Podcasts, an entertaining and informative way to pass the time

Started listening to podcasts lately, here are a few of the ones I am finding informative and entertaining.

• Security Now - General news and info on security related topics with Steve Gibson
• This Week In Tech (TWiT) 
• Tech News Today
• Know How - Tech / geek related Maker podcast.  Recently quite a bit on quadcopters
• Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project - Apparently entertaining random discussions from movie reviews to Adam discussing his kids, Thing 1 and Thing 2, learning to drive.
• The Internet of Things Business Show - Aimed at business leaders, discussions around technology and opportunities for the Internet of Things.  The early episodes go into technology, and standards. As of Q1'15, this is still in the early stages, much like IoT.
• Sophos Security - Chet Chat
• Agile Toolkit Podcast
• HBR IdeaCast
• Paul's Security Weekly - entertaining group of characters / hackers discussing security, penetration testing, social engineering, etc...  

Why Shoot Right

I read a term in a description of a local photography meetup group. It was about "Shoot to the Right."

So I did a google search and found this interesting article "Why Shoot to the Right" about shooting with the histogram a little to the right. The idea is that more data gets lost in the darker areas, and shooting to the right when shooting RAW will allow the camera to capture more information. You may choose to drop it some in post processing, but at least you have the information.

It's worth some experimenting to see how it works with my T3i camera.

Text message forwarding

Finally breaking down and trying an iPhone on my home account. Previously, I had been using my work phone exclusively, and forwarding my personal cell phone to my work phone. However, my iPhone is my personal phone and I don't want to cary two phones.

I found an app from Brian Cross called Mobile Secretary for my Windows Mobile device. Among other things, the feature I was interested in was that it would forward text messages that are sent to the phone. This means sending a text message to my old number results in the message getting forwarded to my new number.

This is great.

The only problem is that the app UI is messed up. Some controls overlap each other. The only reason I could get it to work, was that the text message forwarding is accessed through the menu, rather than the main page. So the main page of the app can just be ignored.

This, combined with regular phone call forwarding seems to be the answer!

Expired phone numbers on the National Do Not Call registry?

I was cleaning up my computer files (something I try to do every once in a while, but almost never fully succeed at) and came across the saved notice from 8/4/2003 where I registered my home phone with the National Do Not Call registry. In the notice, it clearly says that my registration will expire in 8/5/2008, and it identifies my home phone number.

So I went to National Do Not Call registry site, and there is a blurb at the top of the page that says due to a 2007 law that went into effect in February 2008, registrations won't expire.

Your registration will not expire.
Telephone numbers placed on the National Do Not Call Registry will remain on it permanently due to the Do-Not-Call Improvement Act of 2007, which became law in February 2008. Read more about it at
http://www.ftc.gov/opa/2008/04/dncfyi.shtm.

So I thought to double-check and Verify my registration with the link on the left side. However, the verification confirmed that my phone number was actually not registered.

Is there some problem with the database? Or perhaps only phone numbers registered after the law went into effect will be permanent?

Finally got my wife to use a blog

So my wife likes to write. She has a dream of teaching and helping people on their spiritual journey. She's been wanting to create a web site for some time. She finally started generating some content, so I helped her get started with a blog using WordPress. Check out what she's up to over at her Spirituality and Life blog

Firework Photography

After working around the house for several days, trying to get projects completed and mostly trying to sort through stuff we no longer need (tranlation moving piles of junk around) we decided to go visit our friends Hannah and Spencer. I took my camera along and gave a go at some firework photography. Some of these turned out pretty cool.

A couple of tricks I tried include:

• Auto-focus late at night can be a real problem. Try to auto-focus when there was a firework going off, and then switch to manual mode after it is set.


• To help the focus, use a large f-stop such as f22 in order to get a better depth of field


• Try a long exposure, and manually cover the lens when a particular firework is done. This allows blocking much of the excess light for a darker background. Although the appearance of fireworks over a well lit background can be pretty interesting too.


• Oh yea... Use a tripod

Judge for yourself

Outsourced IT cluelessness

A guy I know works for a large fortune 500 company, that outsources their IT. The IT guys decided on the day before a holliday to do the next step in outsourcing for their business unit and move DHCP off to the central server. Yet they didn't provide any notice to the development group there, about when it was happening, and of course several things broke, including all access to the cvs repository which had origainlly been set up without an FQDN.

The big peve is that they did this right before a holiday weekend, without notice. Only by chance was this guy there, and able to help resolve the problem, otherwise several people would have been impacted for some time.