For the n00bs who just got a mac, it might be usefull to compile an updated list of use full software.

I personally use a lot of the usual stuff, like mail.app, address book, ical, itunes, flip4mac, mplayer, vlc, perian, skype, adium X, toast, imagewell, quicksilver, iwork, chicken of the vnc, growl and of course seismac.

Apart from these programmes, I use the following software, divided in freeware, shareware and commercial software:
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Tags: software,mac

Got a new camera (well, bought it second hand). A Zorki 4. An old soviet rangefinder camera. It is a sturdy but a bit spartan camera, no lightmeter, and some quirks, like you have to remember to wind your shutter before you change shutter time. Film loading is also a bit awkward, but I am quite happy with it. Is also still in good shape.

Tags: photography,analog photography

Amazing software: netnewswire. A really nice and free RSS reader for os X. It works in such a nice way, these people have really thought out the workflow very well. Recommended. See here:

Tags: software,mac

(Picture of Paul, taken with a Canon A-1 and Ilford XP2)

I have been doing photography for quite some time. Starting with a Fuji 110 roll film camera I got from my parents, to a Canon Pellix QL from my father, a Canon A-1 I got from my uncle and aunt for my high school graduation, a Nikon FE2, a Nikon D-1 I got from Ivo and a Nikon D-200 I borrowed from Bert. The Nikon dSLR's are great cameras but I really can't make great pictures with them. The D-200 is a nice camera, but it's viewfinder is tiny, making focussing with manual focus lenses very hard, even with the katz eyes focussing screen. The D-1 has a much better viewfinder, but it is noisy in high iso (800 or more) modes, which results in a very ugly noise. So I still make my best pictures using a Nikon FE2 camera (from 1984), analog, using Ilford XP2 film. I absolutely love the XP2 film, it is an amazing film with a beautiful texture and very flexible. You can expose it somewhere between 50 and 800, and it will adapt to the exposure, without having to push and pull, and you can just c-41 process it in any lab and have it scanned. It is also compatible with the infrared noise reduction of film scanners, since it is a c41 film. I also recommend solleveld, where I bring my fillm, development, scanning and contact sheet wil cost me about 7.50 with discount if I do bulk. Very good quality and 1 hour service. I stopped doing AH or other consumer labs, because they where making my negatives dirty. I expose the xp2 at 800 iso and it turns out very well. The problem with most fast b & w film is that they are not really that high speed. Ilford delta 3200 is actually 1000, and so is t-max 3200 (which is a crappy film, imho), so to really use 3200 iso you need to push develop it. The only film which is really fast is Fuji Neopan SS 1600, which I can also recommend. The perfect camera would probably be the nikon D3, but I am not going to spend 5400 euro on a camera. Besides, I prefer black & white photography, and I feel like cheating when I convert it, even though you can have some really nice results when you use alien skin exposure.
Finally I am considering getting a rangefinder camera, like the Leica M6, but cheaper. I am looking at a Zorki or something similar, I want a small, cheap camera to have always with me.

Check out my pictures at christiantan.com, which have been done with different cameras.

Tags: photography,digital photography,analog photography,black & white

So management at my previous company decided that we should go enterprise, thus replacing our unix boxes which run on freebsd or debian with redhat enterprise linux. It's enterprise right, so it should be good? Anyway, redhat is not necessarily that bad, al though a lot less well thought out compared to debian or ubuntu for example. Anyway, the mail server was migrated to redhat, but then we discovered that redhat is extremely conservative with filesystems and only provides ext3 and gfs. Our mailserver still had a mailspool on xfs. This was a bit annoying. So.. centos to the rescue! Centos is the GPL version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux. So it is mostly identical to redhat, minus some tools. It also uses yum and rpm packages of centos and redhat are interchangeable. Centos is identical to Red Hat, but centos has centos plus, which is a repository with additional goodies. So this solved our problem: we installed a centos plus kernel + headers and xfs tools, and now the server is happily running kerio mail server on redhat EL 5, with xfs. How ever, you do need to realize that your server is no longer a real Red Hat EL server, which affects you getting support. But for now it runs, but don't tell your PHB!

Tags: sysadmin,linux,redhat,centos,xfs

I discovered rapidweaver thanks to the tips of a few friends of mine. The problem was, I did not have the time to build a new website from scratch, including writing new css and html code and all that. And not for every site I need a completely original homemade website. And more important than that: it is better to have a website which is not homemade, with off the shelf templates, than NO site at all. So rapidweaver. It is extremely easy to setup a website quickly with blog, slideshow etc. It is also quite reasonably priced. See: Rapidweaver.

Tags: sysadmin,webdesign,mac,software

So I was looking for some way to implement my blog in a secure and safe way. I considered a lot of options, like wordpress (which is a festering pile of securety bugs), drupall (of which I am quite enthousiastic) and nucleus (which runs my old blog, but is not ideal). I wanted it to be secure, fast and scalable, which has for me a higher priority than features. So I thought, why not just generate static html? So this is how I do it, using rappidweaver, which I can highly recommend. I will talk about rapidweaver later.

Tags: sysadmin,software,mac,rapidweaver

I am starting a new tech blog. In this blog I would like to share my knowledge and experiences on different technical things, and like my own interests will be a very diverse mixture of photography (digital and analog), sysadmin stuff (freebsd, linux, os X), music (acoustical and electronic) and more. Hope you like it. There will be some google ads, to support the hosting of my server, but in a modest way.