Blog

I have a pile of camera bags.

All of them have been bought for different equipment at different times, but most wind up being bought from a company called Powepro. They make generally decent stuff and I’ve gotten pretty good use out of many of the bags I’ve picked up, but when I got my Z50 I wound up needing something easy to walk around with and take photos with.

The Lowepro Nova 5 AW that I used for years with my old kit is just too big for the Mirrorless kit that i’m using right now, and it’s bulky and cumbersome when walking around. I did pick up a Adventura BP 300 III and while that’s not horrible it’s still too big if I’m just walking around taking snapshots. And you can’t access anything in there without taking it off so not so great for stashing things you need frequent access to.

And while Lowepro is generally my go-to for this type of thing all their bags all look like photography gear and I kind of wanted something a that doesn’t scream tourist with a pile of expensive camera gear.

The one bag that I kept hearing mentioned was the sling bags from Peak Design. Most of the others seemed to be being compared to that bag as the “gold standard”. I have both a Cuff and Leash from Peak Desgin for my camera but I didn’t pay full price for those. The anchors are neat, and the ability to swap things around to whatever strap configuration I want is very cool I don’t think I would have bit if I had to pay full price for them.

Looking at their bags in general I could see myself spending 180$ on a sling bag, but at that price it’s at a place where I would be willing to try alternate bags if they were cheaper. However most of the sling bags that I found interesting where still around the 140$ range and falls into a price range where I have to think on it for a bit.

Last week after being dragged down to the mall by one of my kids I was walking through the camera shop and saw they had the Peak Design 6L Sling on sale for a decent price (it’s on sale on Peak Design’s page as well for what it’s worth) and after poking at it for a bit I decided to grab one and give it a try since it was down into the same price as the other bags I was looking at because the Peak design ones were pricier than I wanted to spend.

There’s piles of reviews on this bag online in other places so I’m not getting into details here but so far the thing works well. It fits more than I would need walking around, and is well built. All in I’m ok with having spent what I did on this bag since it’s a good walking around bag. However you can’t toss a laptop in there and there’s still a pile of other charging and other accessories that I need to be packing around so it’s not a one bag to rule them all type of thing but it’s close.

I suppose that at some point I’ll have to have a think on their backpacks and see if they would be worth the 300$+ asking price for them. But for now the Lowpro bag will probably be good enough for when I’m travelling, and I’ll just pack the sling bag for me to take walking around.

One of the things that I wasn’t a huge fan of with Unraid was the reliance on a USB key for both booting the device and handling the licensing for the product on the server that it was running on. While USB keys aren’t horrible on their own they aren’t super reliable and I do tend to kill them on a fairly regular basis.

It’s not been a huge issue because the things are cheap enough that they aren’t even worth bothering to RMA them when they fail.

For a piece of install media or where I’m just passing files between machines that’s not an issue but for the device that boots one of my more important servers, that’s not ideal.

The latest release of Unraid did two things that changed this.

The first was to give the option to tie the licensing to the TPM module on the computer, if you happen to have one. Generally these are used to store the keys for encryption and other sensitive information, however in this case it means that the license for my server doesn’t reside on a 20$ piece of hardware that’s commonly prone to failure over time.

The second was to add support for what they are calling “Internal Boot” – in short all that means is that you can boot from an internal disk instead of a USB device. Something that’s going to boost reliability since SSD’s generally last longer than a USB key. It’s also opened up the ability to use a mirrored set of SSD’s for your boot, so that when one does fail your server doesn’t wind up dead in the water.

So, given that the changes do take care of two of the things that I wasn’t fond of with Unraid I sat down this weekend and stepped through their walkthroughs to move over to using the TPM and a internal boot device for booting the server. The process was painless – and gave me an excuse to get around to installing a HBA that was sent my way and getting a a 3d printed mount in place to hold a fan over the thing to keep it cool.

Either case the server is back up and running now, hopefully the HPA helps performance a bit, but the real reason for tossing that in was to free up some more SATA ports for additional disks in the future. Eventually I’m going to need more capacity on the server an at that point having a couple of extra pots to slot in some larger disks to start replacing things will be very helpful.

I suppose that it was bound to happen at some point but Sony just posted this;

https://blog.playstation.com/2026/07/01/physical-disc-production-ending-in-january-2028-for-new-games-releasing-on-playstation-consoles

And honestly I didn’t figure that it would have been Sony deciding to kill off physical media first. I know that Microsoft was planning on doing this when they were planning the Xbox One release and the backlash was bad enough that they backtracked on that decision.

Personally I’m of mixed feelings on this one.

Digital and Physical media both have their own pros and cons. Personally most of what I’ve been using for over the last 20 years have all been digital downloads and most physical media that I have is remnants from days gone by. And while the digital media is convenient as hell for saving space it’s also going to be completely reliant on the various stores that serve it remaining online and running later down the road. So at some point in the future when Nintendo shuts down the store for the Nintendo Switch that’s going to present issues with reinstalling my games that were purchased through their eShop. On the other hand my Super Nintendo that’s over 30 years old at this point still plays games without any issue since the game is reliant on the physical media that the game came on.

The other thing that’s going to be a change is the lack of physical media is going to create concerns around the used market for games. It used to be that you could walk into a local game store and pick up a used game for a reasonably cheap price compared to when they were new at release. With digital licenses that market is pretty much going to die off unless there’s provisions for people to trade licenses through whatever store is in place for your platform.

Another down side is that you don’t really own the game when you get a digital copy. You have a license to use the software, but you don’t actually own it and there is a realistic possibility that someone could take action that results in you no longer being able to play the game that you “purchased”. With physical media it’s a bit harder to make that happen since you have physical possession of the object that is needed to run the code.

Hell, Sony themselves, decided to remove a bunch of digitally purchased moves from users accounts a short time ago so it’s not like this never happens.

Practically this change isn’t as big a thing as it would seem since a lot of the media that’s out there is just holding a small license file to allow the game that the console to downloads to run. Even if a copy of the game is on the media the way that things wind up getting continually patched and updated trying to get stuff running without an Internet connection is generally a pain in the ass anyhow.

Kind of feel sorry for the folks at GameStop/EB Games, once the used game market dries up there’s not going to be much reason to go there unless you need some Funko Pops.

Oh, wait. Well shit. That’s not good news.

Sometimes things work out for stat holidays. However this year Canada Day lands on a Wednesday.

A. Wednesday.

Ugh. Well I’ll take the day off but would have been nice if we could have hit a long weekend out of this one.

Well it happened today. Apple jacked up their pricing today, likely to deal with the increase in DRAM and NAND flash over the past while.

Honestly I’m a little surprised that it took this long for them to go and follow all the others who have already moved up and increased pricing over the last couple of years. I was kind of expecting that they would be doing this in conjunction with new devices being released but I guess it’s gotten to the point where they were not willing to just sit on it further.

The thing is that the increases in pricing have started to make some things actually look reasonable in the current market. The Framework desktop is one of those devices. It was released after the price increases in DRAM really hit so it’s always been a pricy option in my opinion, but now that other things are catching up it’s not looking like a hugely bad idea to pick one of them up.

Conversely the Steam Machine that just hit the market is something that I really don’t care for the pricing of. For the price there’s not enough performance, memory, or storage in there to justify the price. If it was sitting around the 800$ mark I might be interesting in looking at one but for over 1000$ that’s kind of a hard pass for me. Especially when I can build something almost the same size for less money that I can upgrade the CPU on and put a dedicated GPU into.

And yes, I can’t build one quite as small as the Steam Machine, but I can get pretty darn close with a Mini ITX build at a lower price point.

I’m kind of glad that I picked up a laptop when I did. The M3 that I’m running is fast enough for anything that I want to do and while the M4 would have been nice to have at least I was able to dodge the price increases.

My Desktop machine however is getting a bit longer in the tooth and could benefit from a upgrade but I think that I’ll hold off until I can get some DDR5 at a more reasonable price.

One of the things that I do enjoy is going out and getting some camping on.

Locally it’s sometimes hard to find a spot at the local sites but when we can it’s nice to get out and disconnect from things for a couple of days and just enjoy the lack of connectivity. Honestly most of what we do while camping winds up being just sitting and reading books and ignoring what’s going on around us.

Our camping isn’t quite sitting around in tents, but it’s not glamping either. We tend to wind up out with an our tent trailer, some coverage against weather and that’s about it. A camper might be nice, but honestly I don’t want to have to maintain an entire house that I’m pulling around.

By the time that this goes live I would have disconnected at least once and hopefully the weather cooperated with the trip. While I don’t mind listening to the sound of rain it’s not something that I enjoy spending a whole week sitting around in.

Well, as I mentioned earlier I injured myself training, and while it’s healing it’s not as quick as I would like.

In fact last week my ankle swelled up like a balloon as all the fluid drained out of my calf and into my foot.

Wearing some compression socks for a few days has pushed most of that out and my foot is largely back to a normal size so things are healing up. The problem is that I don’t trust myself not to go full send when training and I really don’t want to be re-injuring this and leaving myself in a place where I can’t compete in September.

So as much as I might like to be able to jump right back into things I’ll be taking it easy for a while yet.

I’ve taken several shots at blogging here over the course of the last several years. Most have petered out pretty quickly, and have have little information of any value in the long term. This time around I’m trying much harder to make sure that I keep things posting a couple of times a week but it’s very hard to actually come up with topics that are actually interesting to me to fill out.

Part of the issue is that I try to stay away from things like politics and stick with things that aren’t just posted for purposes of stoking fires and fostering rage within people.

It would be really easy to start commenting on political crap, but frankly I’m not someone who’s an expert on a lot of what’s going on in the world and my viewpoint is very much biased in a number of different ways, so it’s not like I can really provide anything unbiased to people.

I guess that I’ll continue spouting off here on things, hopefully I don’t start repeating myself too soon.

Now that I’ve had the new camera for a couple of months I can actually have enough time to have a real opinion on the thing. Coming from a D70 bought back in 2004 the Z Series cameras are different enough that it’s a big leap forward, but similar enough that I’m not having to relearn everything from scratch.

First of all I do like the size of the thing. The D70 wasn’t huge as far as cameras go but it wasn’t something that you could toss in a pocket and just go about your day. While I could toss it in a backpack it was big enough that you really did know it was there. While the Z50 II still is a little larger than pocket size if you toss a pancake lens on there it’s getting down to the point where it feels like it’s almost something that you could just slip away.

The kit lenses that the camera came with are adequate. In my case I did get the two lens set with a 16-50 and a 50-250 zoom. They work fine, are lightweight, and take reasonable pictures. I’m not a fan of how far the 50-250 extends out when taking photos, it really feels a bit awkward but it’s not really my go-to lens and the only time that I pull it out so far is for grading photos of birds or things that I want to pull in closer so it’s not something that’s getting a huge amount of use so I’m disinclined to fix the issue by buying more glass.

The 16-50 works well, is small, compact, and basically disappears into the camera when it’s mounted. Given that it’s the default kit lens it’s definitely something worthwhile to keep in the pack.

The camera didn’t come with a charger for the batteries in the box, so that’s a bit of a downer but something that can be corrected easily enough with a bit of a browse through Amazon. The battery can be charged in the camera, however that does tie up the camera while charging a battery. One thing that’s interesting since the last time that I picked up a battery is that a lot of them show up with a USB-C socket right on the battery so as long as you have a power source that can provide USB power you are good to go. And sine most of the time I’ll be having a laptop with a USB power brick kicking around the lack of a dedicated charger isn’t as bad a thing as it was the last time around.

Handling wise the only thing that I’m not a fan of is the depth, it’s not quite long enough for my entire hand so my pinkie winds up slipping under the bottom of the camera when shooting. It’s not uncomfortable but I would personally prefer a little more length there. That would however make the camera heavier and bulkier so it’s a tradeoff that I can live with.

Battery life is good enough that most of the time I’m not worried about running out. I’ve been getting ~450 shots per charge off of the battery, not sure if that’s typical or not but good enough for what I’m doing.

So far I’m happy with the results I’ve been getting, now I just need to spend more time with the camera and find more interesting things to shoot. Looks like I’ll have to line up some more hikes in the coming weeks or something.

So with the IBJJF Worlds happening down in Vegas in September, and me looking at going, I’m currently digging through looking a pricing for flights and trying to figure out if I should fly or if it might be a better idea to fly down.

Personally I like road trips, it’s a good way to see things that you would just miss flying over and this trip down is really about the experience of going down to compete so having the trip down be part of that kind of makes sense.

On the other hand flying down takes less time, less stress, and actually looks like it’s going to be cheaper overall compared to driving down.

At one point we were thinking of going town as a family thing. Kids, wife, me, all driving down to watch the fights and in that case driving would be cheaper than flying. However since then it’s looking like it’s just going to be me headed down so flying winds up being the cheaper of the options.

So as much as a epic road trip would be fun, this time it’s probably just a flight down and call it a day.