb detect the printer and try to find a driver for it. It’ll fail.
6. Manually choose the Epson C46 driver. Ignore usbtb’s warning and proceed.

And that’s it! You now have a slow, craptastic printer that you wish would break so that you’d have an excuse to get a better one. You’re welcome!

Originally got the tip from here.

“Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in!”
Michael Corleone, The Godfather III

I guess I’m still sort of a photographer. The company wants me to take a bunch of photos for their brochures and whatnot. I skipped my own English class today to go shopping for Nikon goodies, and guess what I found out.

You can’t set the SB-600 to SU-4 slave mode! It only works as a slave in a CLS setup. Meaning it only plays with other Nikons. Not a problem for me since I have SB-800s, but I was just surprised by this.

SATA connectors inside the AMS Venus T5

As I mentioned before (here and here), I got an eSATA 5-bay external hard drive enclosure to replace my existing FireWire enclosures, and to house a backup. It’s called an AMS Venus T5 DS-2350S, a name that means nothing to me, but it’s relatively cheap and the reviews for it on Newegg are pretty good – mostly 4 out of 5.

I went from this mess:

to this box just slightly bigger than a 2-slice toaster:

It comes with everything, except an eSATA ExpressCard for laptops. For desktops it comes with a 2-port eSATA PCI-E controller.

hard disk tray

screws included *

lever to help move disk into SATA connectors

I don’t know what the included Windows software is for, but on a Mac, you just set up the disks the same way you set up any disk through Disk Utility. To make RAID or JBOD sets, go into the RAID menu. There you can choose to create a Mirrored RAID Set (RAID 1), Striped RAID Set (RAID 0), or Concatenated Disk Set (JBOD).

Mac OS X Disk Utility

If you don’t know what RAID is, you can google it or just don’t worry about it. I think most people won’t ever need it. JBOD on the other hand is simple. It’s Just a Bunch Of Disks that together make one drive. I use two JBOD volumes in my setup and use Carbon Copy Cloner to backup one volume to the other.

Carbon Copy Cloner

Why not Drobo?

The Venus T5 took me a total of maybe 15 minutes to get up and running, and that’s because I’m slow. There’s really nothing to it. You screw the trays onto the disks, insert the disks, plug in everything and format the disks. I suppose Drobo saves you a few minutes since you just insert the disks and it does the rest, but Drobo is $500 and this Venus T5 was $210 (price went up since I got it).

Drobo protects your data in case of a disk failure. That’s a good feature only for people who don’t do backups. If you do regular backups, you’re already protected from disk failure. The price difference between these two enclosures can get you a 1 TB hard disk to backup everything.

And of course, the thing that boggles the mind, Drobo uses USB interface only. I mean, seriously? The thing holds four hard disks and transfers data through USB. USB slow. FireWire fast. eSATA fastest. T5 FTW!

Issues

It’s not perfect though. Every time I plug in the T5 (sounds like a Terminator name), these annoying messages pop up:

Disk Insertion (screenshot)
The disk you inserted was not readable by this computer.

Device Removal (screenshot)
The device you removed was not properly put away. Data might have been lost or damaged. Blah blah blah.

I just click on Ignore and OK, or let the messages go away by themselves after a few seconds. They seem to be false alarms because the drives show up and work just fine, and I didn’t remove any devices.

I bet they have to do with my JBOD setups. Maybe when I turn on the enclosure, the computer sees five disks which aren’t usable, hence “not readable”. And then they disappear because they’re actually JBOD sets, so the computer thinks they were removed. Just guessing though, I really have no idea.

Another complaint I have is that the fans are frikkin loud! They don’t change speeds depending on the temperature. There’s just a switch on the back with a low and high setting, and they’re loud and louder.

They could have made the low setting lower. Even after transfering data for hours, the box stays totally cool. When it’s summertime I’m gonna turn the thing around and point the fans my way.

Final thoughts

Honestly I ended up with the T5 because I was considering getting a Drobo, which has been mentioned in numerous prominent photography websites. Then I started reading about problems with Drobo, such as speed, proprietary file system, and not accepting hard drives that are perfectly fine. Just look through it’s own forums.

So I went looking for an alternative that’s compact and uses FireWire. Well it turns out FireWire enclosures are generally more expensive than eSATA enclosures, so I went with eSATA which is faster anyway.

I’ve only been using the T5 for a couple days but so far so good. I read about people having eSATA problems with OS X 10.5 Leopard, even with the latest version 10.5.2, but someone somewhere (discussions.apple.com I believe) mentioned that there’s only problems when the enclosure uses eSATA plus another interface, like USB. The T5 is eSATA only, and aside from those messages popping up, I haven’t had any problems.

* In the photo of the hard disk with the tray attached, I used the round head screws that came with the disk instead of the flat head ones that came with the Venus T5. You have to use flat head screws or the disks won’t fit in the enclosure.

If you’ve just installed Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard and iTunes doesn’t detect your iPhone when you plug in the sync cable, just reinstall iTunes.

You don’t need to uninstall iTunes first. Just download the latest version, even if you’re already using the latest version, and install it. That should let your iPhone show up again.

I finally got my eSATA ExpressCard today and set up my new external enclosure. Right now I’m moving a little over 1 TB of stuff from four separate drives to the new JBOD volume (or “Concatenated Disk Set”, according to Apple), named Archive A, which is made up of two new 750 GB hard disks.

When that’s done, I’ll clone Archive A to Archive B, which will be made up of two of my current 320 GB disks and another new 750 GB disk. Archive B will be in the same eSATA enclosure.

40 hours?!? Not really. A couple hours later it came down to 8 hours.

Those files are going from FireWire 400 and 800 drives to the eSATA drive. Copying from Archive A to Archive B later should take a lot less time.

I’ll write about the enclosure I got later when I’ve used it for a while. So far it’s pretty sweet.

Some of my external drives.

If you do a lot of photography or video projects, please don’t make the same mistake I made by buying one external hard drive after another.

First of all, they only stack up neatly if you buy the same brand and model enclosure every time. But you’re not gonna do that because better enclosures come out and old ones go obsolete.

Secondly, you don’t want to have a bunch of FireWire cables and power cords running all over the place. Trust me, that Matrix/sci-fi look isn’t worth the trouble.

The best way to go is to get a multi-bay enclosure, meaning an external enclosure that takes multiple hard drives. No, not Drobo. Drobo is way too slow if you’re moving gigabytes all the time. But you don’t need a $6000 Xserve RAID either.

Heck I don’t even think you should use RAID at all, any kind of RAID. In a media archive that just keeps getting bigger, you don’t need the extra speed from RAID, expanding is more difficult with RAID, and having a backup on a separate drive already protects you against a hard drive failure.

My new toy.

I purchased an eSATA enclosure with five HDD bays (pictured above), but I can’t use it because my eSATA ExpressCard hasn’t arrived yet. I plan on making two JBOD volumes inside the enclosure – one for the main archive and one for the nightly backup. When one volume gets full, I’ll replace a disk to expand it and copy everything over from the other volume.

Same thing if a disk goes bad. If one disk in a JBOD volume goes bad, the whole volume is gone, but I’d still have a backup to copy everything over when I replace the bad drive.

I’ll write more about this when I have everything set up. Just waiting on that ExpressCard. I used Amazon’s free shipping so who knows when it’ll arrive. Hopefully tomorrow.

If you’re unfamiliar with RAID, JBOD, and eSATA, go google them yourself. I’m too lazy right now.

If your iPhone is just showing a blank white box in its Camera Roll when you take a photo, here’s how you fix the problem.

1. Find this file on your computer and delete it:
f1b43d3b3ecf259a3626c13a8b0cebd8ba513117.mdbackup. Just do a search for it. It should be at the following:

Mac
Users/[username]/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup/[gibberish]

PC
C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Apple Computer\MobileSync\Backup\[gibberish]

2. Plug in your iPhone and Restore it from iTunes.

After the process is complete, your iPhone should take and save photos normally again. Kudos to jkeegan for figuring this out and posting it in Apple’s support forums.

Check this out. Lambency Flash Diffuser for 75% less than Gary Fong’s Lightsphere. Of course if it’s a knockoff of the Lightsphere, you should respect Mr Fong for inventing it and not get it, just like the Adobe Photoshop Actions he invented. Don’t even think about making a similar diffuser on your own or millionaire Gary Fong [will sue] [and ruin] [your life].

By the way, be sure to check out Fong’s most awesome invention: laptop feet! Only $9.95! Don’t get the $1 stuff available at the local hardware store.

(Photo: dealextreme.com)