Trevin Chow

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!

I’ll be at Mix10 this year in Las Vegas March 15th to 17th.  If you’ll be there, let me know, I’d love to meet up.

If you have firewire and shoot with a Compact Flash (CF) card, do yourself a favor and buy the Hoodman Firewire 400/800  CF card reader today.  This thing is a freakin’ speed demon!  I’m getting between 40-45 MB/s and downloading 175 RAW files from my Nikon D700 in less than a minute. 

To get the fastest speeds, you need to be using fast UDMA CF cards but it also supports non-UDMA cards as well.  Personally I use the SanDisk Extreme IV cards and highly recommend them.  I have never had one of their cards fail, and if their cards can survive explosions, they will put up with anything I throw at them

At first, I was hesitant to replace my Lexar USB card reader which is convenient due to supports both CF and SD.  However, since I shoot mostly with my DSLR, I opted to buy this additional card reader to sit side-by-side with my Lexar reader so I could save time.  I used to have to walk away from my PC while Lightroom imported my photos, but now I can see the files at freakishly amazing speeds.

Construction wise, it’s also built sturdy enough to both in your home office and on the road (assuming you have FW on your laptop) .  From the Amazon comments:

Almost immediately after I bought my reader, I dragged it across sub-Saharan Africa on some of the world’s bumpiest roads in 115° average afternoon temperature, under conditions where almost everything broke-down (cars, generators; hard-drives, computers; lenses etc.). The Hoodman CF Reader worked flawlessly… in fact, it still does, even in my air-conditioned office.

This was the best $80 I’ve spent in a really long time.

I previously wrote about applying ReplayGain to MP3 files with a combination of Foobar2000 and MP3Tag.  I’ve come up with a slightly easier way to reduce some of the manual steps.

I found out that both Foobar2000 and MP3Tag both supports some limited command line operations, and with a tiny bit of legwork, you can add a right-click (context menu) way of making this process easier.

With this approach, you can now right-click songs, select a context menu option and Foobar2000 will automatically apply ReplayGain at the track-level then MP3Tag will automatically open up and add the songs ready for you to apply the custom Action we previously created.

First, make sure you have Foobar2000 and MP3Tag installed.

Second, copy the following script and put it in a batch file and save it somewhere you can remember. I put mine in E:\Documents\ReplayGainScripts\ReplayGain.bat.  I’m on an x64 system, so notice the environment variables highlighted in red which will need to be changed to %PROGRAMFILES% if you are on x86 (32-bit).

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m always playing songs in iTunes through a playlist (vs. navigating through the Library), so when I come across a song that I want to delete, I have always used a 2 step process since through the iTunes UI you can’t delete it from the playlist and the library at the same time. I resorted to:

1. Look at the song title
2. Type the song title into search box
3. In the search results, right click and delete the song

This was such a pain in the butt that I always wished there was an easier way to do this straight from the playlist.  Turns out there is!

I found this list of Windows shortcuts on Apple’s site which shows that Shift+Delete is the answer I’ve been looking for:

Shift-Delete

Delete the selected song from your library and all playlists

So when you’re in an iTunes playlist and want to remove the song from the playlist only, use Delete.  If you want to remove it from both the playlist AND your iTunes Library, use Shift+Delete !

(There is also another undocumented shortcut – CTRL + SHIFT + Delete which will do the same thing as Shift+Delete except it will add an extra confirmation for sending the file to the recycle bin. Since you already get one prompt using Shift+Delete, there’s no reason for this extra step)

Over the past year, I’ve fallen in love with photos out of toy / Lo-Fi cameras so I was absolutely thrilled when I got a Zumi Digital camera 2.0 as gift this past Christams.  I have been shooting like a fiend with it for the past week.  Here are some sample shots:

One of the hidden surprises of this camera was that there is an undocumented black & white mode!  I stumbled across it by accident going through the menus one day, and the great part is that it also works for videos!

Here is a shot I took of downtown Seattle:

Here’s how you turn the B&W mode on:

1. Start with the camera off
2. Press the “On” button and wait for the screen to say “Ready”
3. Press “Menu” button 5 times so you cycle through all the menus and end up back at the screen that says “Ready”.
4. Press “OK” button 3 times – first time to toggle into Video mode, second time to toggle back to camera, then the third time to go back to video mode. 

Tada! You’ll now see video mode in B&W, and if you press the “OK” button one more time, you’ll go back to photo mode which will now also be B&W. 

You automatically go back to color mode when you turn the camera off and back on, which means that you unfortunately can’t stay in B&W mode by default.

Note: I have the Zumi 2.0 camera, so this may not work for the first generation that was originally sold by Photojojo.