Check out this link to NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive and get a little perspective.  Please.  Do it for the rest of us.

P.S.  I’m a big fan of the photos with the word “Nebula” in the title.

I had the opportunity to take a trip last year which covered the better part of Ireland.  While there, we had two cameras: a Nikon D70 DSLR and  a Sony DSC-N2.  More importantly though, I had a Sony GPS-CS1 geologger.  This little device locks onto GPS signals and records your location every 15 seconds in standard NMEA format to internal flash memory.  If you take the time to synchronize the internal clocks in your camera to GPS before you go shooting, afterwards you can correlate the time stamps in your photos with the position recorded by the device.  I use software by RoboGeo to do this, although Sony includes some basic software with the device.

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This past weekend, I took a trip to Dayton, Ohio for the annual airshow held at Wright Patterson Air Force Base.  The main draw this year was the demonstration of the F-22 Raptor.  The speed and agility displayed by this plane was really special even though the pilot wasn’t allowed to show its full capabilities.   Aside from the F-22, there were many other interesting planes and helicopters on display, including the C-17, C-130, P-3, Apache Longbow, A-10, Huey, CH-47, V-22, F-16, and many more.  While oogling at all the technology (some of it new, some of it really really old), I managed to take a few photos which I’ve included here in abridged form.

Edit: Somehow I missed the emergency landing in the middle of the show?  The plane must have (and should have) landed on a runway far from spectators because I certainly didn’t see it.

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As I’ve previously mentioned, I run a Smoothwall Express 3.0 firewall on my home network.  I built this firewall using a crappy old computer I had lying around.  Well, the harddrive ate it big time this week and needed to be replaced.  Luckily, I had another old harddrive laying around which will get me by for a few more months (they just don’t make harddrives like they used to… the one that died was almost a decade old).  As you may know, Smoothwall has a built-in backup feature which will copy your settings over to a floppy disk.  It’s limited, but I guess it would work for some people.  I knew my old junk hardware would fail eventually so a few months ago I installed the SmoothBackup for SWE 3.0 v.1.4 mod.  One can configure this mod to make scheduled, complete drive backups.  Since a Smoothwall installation is inherently limited in size (~130 MB for mine), this mod generates a tar file of the entire file system.  It can also optionally SCP the file to another computer.  I had mine configured to put the tar on my server out of harms way.  So today, when I went to replace the crashed drive, I simply reinstalled smoothwall and the SmoothBackup mod, and then restored my previous installation from the tar which I copied back over from my server.  BAM!  10 minutes tops and I was back up and running.  Smoothwall is a quality application, and community-contributed mods like SmoothBackup are icing on the cake.