Nikon D80

I borrowed my father’s Nikon D80 for a few days to play with… And until now, I must say I’m quite impressed with the beast!!! I was used to my small Sony DSC-W5: a compact model which can’t physically perform like a DSLR type camera.

I find terribly amazing the possibility to play with the aperture, the manual focus and other features which are really missing on compact models and which allow you for example to get a fuzzy background. Moreover, my father is using a 18-200 lens which features a wide angle as well as a huge zoom…but this king of lens is lengthy though. Here are some pictures I took so far:

glen_b&w.jpg acer.jpg

DSC_1609.JPG DSC_1611b&w.jpg

Now I’m really tempted to get one myself… the question is: the D40x or the new D60?

New DVD Player

Two weeks ago, we were watching a nice DVD my girlfriend and I, when suddenly, a terrible noise and a flash occurred, followed by a total blackout…

I first thought: “oh my god, my TV just exploded!”. But after having put the breaker back on, I realized it wasn’t my TV the faulty part, but my cheap DVD player. I could even see some smoke going out of the poor guy… Since it wasn’t pretty new nor expensive, I wasn’t more worried about the player than the DVD inside!

A screwdriver helped me to get the disc out of the dead player, and it was playing back some minutes after in my laptop… no way we had to miss the end of the movie!

Nevertheless, the laptop was only a backup solution, and I recently bought a new (and cheap – 40€) DVD player to replace the broken one. I got one featuring USB and SD inputs (very nice to put an external drive and read from it) and HDMI output (not really necessary since my TV isn’t HD at all… but hey, why spitting on it?). And of course it reads plenty of formats. Here is the new beast:

dvd_player.jpg

Quick&Dirty: keep ssh connections alive

A irritating problem started to occur some weeks ago: my ssh connections dropped off after some minutes of inactivity. With security in mind, this is not such a bad thing, but since I didn’t change anything neither on the server side nor on the client side, I suspect my ISP of having change some DSL line parameters…

Anyway, the following trick solved that issue; simply add the following line to your ~/.ssh/config file (or create it if necessary):

serveraliveinterval 60

This will send a keepalive message to the server each 60 seconds. I found this solution particularly suitable for my needs as I didn’t need to change the config of all my servers.