Goruck GR1

On July 6th I hiked over 14 miles on Mt. Harvard with my Goruck GR1. Inside it was nearly 30 pounds of water, food, clothing, and camera equipment. I've carried a lot of packs, and many of them have been uncomfortable under similar loads, and especially on tall peaks. Not the GR1. Despite having no hip belt I barely noticed the weight at all. While climbing over boulders and talus fields the pack stayed glued to my back and protected my gear. I slipped and fell twice along the way with no damage to the pack or my gear (or myself, thankfully). It rained on the way down, and while I do have a pack cover, it didn't seem necessary in the light drizzle. My only complaint so far is that while wearing a rain jacket I sometimes wished for a sternum strap. The straps had a tendency to spread further out with the reduced friction of the jacket. I have definitely found the day hiking pack that I'll use for the rest of my life. Here's a shot of the GR1 up on Mt. Elbert a few days earlier. To learn more about this great piece of gear please visit goruck.com (and if you like what you see, also consider visiting goruckchallenge.com).

Packing Light: WWDC Edition

Packing light is a skill I've learned the value of many times when hiking in Texas, New Mexico, and Colorado. It's a lot easier to climb a mountain without a bunch of extra stuff you don't need on your back. The same is true for traveling as well. If you don't have to worry about extra luggage you can make it through airports faster and easier and not have to worry about managing belongings on your trip. I think this is especially important for conferences, and also easier, since you are focused so much on the event at hand. So here's my packing list for the best conference ever: WWDC.

- Backpack
- 5 Mutual Mobile t-shirts
- Underwear and socks
- Running Shoes
- Workout Clothes (you never know)
- Jacket
- Rain Jacket
- Battery Pack
- iPad
- iPhone
- MacBook Pro
- Chargers
- Sunglasses
- Headphones
- Toothbrush, travel soap, deodorant
- Canon DSLR with wide and telephoto lenses. I am a photographer after all.

Thats it, and it all fits in the one backpack. A few notes on individual items:

1) Shoes. You're going to be walking a lot in San Francisco. Bring shoes that are comfortable to walk in.

2) Bring the long cable along with the charger to reach farther power outlets.

3) A jacket is definitely required for June in SF. The rain jacket is optional, but it's nice for a windbreaker while waiting in the keynote line at 4am.

4) The telephoto lens may be overkill, but I get a kick out of playing photojournalist during the keynote.

Thanks for reading! If you want to say hello at the conference feel free to @ me on the twitters.

WWDC Tips and Tricks

WWDC is an amazing experience and an incredible opportunity for developers.  It's so exciting to be around all of the other great members of the iOS and Mac development community who are just as excited about the state of the platform as you are.  With such an exciting event I feel that it's important to plan ahead in order to make the most of the opportunity.  Below are some notes on how to be prepared to get the most of the conference.

1) Prepare lab questions along with sample code. If you've got a specific question consider creating a sample project that effectively explains your issue. You want to be able to explain your problem to an Apple Engineer as quickly as possible, so be sure to think about the best way to get your point across.

2) If you're interested in attending the UI Review lab go straight upstairs to the 3rd floor in the morning to sign up for a spot. All of the other labs are first-come-first-serve but the UI and App Store Review labs are scheduled time slots.

3) Plan on arriving to sessions (especially popular ones) at least 10-15 minutes early. This isn't just to get a good seat, but for some sessions it may be just to get in at all. Ushers will close the doors to some sessions when they are completely full, so if you're really interested in attending a specific session plan to arrive early.

4) If a session isn't interesting to you, leave. You're there to get as much out of the conference as possible and if you're not getting anything out of a session you should walk out and head to another one or go to a lab. No one will be offended if you walk out.

5) Talk to other developers. If you are standing next to people you don't recognize then try to introduce yourself. If you see people whose work you admire, tell them. If you see people you recognize from the internet but haven't met, go up and introduce yourself. The Mac/iOS community is so great and everyone there will be very friendly and willing to talk to you if you make the effort.

6) Bring a card with your Twitter name on it. Twitter seems to be the best way for developers to stay in touch since it's something that everyone uses. I still keep up with several developers I met last year via Twitter. Paper cards do seem outdated but they still are the most effective way to pass out contact information at a conference.

7) Choose your seats wisely. Seats near the isle usually have power strips. Try to sit near the front or the center if possible. I usually tried to sit near the isles because I wanted to have an easy exit to get a good seat for the next session.

8) If a session is really interesting or important to you go up and talk to the presenter afterwards. They usually hang out for 10-15 minutes to answer questions, and that can be a great chance to ask a follow-up question if you have one. I got a couple good ARC questions answered after one of the Objective-C sessions last year as well as a CoreData question so I'm really glad I did that.

9) Apple will almost certainly provide beta versions of Mountain Lion, iOS 6, and possibly any other new SDKs the first day of the conference. Make sure you're prepared to receive them. The tables in the cafeteria are all outfitted with ethernet cable drops, which is what you'll need to use to download the files. If you have a MacBook Air, make sure and bring your ethernet adapter. I also recommend setting up your laptop with a separate partition for beta SDKs, especially on the off chance that the next version of Xcode requires Mountain Lion. Last year I set up my iPad and iPhone to sync to my work laptop (not trivial) but hopefully this year that won't be necessary thanks to iCloud. Time will tell.

10) Go to parties (duh)! Half the fun of the conference is going to hang out with the other developers. Go enjoy the atmosphere and meet new friends.

Bonus) The brown liquid substance served between morning sessions in the foyer may be labeled as Coffee and may even closely resemble Coffee, but I assure you that compared to Blue Bottle Coffee it is not Coffee. Blue Bottle is only 2 blocks away, and a great way to step out and get a refreshing beverage (or a great way to start the day out if you spent too much time on number 10).

Enchanted Rock

I just got back from a trip to Enchanted Rock and I wanted to write up a trip report.  Enchanted Rock is without question one of the best hiking spots close to Austin.  It's located about 90 minutes west of Austin between Fredericksburg, TX and Llano, TX.  That's actually quite convenient because there's great food in both: German in Fredericksburg and BBQ in Llano.  This trip to Enchanted Rock was quite special because it was completely covered in wildflowers.  Here's an example of what I mean:

We've gotten a lot of rain lately and that seems to have done wonders for the wildflowers.  I have never seen Enchanted Rock like this in more than 20 years, so if you've been waiting for an opportunity to go out there I HIGHLY recommend going now.

Enchanted Rock is also very interesting from a geologic perspective.  Enchanted Rock is part of an extensive batholith, an intrusion of igneous rock, which is one of the largest such structures in the state and the country.  It is composed of Precambrian rock and is one of the oldest pieces of exposed material in the United States.  Intrusions such as Enchanted Rock form deep in the earth’s crust when magma intrudes into a pocket and cools slowly to form igneous rocks such as Granite.  You can tell by the grain of the rock that the intrusion cooled first at the center and continued cooling outward from there.

One of the lesser known facts about Enchanted Rock is that it's not just part of a batholith, but is also an exfoliation dome.  Exfoliation occurs through weathering: water seeps into pores in the rock and freezes which causes it to contract and crack the rock  Concentric shells of the exposed surface crack like a shell, and slabs of rock are removed from the outer surface in layers.  You can see the layers everywhere, some of the pieces are left behind on the surface of the dome and others have slid down to the land below.  Here's some pictures of what some of these slabs look like, as well as an exfoliation layer just beginning to peal away.

If you've ever looking for a great place to hike, camp, or picnic then I highly recommend Enchanted Rock.  In addition to the great scenery and neat rocks there's also a network of caves and several good rock climbing routes (not to mention bouldering).  It's a great place to go.  And don't forget to stop in Fredericksburg for a beer afterwards.

See more photos at my 500px.

Canon 300mm F/4L IS Lens

I've been testing out the Canon 300mm F/4L IS lens this weekend and so far the results have been amazing. It managed to handle low-light situations just fine at the NCAA Track and Field Regionals, and compared favorably to the 300 F/2.8L IS (which costs and weighs about three times as much). Below are two images of the same athlete photographed two years apart, one with the 300 F/4L and one with the 300 F/2.8L. See if you can guess which is which.

The top image was shot with the 300 F/2.8 and the bottom one with the 300 F/4. I actually prefer the bottom one, but either way, both results are perfectly usable.

It also turns out that the 300 F/4 is an EXCELLENT macro lens! I spent the morning shooting wildflowers with it and I was blown away by the results. The lens focuses down to a mere 4ft (amazing for a 300mm lens!) and the results are also very good. The lens is incredibly sharp. I was also impressed with the shallow depth of field with a smooth and pleasing background blur. This is an excellent nature lens.

I'm very happy with what I've seen from the 300mm F/4L IS lens that I rented for the weekend and I think I will be extremely happy adding one to my kit in the near future.

Check out more shots at 500px.com/cnstoll.

This review also helped inform my decision.

Comments

As I finally take my blog live, I wanted to address the lack of comments.  I decided to follow the John Gruber/Matt Gemmell model and forego comments.  I'm not so much worried about negative or adversarial commentators as I am with just keeping my site simple.  There's no extra widgets or social feeds, and I didn't feel like I needed to have comments either.  That doesn't mean I wouldn't love to hear from you though.  I plan on linking most of my articles from Twitter as well, and I would love to have you comment on my posts there!

Universal Battery Charger

As part of my preperations for WWDC I decided to get an external battery charger for my iPhone.  I never actually ran out of power last year, but I got very close almost every day and I had to make an effort to keep it charged.  I think it will be nice to have a charger available for emergencies.  I looked on monoprice for their 30-pin compatible chargers and I found a few of them.  But there are a lot of problems with these.  For one thing, they're marked up on price compared to the USB options.  For another, if you use a case you'll have to take it off to use them.  I didn't want to deal with either of those issues, so I decided to combine parts to make my own.

Here's what I got:

That is a 2800 mAh battery, a USB 2.0 A Male to mini 5 pin Female adapter, and a USB 2.0 A Female to A Female coupler.  What that let's you do is plug any Apple 30-pin cable into the battery to charge your devices.

I tested it out on my iPhone and it worked very well.  It charged my phone from 50% to 100% in 1.5 hours and used about 3/4 of the battery's charge.  I'll definitely be keeping this guy charged up and in my backpack all week long at dub dub.

Screenshot of shopping cart below:

Thoughts on Lenses

Recently I've been thinking about upgrading my photography kit and trying to decide which lens to buy.  Canon is currently running a great special on their professional-level bodies and L-series lenses so there are some great deals right now.  It's always important to consider your use-case when purchasing camera equipment.  My work covers a broad range of categories but primarilly I shoot sports, nature, and landscape.  I'd been debating between upgrading either my 17-40 F/4L or 70-200 F/4L to their 2.8 cousins, or buying a lens in a completely different focal length range.  

I use Aperture for all of my photo management, which means that I not only have access to all of my photos but a complete database of all of my photo metadata.  I decided to run some analysis on that data to see which lenses that I have used produce the best photos.  These results don't necesarily say anything about the quality of these lenses, meerely my own preferences for which lens to use in a given situation and my own satisfaction with the results.  Note that I only own two of these lenses, the rest I've merely borrowed.

Out of all of the 5 star images in my library (1300 out of 162655) here is the breakdown per lens:

300mm F/2.8L IS: 305

400mm F/2.8L IS: 151

17-40mm F/4L: 280

70-200 F/2.8L IS: 98

70-200 F4L: 84 

The rest are the 600 F/4L IS, the 16-35 F/2.8L, 24-70 F/2.8L, the 28-135 F/3.5-5.6 IS, and point-shoots.

Sadly only three of these are from my iPhone :(

That tells me that the 17-40mm F/4L is by far the best value I've ever gotten out of a lens (600 dollars for hundreds of good shots) and that 300mm is my most used-per-good-shot focal length.   

These ratios are about the same if I lower to 1 star images and above (sample size of 25000 photos).  The only exception is that there are far fewer 400mm images here (roughly 1800) meaning that the 400mm produces far more exceptional results per-image-shot (which is to be expected since it costs about $8000).  I would love to own a 400mm F/2.8L if I could afford one.  I think it's the best lens I've ever used.

Overall I think this shows that the 17-40mm F/4L is an incredible lens for the money that has served me well, and that I need to invest in a lens in the 300mm focal length range for my own use.  It also shows that my usage of the 70-200 focal length range, even though it's an exceptional range (and both are exceptional lenses) is limited and that my results in that range don't tend to be as good as those in the wider range (landscape, etc.) and at the farther end of the range (closer to action).  I'll continue to rely on my 70-200 F/4L for mid range shots, and probably invest in a 300mm F/4L IS for future long range needs.

Aperture SSD Performance

I plan to write a lot about iOS development on my blog but I wanted to kick things off with some articles about photography.  I've been a photographer for more than 12 years and I've been shooting sports professionally for 5 years.  Photography is one of my passions and it's even better when it synergizes with my other passion: computers.  Below is an article I posted on Macrumors to test my hypothesis that an SSD would improve performance in some areas of Aperture usage.

I finally made the jump to an SSD for my primary volume, so I thought I'd share some of my experience with using it for Aperture so far. A while back, a lot of people told me that they thought SSDs would have no bearing on Aperture performance. The assumption was that most Aperture tasks are CPU bound (preview processing, exporting) so the SSD wouldn't offer much benefit. I decided to put this to the test using my own setup and workflow.

First, my setup. I'm using a 2010 3.2GHz Mac Pro with 13GB of RAM. I am using a referenced master's library configuration. The library package resides on the main volume (MacPro HD) and the masters reside on a 2TB RAID-1 mirrored volume (MacPro RAID). 

My basic workflow with Aperture is this. After returning from a shoot I import everything from the CF card (using a FW800 CF reader) into a new project. I mostly shoot sports, which is on a deadline, so I am typically editing immediately without waiting for the import to finish. This means that I am scanning through thumbnails and full size images before they are processed or cached. It's critical that this process doesn't hang or lag at all because I generally don't want to wait for the import to finish (especially on projects involving 2000+ photos). 

For the test I used a 1000 photo set from a trip I just took to India. I completed my import and basic editing process first with my library on a 1TB HD, and then again with the library on a 480GB SSD. In both tests I downloaded all the images from the CF card during the import. While the import was in progress I timed several benchmarks using a stopwatch (I admit this is not very scientific). I also continually scanned through thumbnails and full sizes to gauge the overall "feel" of each system. I also took a few other non-import related measurements that I feel are worth including.

So, here's the results.

HDD:
Mac Startup Time: 56s
Aperture Startup Time: 39s
All Photos Load Time: 12s
All Projects Load Time: 22s
Import Thumbnails (and metadata): 1:28
Copy All Images to Masters Directory: 1:50
Total Import Time: 3:20 (sum of two previous steps)
Process Embedded JPEGs: 2:57
Process All Images (previews): 14:25
Load 10 Previews (select an image, wait for it to fully load, right arrow to the next, wait, repeat): 17.4s

Notes: during this process scrolling locked up frequently. It was difficult and frustrating to flip between images. Tapping an image often resulted in a 4-5 second beach ball cursor. 


SSD:
Mac Startup Time: 21s
Aperture Startup Time: 10s
All Photos Load Time: 12s
All Projects Load Time: 8s
Import Thumbnails (and metadata): 12s
Copy All Images to Masters Directory: 1:51
Total Import Time: 2:20 (sum of two previous steps)
Process Embedded JPEGs: 1:57
Process All Images (previews): 12:30
Load 10 Previews (select an image, wait for it to fully load, right arrow to the next, wait, repeat): 15.1s

Notes: There were never any hangs of any sort while flipping between images during the import process. Tapping on an image resulted in an instant preview followed 2-3 seconds later by a full quality image.


I think the summary is that there is definitely a performance benefit to having the Aperture Library metadata on an SSD. I think the initial project import time is the best example. From 88s to 12s, a 6x improvement in performance. I have no doubt the hangs in performance with the HDD during this time were a result of the disk head moving back and forth writing metadata, previews, etc. and then having to seek back to find some bit of metadata from the library for a given image before showing it's preview in the viewer. For me, the lack of hangs and freezes during import make the SSD a huge win. I also like the faster startup time for Aperture, as well as more-quickly loading large projects (or multiple projects, like all photos). So yes, while exporting (or as shown in this example, preview generation) don't really benefit from the SSD, I still think it's worthwhile to use one with Aperture.

Original:

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=1357118

Hello World!

Hello, my name is Conrad.  I'm 6'5", 25, and this is my first blog post.