I used to try to bring my Canon 5D Mark II with me wherever I went. But with the best walkabout lens, the old 24–70 f2.8L mounted on the camera; it became a pain just to carry the beast around. Only the glass weights 1.1 kilos, and with a battery grip with dual batteries, it’s a complete monster. I still use it because of the great optics and the quality when shooting with it, but I no longer use it for street photography.
JPEGMiniWhat if you could reduce the size of all the jpeg pictures on your hard disk? Do you have problems sending full resolution jpeg images via email because of size restraints? Is your iPhoto library too large? Let’s face it; pictures is one of the things that sucks up space on your drives. It’s even more annoying if you are using a newer Mac with an SSD disk where cost is premium. Upload speed when sending emails or uploading images to the web can be slow and annoying. An application called JPEGMini claims to help you with reducing your pictures with up to five times while retaining all the quality. I got a bit curious if the team at JPEGMini and their patented image compressor really could reduce large JPEG photos without losing quality. I’ve tried the application before when I wrote my article about comparing the best jpeg compressor applications for web use. But even though JPEGMini is geared more towards large megapixel pictures, not small images usually used on web pages, my test shows that it stacks up well against the competition even on more modest photographs. Many web pages now use pictures optimized for high-resolution images like for Retina display and high-resolution mobile devices, so the use of an image compressor is getting even more useful for web use.
But how well does JPEGMini retain quality on megapixel images in JPEG format? How much do you lose in quality by using compressing?
A couple of days ago I got my new Spyder4 Elite Color Calibrator for color calibrating monitors. After doing a calibration on both on the latest MacBook Pro 15″ retina and my factory calibrated Asus PA246, I saved the comparison charts for the two displays to see how they stack up.
Now that Google is pulling the plug on Google Reader, I’ve been researching an alternative. I bought Fever, a self hosting solution. My favorite RSS app for ipad is Mr. Reader has just been updated with support for Fever, but it’s slow. So I’m giving up on Fever as my syncing for RSS and going to use Feedly instead, now that they have an API. Feedly has a very nice app on iOS but Mr. reader now also supports Feedly, so I’m going to use it instead. On my Mac I’ll just use Feedly’s web interface which is quite nice. Good to be able to find interesting articles to read again.
My old web server built on old spare parts had a hard disk crash a month ago. So I had to put it up on my BlueHost account while waiting to get hold of a new disk. I decided to try out a SSD disk, so I got hold of a 60gb IBM SSD disk. Without any optimizations, it can now handle double the traffic! I’ll continue to optimize tomorrow to get the most out of it. I’m doing an article on how to set up a LAMP server on Ubuntu Linux for WordPress with all the stuff needed to get W3 Total Cache, APC and other stuff working, because I can’t find a good article that describes everything. I will start writing on it tomorrow.