I've fallen back into a bit of light gear-acquisition mode over the past week.

The wireless interface on the old ThinkPad R40 running Debian Unstable flaked out and stopped associating with the wireless access point at home. I thought the hardware was failing, like the USB failed months ago, but I wanted a second opinion -- was it really broken, or am I just incompetent?

Claire's headed off for her Manic Mommies cruise for the weekend, and I'm anticipating the rest of my weekend with the kids. Paige has a half day of school, so I figured I'd just take Friday off.

I figure it's an opportunity to do the stuff she wasn't jumping to do, so I'm looking for some things to do with the kids and people to join us.

I had my SimpleShare NAS working nicely for a while, but something's changed, and I'm not sure what.

I reinstalled the ThinkPad with Ubuntu 8.10, and I've had to get a few things going again on there. As slick as Ubuntu has been with most things, I was expecting to be able to browse my way to my NFS shares in the house, or failing that, I'd be able to go to "nfs://nas/..." and be in business. That's not the case, so I had to set up a bit for myself.

My very old Hawking Tech wireless access point started to flake out, so I had to go out and get a new one. I was preparing for the worst -- I was going to end up with a router, and I couldn't disable the router functionality. Access points are hard to come by these days, and the only one I could find cost twice as much as a more feature-rich router (in case I wanted to use any of those features one day).

Does anyone even remember that question? That's the question that Twitter explicitly asks, and the purpose of any microblog. It's about putting original little thoughts out there that weren't worthy of big old blog entries.

I recently attended the Portrait Photography class at HACC Lancaster Campus taught by Darryl Nicholas. It only runs 1 night for 3.5 hours. I arrived to find a whole 2-light studio strobe setup with backdrop, etc and got pretty hopeful -- I wasn't expecting much lighting discussion. Unfortunately, I found that the lights were only there for the most basic setup discussions and otherwise for making a shopping list.

I've been watching people post HDR images for months, and I recently stumbled upon Meet the Gimp: Episode 25 which discusses exposure blending. The hard part was defining a clean mask for blending the images.

It's not the crazy tone-mapping stuff, but this technique allows for some relatively natural looking changes.

I've been tuning my workflow a bit -- the process of pulling images from the camera, processing, editing, and getting them posted. I still do everything on Linux.