Review: Nikon D500 DX SLR

tl;dr : This camera is the best DX camera yet when it comes to build quality and speed, and is the best camera I've ever used when it comes to autofocus capability (extremely helpful for sports and wildlife). Buy the D500 on Amazon.com for $1799.

Nikon D500 Body front

This week I had a chance to rent a Nikon D500 to shoot a soccer game, so I rented it for 3 days from BorrowLenses , and spent some time testing it in


Figuring out why an external USB hard drive won't spin down on my Mac

I am using a 2011 Mac mini as a backup server for all the data I store on iCloud , and for the first few days while I was setting up the Mac, I noticed the 4 TB and 2 TB external USB drives I had plugged in would spin down after a few minutes, and I would have blissful silence as long as there wasn't an active operation on that Mac (which should be fairly rare; just hourly Time Machine backups and periodic SSD activity since the iCloud libraries are


I made the switch from Aperture to Photos

Aperture to Photos macOS Sierra upgrade and migrate library using iCloud

tl;dr : ~600 GB photo library, took ~3 weeks to migrate, some things are awesome (access to all my photos everywhere, on any device), some things less so (faces don't get synced, no loupe, no five-star rating system, no pro-level editing/batch workflows). All-in-all, I wish Apple didn't ditch Aperture... but it's not the end of the world moving to Photos.

There


Experience with getting LASIK a second time (2016 Edition)

In 2010, I had LASIK eye surgery on both eyes and had my vision corrected to 20/16. It seems my eyes weren't content, as they elongated slightly in the following years, and my vision degraded back to about 20/60... meaning I had to buy a couple pairs of glasses from Zenni to bridge the gap until I decided whether I'd get LASIK again.

Apparently only a small percentage of those who get LASIK after their mid-

Jeff smiling with glasses pre-LASIK

Remove ALL your local Vagrant Boxes via this bash command

Assuming you have only one box per provider, this command will delete ALL Vagrant boxes you currently have on your system:

$ vagrant box list | cut -f 1 -d ' ' | xargs -L 1 vagrant box remove -f

This command does the following:

  1. vagrant box list : Prints out a list of all installed vagrant boxes (with two columns—box name or path, and meta info)
  2. cut -f 1 -d ' ' : Cuts the list and takes out just the first column

Fix macOS Screen Sharing frequent pauses or freezes

Ever since upgrading my Macs to macOS Sierra, there have been one or two times when using Screen Sharing (as part of Back to My Mac) when the session would freeze up, or intermittently pause. It seemed that every 5 or 10 seconds, there would be 10 seconds where the shared screen would stay frozen.

I could enter keystrokes, but things like pasting or clicking was hit-or-miss. This made it extremely annoying to work on one of my headless Macs (without a monitor plugged

Use Shared Clipboard menu option in Screen Sharing

Apple giveth, and Apple taketh away — the Escape key

In Apple's 10.12.1 macOS update, the file 'ApplePaySplashSA.tiff' seems to spilled the beans on Apple's new MacBook Pro's (and possibly other laptops') contextual function row key replacement. I'm guessing this change won't make it's way to Apple's Magic Keyboard for some time... but for users of Apple's laptops, having a 'software-defined' escape key might be a pill that's hard

Macbook Pro Escape Key missing OLED contextual keys

Replacing the foam speaker surround on my JBL speakers

About ten years ago, I bought a pair of used JBL J520m bookshelf speakers. They have nice, wood cabinets, a great-sounding woofer and tweeter, and a classic look (they don't really look dated, like 90% of 80s and 90s-era speakers).

JBL J520m speaker wall mounted with grill cover next to TV

Doesn't it look stately?

Whenever you buy used speakers, you should check the woofer cone and foam surround, as these are usually the first parts to deteriorate and cause terrible


Using Ansible through Windows 10's Subsystem for Linux

Ever since I heard about the new 'Beta' Windows Subsystem for Linux, which basically installs an Ubuntu LTS release inside of Windows 10 (currently 14.04), I've been meaning to give it a spin, and see if it can be a worthy replacement for Cygwin, Git shell, Cmder, etc. And what I was most interested in was whether I could finally point people to a more stable and friendly way of using Ansible on a Windows workstation.

In the past, there

Ansible running on Windows in the Ubuntu Bash shell

How I test Ansible configuration on 7 different OSes with Docker

The following post is an excerpt from chapter 11 in my book Ansible for DevOps . The example used is an Ansible role that installs Java —since the role is supposed to work across CentOS 6 and 7, Fedora 24, Ubuntu 12.04, 14.04, and 16.04, and Debian 8, I use Docker to run an end-to-end functional test on each of those Linux distributions. See an example test run in Travis CI ,

Ansible Java role - Travis CI Docker-based test results