iPhoto Books: be warned!

No, I'm not going to complain about the output quality (at least not yet as I'm still waiting for my order).

What I want to complain about is the fact that your iPhoto Book orders do not show up on your Apple Store account. And apparently this oddity has been happening for quite a while.

That means that there is no way for you to know about your order status. Of course there is a confirmation email sent to your Apple ID email but, what if your .mac account has expired? (then you no longer have access to that email).

To make things worse, once 1-click order has been activated iPhoto will not ask you for an additional confirmation when issuing a new order (I guess that's the 1-click beauty once your Apple ID email account works nicely).

Calling customer service did not help much, as I was assured my credit card was not billed and somehow I had no pending orders. Calling my bank gave me another version: My credit card was billed (and apparently my order was taking longer than expected to arrive).

At this point I was no longer sure the "easy" route that iPhoto promised to get my photo book was actually easy. Even worse, once I realize customer service gave me the wrong information after forcing me to wait several minutes at the phone I was angry.

To make things worse, I had order a second photo book by mistake (thinking the customer service information was right and being unable so see the order on the Apple Store site). And I could not find a way to cancel that duplicated order.

Thankfully, the link provided above included a cool tip. You can visit this url to know your iPhoto Book orders and, if within 90 minutes from your order, you can cancel it. What this information is not clearly stated on Apple Store I do not know. However I have asked them to fix this as it's been this way for at least two years.

Apple Store's answer:

iPhoto is an Online service that does not belong to our Store.

For any query or issue with iPhotos, please, go to http://www.apple.com/es/support/photoservices/contact_us/ . You will find a rebate to fill out, and in the next 48 business hours, an agent will provide you full support by email.

E-ink experience

Not yet very affordable, but better than I expected. This is my opinion after buying an ebook reader. Mine is branded Papyre 6.1 but it's named Hanlin v3 in other countries. It's manufactured in China (what a surprise!) and it runs Linux (it has an ARM processor).

Definitely worth watching at. However I have not used it for more than a few minutes so I do not have an opinion about the long term usefulness of the device. But if it delivers what I've seen in the tests it is more than worth it.

Now I'm sorry but I'm back to reading, please do not disturb.

Update:

The reading experience has been better than expected. And the availability of contents has also been better than expected.

What I have not find, however, is a shop with the latest books. But that only meant some books cannot be bought but they might be available somewhere ...

For example, I was reading a paper copy of this book in Spanish. And I had no trouble finding an electronic version.

There is a cheaper electronic book in Spain called iLiber, but it does not come with a cover, earbuds or MP3 support.

Online network doctor

Years ago, in a distant galaxy, I was a member of ICSI. Now I've been surprised about one their offerings to the community: A network analyzer. It's Java-based so it won't work unless you have Java support in your browser and you're happy running digitally signed code.
You may learn a couple of things about your network connection.

Yann Arthus-Bertrand's HOME

A succession of breathtaking sequences shot from the air is the newest release by this widely awarded photographer. It's really worth watching.

You can get the movie for free! Movie is available in theaters all over the world (but apparently not in USA) and also in YouTube in HD. Although the beauty of the images might be better enjoyed on the big screen, you can have a look at it on-line.

What amazes me is that it is the creators of the movie who decided to release it on YouTube at the same time than in theaters. The release details were given on a press conference.

The movie has been sponsored by PPR, a French multinational in the fashion business.

Two useful additions to your Iomega Screenplay pro HD

I've found the network transfers to take forever on this device. Between 1 and 2 Mbytes/second is really slow by todays standards. It means around 4GB per hour.

I'm happy with the torrent download functionality I mentioned on a previous entry but there is a catch: What if your download contains a sequence of RAR files? Yep, it happened to me with a 16GB download. Moving this back and forth to a PC would took more than 8 hours!!

So the obvious idea is ... why not to have unrar command on the SPP? And this is what I did. I looked for the source code, and using a buildroot ext2 image file I compiled unrar command. Now I can telnet to my box and launch it without the need of moving files back and forth. It's not lightspeed but it's minutes instead of hours.

The other improvement was to add SSH functionality by borrowing dropbear binary from OpenWRT project. Please have a look at dropbear documentation so you can install in properly on your system (a few files and links need to be created to get it working). It also includes SCP file transfers.

Trouble is not only on the digital side

My old analog camera is also giving me trouble. The symptom was that many pictures had just a small fraction of the total field. This can happen when shooting with flash if the sync speed is not correct (flash fires when shutter is half-open only). However this time I was shooting outdoors without a flash.

After a few iterations with Google led my to a photo on Wikipedia with exactly the same type of residue I've found on my camera. A few more searches led me this article that explains the causes of the problem and a possible fix.

Aging and heat turn a piece of foam inside the camera guts into an oily tar that ruins the shutter operation. Did you think you can keep on using your old camera, maybe not if it as a twenty years old Canon EOS.

Digital pollen allergy

One of the bad things about DSLR (aka Digital Reflex) cameras is the tendency to get dust in the image sensor (as these cameras use removable lenses). Whether it is just dust or pollen it may eventually be shown in your photos (like the spot I show on the right: it is just blue sky).

For not so big spots, they may go easily undetected. If you want to check for dust in the sensor the simplest way seems to take a photo of the blue sky with the smallest aperture possible on your lens (F22 in my case).

Detecting the problem only serves to make you nervous, but fear not, it can be fixed. There are different ideas and people who would talk for or against any of them. I do not feel comfortable risking my camera sensor without reading quite a lot before doing one thing or another. Apparently there are several ideas that can help:

1. Air blower.
2. Dry dust removers.
3. Wet dust removers.
4. Send the camera to the manufacturer for a professional cleaning of the sensor.

The first three is something you can do if you have the proper tool for the job. And no, you cannot use a common brushed air blower you use for your lenses. Sensor surface (or filter) needs to be extremely clean to render clean photos.

I'm still in the process of trying one (or more) of the above methods to get rid of my sensor dust. For the moment I think my camera just has Spring fever :-)