Trevin Chow

I’ve started a new photography blog that is separate from this one, that is more optimized for viewing my photos.  This is a more curated than my Flickr stream (which is more of a firehose of my daily photography).  You can expect to see photos taken mainly with my toy cameras and my iPhone.

Here’s a few of the recent photos I’ve posted:

Head on over to check it out, and feel free to subscribe to it by RSS or if you prefer, subscribe by email to get updates in your inbox every time I post something new. 

(I had a few issues at the beginning getting the blog layout right, so I republished photos several times over to accommodate different sizes.  So if you were an early subscriber, I apologize for the glut of updates in your RSS reader!)

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).

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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)