A while ago I wrote about my new Longines mechanical watch. As much as I loved it, it seems like my only fear came true - the watch cannot keep accurate time. Since I've bought it it has been in for repairs twice now. Both instances it started running slow. I am not talking about 15 seconds per day slow - more like 10 minutes in a week. If you are to rely on your watch for accurate time, clearly this is a huge issue.

Trouble is most watch aficionados detest quartz watches with a passion. They create this perception that a watch has to be mechanical to have any value. Luckily I don't give a shit what other people think.

Most watch manufacturers will have both mechanical and quartz watches in their lineup. This makes it easier to find a combination of a well made watch with the accuracy inherent in a quartz movement. Personally I think these watch assholes are just full of it. Don't get me wrong - I love the idea behind a purely mechanical watch. Technically such a watch can last forever as long as it is well maintained. Most quartz based watches will fail after several decades due to the crystal and other electrical components not being repairable. That said, unless you intend to pass down this watch to your descendants, I see no reason why this should make quartz watches inferior. Just as I would not drive the same car for the rest of my life, I will get tired of my watch long before it stops working.

You spend hours preparing for a photo shoot. You make sure your camera is in perfect working order. You know your subject through and through, the environment your subject finds itself in, behaviour etc. Using techniques perfected during the past decade, you approach your subject with the intent of capturing all those glorious photons bouncing off its surface.

Casual photographers and armchair critics call this photography. They also call it photography when you take snapshots with your cellphone while walking past some landmark in a tourist town - not even bothering to stop. Clearly there is a difference between the two activities.

It is thus no surprise why I become livid when I show people photos I took, only to hear the despicable comment

Have you ever just stared in amazement at the stupidity of our pathetic attempts at maintaining security? I would estimate 80% of all applications that I install on servers specifically state that you should disable your anti virus protection before installing it. It is like a stranger knocking at your front door, asking you to unlock the door for the night. Seriously?

I just received a new Giesemann Futura LED light fixture for my new 60g reef aquarium, straight from Germany. Taking out the beautifully crafted fixture evoked high expectations for the performance of this device. It was sad when I realized the instructions did not work well. See, this is a high tech unit. To use it you need to program it. No switches, not even an on/off switch. It works via Bluetooth. So I set up everything as per the instructions only to find to my dismay that the password is not accepted. This is not a cheap device, so I was highly upset when the code they gave me did not work.

Waiting patiently for midnight PST time (09:00 CET), I called Giesemann in Germany. A guy picked up and responded to my request for support. He also noted that I was the one sending in a support request via email as well. He listened to my issue, and asked me (in English) whether he could call me back. Two minutes later the phone rang. It was him. He gave me the correct code and all was well. It is a stupid thing - a mistake on their part, but it is about appearances. I was terribly upset that this device would not work as expected considering its cost. However, the top notch service I received from this German guy impressed me beyond belief. I just wanted to mention this if anyone is considering buying one of their products - their service (at least for me) exceeded my expectations.

I have Roxio Toast 11 on Mac OS X 10.9 (Mavericks), and was trying to burn some Blu-Ray BD-R DL disks on my new Pioneer BDR-XU03 burner tethered to the USB 3 port on my MacBook Pro Retina. Unfortunately, even with fast Verbatim CD-R DL 6x disks, it took over 2 hours to burn each disk, and another hour to verify the 50GB of data. This translates to a write speed of between 1x and 2x.

Eventually I found the culprit - Mavericks' App Nap and PowerNap features. Turning off PowerNap in System Preferences, and right clicking Toast Titanium in Finder, and in Get Info disabling App Nap fixed the issue. It now burns at 4x (about 45 minutes for a 50GB disk) and does not stop mid way. It used to pause reading / writing the drive every 1 minute if Toast Titanium was not the active app.

Clearly this is a major issue that should be stated clearly on Roxio's web site, but as far as I know it is not.