Etikettarkiv: settings

English

Setting up MSMTP for Protonmail

This is the config that worked for me.

First generate an SMTP token and a separate address for the system to use within Protonmail, otherwise this is not going to work without installing mail-bridge or something similar.

This will be special@domain.com

MSMTP Configuration file

Configuration file is /etc/msmtprc
File owner should be root:msmtp
File permissions 0660

defaults
tls on

account default
  host smtp.protonmail.ch
  port 587
  from special@domain.org
  set_from_header on
  auth on
  user special@domain.org
  password SMTP_TOKEN_GOES_HERE
  auth plain

Installation

Install the following components:

sudo apt install msmtp msmtp-mta mailutils bsd-mailx

Configuration

Edit the configuration file for mail /etc/mail.rc and add the following line to it:

set mta=/usr/bin/msmtp

You may also set up aliases if you like in the file /etc/aliases where you can add lines such as:

root: master@domain.org
caroline: caroline@example.com
defaul: admin@domain.org

English

Make your XP installation SSD-flavoured

7 kommentarer

Many people are considering SSD (Solid State Drive)  in their laptops. There are of course many reasons for this, the SSD is silent and less heat generating, in many cases less power consuming and above all else, not susceptible to shock or sudden movements of the laptop.

Field engineers love SSD it has extended battery time, made laptops that are quickly closed and shoved in a bag much less prone to overheating and they can be used in harsh electro-magnetic evironments such as in the vincinity of radio trasmitters without risking that the hard disk loses data.

The problem with XP and SSD is that most drives made with this technology requires an erase operation on an entire block before it can be written back to the drive. This means that things like disk caching and so on works different from with standard disk drives and needs to be tweaked in order to get maximum performance out of it.

Most SSD manufacturers also guarantees only 10 000 writes to a cell and although most SSD uses techniques such as wear leveling where the cells are written to in a fashion to spread the wear on them over the whole disk eventually they will start to fail. An SSD is a rather expensive item still so people would like to maximise the life spand of their drive. Hence the following tweaks.

Disable windows XP prefetcher

Change the following registry keys:

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
”EnablePrefetcher”=dword:00000000

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOpt imizeFunction]
”Enable”=”N”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\OptimalLayout]
”EnableAutoLayout”=dword:00000000

You must reboot after the changes have been made.

Restore original setting

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Session Manager\Memory Management\PrefetchParameters]
”EnablePrefetcher”=dword:00000003

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Servic es\Schedule]
”Start”=dword:00000002

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Dfrg\BootOpt imizeFunction]
”Enable”=”Y”

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\Curr entVersion\OptimalLayout]
”EnableAutoLayout”=dword:00000001

You must reboot after changes has been applied.

Change the disk cache behaviour

Start Device Manager

  • Select the drive for which you wish to administer the caching policy (your SSD)
  • Select Properties
  • Click on the Policies tab
  • Look for the option ”Enable write caching on the disk” and make sure it is selected
  • Look for a second option ”Enable advanced performance” and select it.

This option favors throughput/speed at the potential risk of data corruption. Since this is to protect removable drives from suffering data corruption if they are removed while a write operation is in progress — you may safely change this option on your internal SSD.

This trick can also be used to increase performance about 10-fold on USB-attached disks, but then you should be very careful when removing them from your system, use the device manager to disconnect before you remove them.

Other tweaks

Hibernation

Turning off hibernation can mean a better performance and longer life for the SSD because then Windows will not have to update the page file constantly in anticipation of a hibernation order.

  • Go to the control panel
  • Open the Power Options
  • Select the Hibernate tab
  • Uncheck Enable Hibernation box to disable
  • Click Ok

Reboot your system and the hibernation option is gone (but you can still use sleep mode of course which is brilliant in combination with SSD.

 

English

Shooting at night

4 kommentarer

[På svenska här]

I have gotten a few questions on how to set the camera up for good night shots and there is really nothing to it this is what I normally do is very simple things. If you check your camera manual you should be able to follow the same settings.

Here is an example of a night shot that I have taken with my old Nikon D70s:

Night Traffic
Nikon D70s, Taken from the roof top of the old tax building in the south end of stockholm using a tripod and long exposure. 30 second exposure and f/20.

Fortsätt läsa Shooting at night →

English

Camera Settings: Street Photography

3 kommentarer

People sometimes ask in forums and other places what is the optimum settings for certain types of photography. Although there is no absolutely clear answer—it depends what you are trying to capture of course and your own style there are some things that are useful to remember.

  • Continuous shooting (Ch or continuous high)
  • Tracking autofocus
  • Aperture priority
  • ISO200
  • Center focus
  • Matrix metering
  • White balance daylight/cloudy
  • RAW format

Here are my arguments for each of these settings.

Continuous shooting this is great because if something happens unexpectedly you just point and keep shooting frame after frame and you might get that special picture even if you was not ready to compose and wait for the moment. Things happens fast in the street so be prepared. A useful lens to have mounted is a superzoom, 18-200 mm or similar, they give you great range and can handle almost any urban situation. The drawback is of course that superzooms are a compromise and may lack sharpness for example.

Tracking autofocus this means the camera keeps focussing all the time even if you keep shooting frame after frame. This is good for tracking moving objects but you have to be aware where the focus points are in your frame. On Nikon cameras this is AF-C (Autofocus continuous). Single time focusing is called AF-S.

Aperture priority or the ”A” mode on the camera. This allows you to select the aperture for best depth of field and focus and the camera will automatically pick the apropriate shutter time for a good exposure. This means you don’t have to worry about the exposure and you still maintain a high level of control. Most lenses are sharpest when they are stopped down 2-3 steps. For most this means that f/5.6 – f/11 is probably the best choice in broad daylight. As your light diminish, keep shooting but open the aperture to f/3.5 or f/2.8 or even further if your lens supports it! Most superzooms can not open byond 3.5 at their broad end and 5.6 at their far end.

ISO200 this is a good setting because it minimises the noise from the sensor. If the light conditions are low, raise it but do it with caution since it can produce severely grainy images. Some cameras are much better than others though, you may want to experiment with this. But if your light conditions do not require it—keep your ISO low.

Center focus is preferred because thats where you aim. Use the AF-L (autofocus lock) button to lock if you wish to recompose. The reason center focus is so nice is that if something happens quickly you tract it the focus system has a better chance of concentrating on the object you are tracking. On Nikon cameras the 21 point focus system is great. On the older models as the D70 that has a very limited number of focus points use the single center dot.

Matrix metering means the camera is ready for most light conditions. Activate the ”highlight” function on your display to see if the metering has overexposed the picture, then use the exposure compensation setting +/- to change, recompose and take another shot. Using spot metering it may be very difficult to get the right exposure when there are multiple light sources as it generally is in the city. Centre weighted can sometimes be useful but most of the time matric metering is the best.

White balance does not matter too much if you are shooting RAW which you should be anyway… you can always correct this afterwards in your post processing because RAW files keep the sensor data as it was while JPEG will apply the white balance to the final picture. If you are shooting JPEG then set your WB accordinly, if you are shooting RAW you may do so but auto is usually fine as well.

RAW format is great because it allows you to adjust exposure and white balance with the maximum dynamics in the picture. In RAW you can easily correct 1 EV underexposure but if you attempt to do this on a JPEG the picture usually does not fare well.

JPEG format is not listed above but still very useful in certain situations… There is one time I will flip to JPEG when shooting street phot and that is when I will be taking long series of pictures of some event such as marathon runners or similar. The reason is that when I shoot RAW my camera buffer overloads after a few pictures and the camera can not fire as rapidly as in the beginning because it has to wait for the memory card to ”swallow” all the data. Since JPEG images are pre-compressed before they are written to the memory card they are smaller and thus allows me to shoot very long series of pictures before the camera memory buffer is full and it starts to ”stutter”. Don’t forget to set it back to RAW when you are done!