Carl Hutzler's Blog

I bought a lens baby earlier this week. It is basically a distortion lens which allows you to have a small area of focus in your image and the rest of the image is distrorted/blurred. You can control the focus point by swiveling the front part of the lens around in a similar fashion to how a view camera adjusts.

I have been playing with it a little and it is a nice lens for adding a little bit of interest to an image. I can see using it for portraits as well as product shots.

Before I bought my first digital camera around 2003, I had a Nikon FE2 and a bunch of prime lenses. I bought the camera with a 50mm lens from Service Photo in Baltimore, used, for about $500 in 1988. I used the camera for 15 years mostly shooting black and white negative film and then slides.

I have a lot of B/W prints from my darkroom. But the slide collection was always hard to view. The projector, screen and inability to simply pull out an image and show someone were always a drag. For years I have been looking for a way to scan the slides cheaply, but the cost to scan 4,500 slides is not even close to approachable. I did not need the highest quality…just something fairly good…good enough for the web. If I really wanted to make a print/enlargement, I always had the original slide and could pay for a drum scan if I wanted.

The idea of putting the slides into a Kodak projector and somehow taking pictures of them with a digital camera was always a thought I had. I even briefly tried to make it work, but quickly ran into a number of issues which stumped me. The slide projector bulb was WAY to bright. Focus was an issue. And even getting decent color balance and contrast was problematic.

Luckily, my father (and mother) have a huge slide collection. My dad was also interested in the same thing – digitizing the slides. He did most of the work but I helped supply equipment, software and some know how on things.

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We did it. Our good friends, the Schnellers, joined Rylan and I for a trip down to the mall today to see Barack’s inauguration. We drove down to our old apartment complex across from the Iwo Jima in Rosslyn, Virginia and walked over the Memorial Bridge to the Mall. Took a little over an hour. But we got there and had good spots to view the festivities.

People were very happy.

Some of you may have read my post back in October that Rylan and I ripped out our aging pressure treated deck and put in a new deck and screened porch (hate those tiger mosquitos). They were about 80% complete back then and I promised to update my blog with the final results and my feelings on the work completed.

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So you post something on your blog and someone comes along and comments. Sometimes the comment is just a “Thank you” or something. No big deal. But sometimes it is a comment asking for some follow-up info. I have always wanted to be able to answer the question in the comment area with another comment so that future visitors could see the response (and that I do respond). But I also need to respond to the original commenter via email as they will likely forget to check back most of the time.

Today I found a plugin for Wordpress which accomplishes this fairly nicely called, Subscripe To Comments by Mark Jaquith. When someone is leaving a comment, they have the option of subscribing to that post such that any additional comments will be sent to their email…including my response of course. And they can go back in and manage their subscription to that post later if they do not want the updates any longer.

And an even nicer little twist is that the blog owner can see who is subscribed to commets and on what post by visiting the TOOLS section of their Wordpress Blog and clicking on SUBSCRIPTIONS.

In my first ever wife guest celebrity blog post, I am pleased to talk about a unique opportunity to have fun while raising money for a good cause.

For those of you who don’t know me, I’m Carl’s wife, and organizer of the recent Disney trip. I am also good friends with another  local blogger who has started www.bloggersforgood.org to benefit local charities. The first event will be on February 19 from 6-8 pm at O’Faolain’s in Sterling VA (right by Regal Cinemas). A portion of the restaurant tab, raffle sales, and direct donations will go to Loudon Interfaith relief. Several local bloggers will be there, as well as Carl who will take some pictures of the event.

Hope to see some of you there!

When you go to web pages with forms, most modern web browsers will try and help you fill in the form by remembering what you typed into a form in the past. So if you start typing your name into a field that is depicted as a “name” field, then the browser will offer up suggestions as you type. This is a great thing.

But once upon a time I typo’d my email address in a form….instead of cdh@carlhutzler.com I entered cdh@carlhutzer.com. I don’t recall what form it was for, but I think I realized it when I never got email from that site. No big deal, I just re-did the form on that site and went along my way.

But what happened was that Firefox remembered my typo. So now when I fill in forms with email addresses, I would get two suggestions for my email address…one correct and one typo. Worse yet, the typo one was the first choice. This has stung me a few times when I was in a hurry so today I searched for the fix.

Turns out Firefox stores form suggestions in a file called formhistory.sqlite located in /Users/someuser/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles/someprofile.default/formhistory.sqlite

I opened the file in a text editor initially just to see if I could find the typo and it was there. Before I made any changes, I made a copy of the file (for me it was a 700KB file…and not something I could afford to f-up). After making a copy, I tried to make the correction by changing the text to the correct spelling of my email address. I figured it would simply have two “Correct” spellings after that change. But the edit I did made the form file not work anymore. Thank god I made a backup.

So I went to versiontracker.com and looked for anything in the Mac OS X area that allowed browsing and editing of SQLITE database files. I found MesaSQLite. Once I downloaded the software (shareware), I was able to open the formhistory file (even double-click to open) and search for the typo email address. I played with the table and field search settings till I found which one had the data I needed:

table=moz_formhistory
value=<my typo'd email address>

I edited (in my case deleted) the record and COMMITed the change. Put the changed formhistory file in place of the old file and restarted Firefox.

No more typo!

I use Gmail to host my carlhutzler.com email. It is free and very versatile. They have great spam fighting as well. But I started to get concerned about false positives with Gmail the other day when my buddy Tken said an email I just sent to him went to his spam folder (he hosts his domain on gmail as well).

Then yesterday I found out one of my client’s had responded to me about 3 weeks ago and her email went to my spam folder. Not that this is a big cause for alarm, one false positive (that I have noticed) in two years is not bad. But maybe there are more?

As one preventative step, I decided to look at my gmail address book (contacts) to see how many were in the list. Turns out I only had 75 contacts! But my local email program on my desktop had over 2000. Hmmmm. I guess Gmail does not “collect” addresses as I send them from my desktop email program (via SMTP). Or maybe there is a setting to allow that? I am not aware of one, but boy should they have it.

Anyway, I use Thunderbird for my email client and I did a quick google search and found a plugin called “Zindus” that will allow you to sunc (bi-directional if you like) to gmail from thunderbird. While the interface/set-up is a little clunky looking, it does work. After a little playing, I was able to sync my 2000+ contacts to Google. And it removed dupes as well!

This should help with spam reliability from people I already email regularly and will make using the Google webmail interface more versatile as I don’t have to remember everyone’s address if I am away from my laptop.

Oh, and I also found that you can now sign into AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) from within the Gmail web interface now. Bonus :-)

OK, most everyone loves Disney. But I am not a big fan. I just don’t like rides that much nor crowds nor all the pretend stuff. I mean, if you want to experience white water rafting, they have the technology and it is a lot more fun when you are on an actual river! And if you want to experience driving a formula I car at 100 miles an hour, well they have a lot of places where you can do just that (including Disney World!). Along with sky diving, balloon riding and more, why not just do it instead of a 50 minute wait in a line and a 38 second ride. And if you need to feel zero g’s or 2 g’s, well they got better roller coasters in Kings Dominion which is an hour from most everyone’s house and a heck of a lot cheaper.

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How you ask?

Answer: Get rid of your cable TV.

But how will you survive without TV and Movies?

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