Two:Thirty AM

Photography is really starting to become a passion of mine in my life, and because of this I am starting a new weekly post segment where I will be posting 1 of my original photos each week with a short write up and some picture background info. The format might change a little from week to week but eventually I think it will level out. As always, let me know what you think, and feel free to leave comments, feedback, and critiques!

This weeks photo “Mexican Sunrise” was taken in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico while we were on vacation there in Feb 2009. It was taken from the balcony of the condo we were renting.

Click photo for larger view

Photo Info
Aperture: f/5.6
Shutter Speed: 1/2000
ISO: 320
Focal Length: 200
Camera Body: Nikon D40
Camera Lens: Nikon 55-200

A little background: We used an AppleTV for a while in the living room to serve all of our media. Well, long story short, the AppleTV sucked one too many times, so in the closet it went, and out came the Mac Mini to take its place on the home theater rack!

Problem: The Mac Mini is a little on the old side. I had already cracked the case and upgraded it to 2GB of Ram, which made it a little more usable. However the real problem was realized when attempting to watch full screen flash video (Hulu). It came down to raw processing power; the older Mac Mini only had a 1.5GHz Intel Core Solo! Yes, a Core Solo! Shame on you Mac Mini!

Solution: The short story, swap the processor! I wasn’t looking to spend a fortune on a processor for this machine since it really only needed to be “good enough”. I decided to pick up a T2400 Intel Core Duo running at 1.83GHz. You can find them for between $30 and $50 on eBay. The install is pretty simple, crack the case open, remove the optical drive and take out the logic board. The worst part is the stupid plastic pins that hold the CPU heat sink on, they are brittle and break easily. The processor is a simple locking socket, so no big deal there. Apply some new thermal grease, and reapply the heat sink, and you are good to go. Reassemble the machine and start watching full screen flash! One last reminder: ensure you reconnect the fan controller cable or your fan will default to full speed (which is your indication that you forgot).

Final thought: It was an easy install, and only took about 20 min (40 if you include having to take it apart again to plug in the fan controller that came unplugged) and best of all, the machine is much faster now and plays Hulu like it’s nothing! If you have an older Mac Mini, I highly recommend the upgrade.

10 months. 6500 tweets. Addicted. Yes.

Ok, now that I have admitted it and it’s out in the open, lets move on. :)

My girlfriend and I went on a vacation to Mexico for 8 days. It was a fantastic trip!! I had been gathering up gear that I was going to need, during which I realized, I would be without the normal means of communication I have now. Internet everywhere I go, iPhone in my pocket, and so on. To normal people, this would be ok, but my addiction to bandwidth wouldn’t allow it! So instead I formulated ideas on how to twitter while being disconnected in mexico (for a reasonable amount of money). Now in all seriousness, I wouldn’t die if I couldn’t twitter (hopefully), but I took this as a challenge / project of sorts, just to see what could be done. Lets get into the details a little, here are the ideas I had..

Options:
- Peek e-mail device (possibly hacked to work outside USA).
- Unlocked / Jailbroken iPhone 3G w/ Mexico SIM card.
- Laptop with rented 3G Card.
- Rent a mexico cell phone.
- Laptop with WiFi (if available).
- No twittering at all. not an option ;)

Right away, let me kill of some of these options. Obviously no twittering at all was not an option, or why would I be writing this! Secondly, WiFi was non existent to say the least!

Ideally, the Peek device would have been perfect. It is cheap, simple, and used cell data instead of WiFi. If you setup an email gateway to sent tweets through email, you are set. The problem is that the unit is locked down to only work with the T-mobile SIM that it came with, and since the SIM is blocked from roaming it made the device completely useless.

Next we have my iPhone 3G. My iPhone is unlocked so all I had to do was get a local Mexico SIM. I got said SIM from a company called Movistar. The problem I found with getting SIMs in Mexico is that they are all pay-as-you-go, so they didn’t seem to have any that included cell data. This knocked out any hopes of using iPhone apps to twitter. Instead I was left with only SMS as an option. Great huh? well yes and no. Twitter uses a US short code which doesn’t work from mexico, so I had to setup a SMS gateway to pass the tweets through. This was the only method I tried that actually worked for me reliably.

On a last note, there was 1 single ethernet cable in the place we were staying that worked most of the time, although it seemed to have the slowest DHCP server on the face of the planet, so that was an option as well, sort of, although it didn’t allow for mobile twittering

Long story short, if you can’t get international data, SMS is totally the way to go!