When I was buying my new road bike, the question of what bike computer to put on it came up. I had a Sigma bike computer on the bike that had been my primary bicycle, but it would take some work to move it, and its cadence sensor had never worked right. I let the…
Category: Technology
Dell XPS 15
I finally bought a new laptop computer. When I say “finally”, I mean that this is the first full-size laptop I have bought for myself personally since 1999. This is the fifth laptop I have owned in thirty years. I suppose that’s because I am more of a desktop kind of guy, and lately I…
Preamps
The first audio recorder I used for film was the Zoom H4n. Then I upgraded to the Roland R-26, then the Zoom F4, and finally to the Sound Devices MixPre-10 II. Each time, I congratulated myself that I was stepping up to a recorder with better preamps, or so I believed, but I could never…
Sound Devices MixPre-10 II Review
I have acquired a Sound Devices MixPre-10 II, which is a big step up from the Zoom F4 I have been using primarily for nearly three years. This review will largely be written as a comparison between those two devices. [Be warned that many of the features of the MixPre-10 II are not present in…
Zoom F4 Battery Life
In early 2017, I purchased a Zoom F4 digital recorder. Though I had been recording location sound for film for years, this is the first device I have owned that was designed for filmmaking. Prior to that, I had been using a Roland R-26, which was a step up from my Zoom H4n, which was…
Samsung Galaxy S10
Last October, somewhat on impulse, I upgraded my phone to the Samsung Galaxy S10. It all began when I met up with a friend of mine and saw that she was taking photos with her phone, not with a DSLR. This was a surprise to me, since the photos she had been posting looked like…
Whip-poor-will Overload
I haven’t been to all of them, but I suspect that the Hercules Glades Wilderness is the crown jewel of Wilderness Areas in Missouri. It is not the biggest, but it is scattered with glades — some quite large and picturesque, has an extensive and well maintained trail system, and even has a set of pretty…
Panasonic GH4 Crop and 4K Window
Five years late to the game, I am picking up a Panasonic GH4 for filmmaking. This is for a specific project, which I needn’t discuss here. I have just spent some time making sense of the crop factors and the 4K windowed video, and here is what I have figured out. First of all, “crop…
Hey, Baldie!
I just realized that I can’t remember the last time I saw a film in a theater that wasn’t a superhero film, a Star Wars/Trek film, a James Bond film, or a Harry Potter film. Maybe it was “Ready Player One”. I decry all the superhero films and sequalism, and the audiences who won’t risk…
CentOS vs. Ubuntu
The newest release of WordPress requires a minimum of PHP 5.6.4, and so does Laravel. My primary web server has been running PHP 5.4.16, so I needed to upgrade. It was running on CentOS 7.0, so I figured it was time for a complete refresh. I spun up a new VPS with CentOS 7.6 and…