A friend recently gave me her Olympus Digital Camera, worried that she lost all of her photos on the xD memory card. She had recently taken a significant amount of photos, and at some point the camera marked the card as “not formatted”, and only gave the options to reformat the card, or power off the camera. Attaching the card to a computer via a memory card reader yielded similar results.

After some research, I found PhotoRec:

PhotoRec is file data recovery software designed to recover lost files including video, documents and archives from Hard Disks and CDRom and lost pictures (thus, its ‘Photo Recovery’ name) from digital camera memory. PhotoRec ignores the filesystem and goes after the underlying data, so it will still work even if your media’s filesystem has been severely damaged or re-formatted.

PhotoRec is free, this open source multi-platform application is distributed under GNU Public License.

Very simple to use software, was able to not only find all of the images currently on the media card, but about 1GB of since-deleted images as well. Pretty nice software, I sent them a donation.

My buddy Dustin sent me some Gears of War 2 style Cog Tags for free, which I think is really cool. I think he made them out of scrap metal.

Thanks Dustin!

I’m sure I’ll use this in the future: FlickrDown.

I’m coming up on the renewal of my Flickr pro account. Now that I’ve made ~150 sets, I see that non-pro accounts are limited to 3 sets, not to mention the photostream only shows the most recent 200 images; the others can’t be found in a convenient manner. Since I don’t want my ~147 sets to magically disappear, I better renew.

Tricky bastards.

For awhile I’ve been pretty disappointed by the audio on my HTPC. The subwoofer never really worked, and the audio levels were pretty abysmal. I have a JVC RX-6030VBK 5.1 setup with a toslink cable going between my Mac Mini and the receiver. The subwoofer is behind a door in my entertainment center, so the already-quiet sound is muffled. I’ve been thinking of replacing this system for awhile, because the audio quality is very weak.

Last night, I played around with the configuration on the unit, and set the subwoofer to +10 audio and the other 4 channels to -10. I tested it with some bass tracks, and man it was ground-shaking great. The wife and I watched some TV on it and were pleased with the experience. I think I’ll keep this system after all (at least for awhile).