Photographe Paul Galipeau Ottawa Canada | lechampiondumonde.com

Flying with batteries

Announcements were made on January 1 that there were new rules on flying with wet-cell and lithium batteries. It all seemed a bit confusing to me but I guess they’ve been planning this for a while. How do I know? You would too if you always flew with a pair of these bad boys in your carry on.

Quantum Battery 1 (photo from Victor Grepo)

Nearly everytime I flew in 2007, I was held by security because of these things. Once, I was even questioned as to what they were…because apparently printing “BATTERY” on the top is an insufficient sign. The worst was at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv where they weren’t so interested in the batteries as they were in ALL electronics in my carry on, passing all major items individually through the x-ray (laptop, camera body, lenses).

Anyway, the whole thing has been riddled in confusion buy leave it to Rob Galbraith to clear things up for us.

The reality is that the changes most photographers will have to make when readying to fly are less onerous than the coverage might have led you to believe. … the main and perhaps only change we’ll need to make when preparing to fly is to consistently place spare camera and laptop Lithium-Ion packs into see-through, sealable bags, so as to not give airport screeners a reason to delay the passage of carry-ons through security.

All in all, as inconvenient as this seems, my hunch is that preventing the mass shipment of lithium on an airplane makes more sense than allowing the current war on liquid to reach the point where a guy chugged a litre of vodka instead of throwing it away. I mean, if single laptop batteries are liable to explode in my face, what could happen if I tried flying with a skid full of them?

So, TSA, Transport Canada and everyone else, I’ll put my batteries in plastic bags but please, tell me that you have plans to stop taking my orange juice away when I go through security. Can’t you just swab it to determine that it is the same orange juice that is available at the café on the other side?

Read Rob Galbraith’s article (it has good links too)

Zooming in on photos on an iPod

This is old and maybe it’s irrelevant in this iPhone, iPod Touch world but after the data/charging cable on my cellphone has been crapping out*, i needed another way to portably zoom in on an image.  While iPods (photo & video) can display images, the viewing mode is set to an unmodifiable “fit to screen” mode which isn’t that convenient if, say, you need to look at a Google Map of a specific area in Berlin.

I found my way to LittleAppleScripts.com though and found a little script called SplittingImage that properly slices a single photo to fit little sections of it on an iPod display. It’s simple to use and can be quite useful.

*My phone is a Sony Ericsson w810i and while this is apparently a common problem, I haven’t been able to find the source of it or a solution. Any ideas? Anyone?

Freeing hard drive space on internal drives

My computer has an internal 100gb drive.  To protect myself, I have a pair of 250gb external drives that mirror off eachother where I store photos, movies and music.  Naturally, I rely on my internal drive a lot – something that has been more challenging lately as I have been regularly working with less than 5gb of free space.  I like to keep photos from the last two or three months saved on my laptop in case I ever have to quickly access them while traveling but the space issue has made this difficult.

Enter Disk Inventory X (free!) ! This program, which seemed kind of frivolous to me at first, graphically illustrates the size of each file on your computer.  I hadn’t used this program in a while so it came as a surprise to me when it found me an Adobe Bridge file called filesystem_blobs.MYD that was over 5gb in size.  sleepimage is another file that was about 2gb in size.  Both of these are self-generating and relatively non crucial.  I deleted them and the world is now a more harmonious place!

In my case, I also noticed various .msf files somehow created by Thunderbird (which I don’t use) were taking up room so I got rid of those too!

Remember the days when a 500mb hard drive with 4mb of RAM was almost unbelievable?

To end on a sidenote, if you have a Mac and are tired of embarrassing yourself with the startup chime after you’ve arrived late to class or to a meeting, check out Psst! (free again!), a program that controls the volume of this startup sound. Cool.

Disk Inventory X (free!)
Psst! (free again!)