Fujifilm X-T1 Review

My interest in Fujifilm camera's was rekindled when they released the X-Pro1. When they announced and released the X-T1 this year I had to have one. Why, because it had everything that my old Nikon D300 doesn't have;

Lighter
Smaller
More Mpix (16 versus 12)
Lighter quality lenses
Capable of mounting Leica and Nikon lenses (through the use of third party adapters).
Tilt-screen
Electronic View Finder (EVF)

So my Nikon gear went on sale, and the X-T1 with the Fujinon 18-55mm 1:2.8-4 R LM OIS kitlens found a way into my camera bag, and I skipped the Sony A7(r).

Posted on March 28, 2014 by Willem and filed under Gear, Photography, Review and tagged x-t1 macro kipon adapter Sigma Fujifilm.

REDELIJKHEID.COM Turned Black

and not that I wanted it.

This weekend all the REDELIJKHEID.COM services went down. This included;

Mail services (for the family)
My website (this website)
My father's website
My photo website
Tumblr
etc.

Posted on February 19, 2014 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Internet, No Way!!!, Personal, Website and tagged domain outage hover domaindirect.

Train iPhone 5s Touch ID

Touch ID is the name for the fingerprint reader in the new iPhone 5s. When you configure it, you have the possibility to register a number of fingers (5) with which you can unlock your iPhone.

Settings -> General -> Touch ID & Passcode -> Touch ID

For some reason this always failed after a couple of days on my phone. For some reason the fingers didn't 'register' properly, and I was forces to use the PIN.

The way to solve this (temporary) was to re-register the fingers, until I read about a way of training the device.
When you're in the menu where you normally register your fingerprints, you can register additional print data for each finger by just placing one og the already registered fingers on the home button. When the finger is recognized the registered finger entry on the iPhone turns grey for a second (as shown in the screenshot). Doing this for every finger a couple of times increases the registered data for those fingers. The more data that's registered the better the chance that the finger keeps getting recognized in the future.

UPDATE: With the iOS 7.1 update the Touch ID responds a lot better.

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Willem and filed under Apple, iPhone, Tips'n Tricks and tagged touch id 5s train iPhone.

Updating to iOS 7.0.5 Turned Ugly

During the update of my iPhone it got stuck in the so-called recovery mode. This means that everything on the iPhone is lost, and that you need to restore everything from a backup. Thankfully, the last backup was made 10 minutes before the upgrade process began. So no worries there.

The panic started to kick in when the actual recovery process terminated with an unknown error (17).

An unknown error occurred (17)

No matter what I tried, the error kept re-occurring

Searching the Interwebs, I founds several forums mentioning modifying the hosts file on your computer. Any entries referring to the apple.com domain should be removed.

Checking the hosts file out (located @ /etc/hosts on a Mac), I found a reference to a gs.apple.com with a specific IP address. At that point things started to dawn on me....

A couple of years ago I started to experiment with creating your own MobileMe thing (so I would have no need to purchase a MobileMe account back then). In that process you needed to fake some Apple web-servers. One of those servers was gs.apple.com.

After removing the entry from my hosts file and rebooting my iMac, the recovery process went flawlessly.

This 'experience' made me wonder; Did the 'crash' of the iPhone happen because of the hosts file entry? If so, this could be disastrous if someone made these servers unresponsive (e.g. DNS hack, or whatever), since the iPhone would become a brick. At least for as long as these servers are not accessible....

Posted on February 8, 2014 by Willem and filed under Annoying, Apple, iPhone, Personal, Software, Tips'n Tricks and tagged ios error 17 recovery mode iPhone.

The 4K Video Enabler

The biggest thing during The Consumers Electronics Show in Vegas (CES) was the 4K televisions. 4K is a reference to the resolution. Current TV's (LCD/LED/OLED/Plasma) usually have a resolution of 1920*1080 pixels (1080p). The 4K versions have 4 times the resolution. Capable of displaying UltraHD content at an affordable price. These TV's sell for $1000 - $2000.

All very nice, but the average Joe has no real access to 4K content. Sure, there are some videos on YouTube in 4K, but most of the time it's just plain old 1080p (if you're lucky). The current HD media (BluRay) isn't officially certified for 4k content, so the only alternative at the moment is downloadable content. Guess which industry is on top of things? (pun intended).

As with almost everything in the past (VHS / Internet / DVD), the porn industry is one of the first to embrace the new technology. Now all we need is fiber to the home with a minimum of 100Mbps to enjoy the new format.

Posted on February 8, 2014 by Willem and filed under News, Personal, TV, Video and tagged 4k video.

A Conference Call In Real Life

Posted on February 5, 2014 by Willem and filed under Fun and tagged Conference Call.

Use Cisco ISE for RADIUS Authentication with Juniper Junos Devices

While preparing for some Juniper exams, I wanted to test RADIUS authentication for Junos device access. This way of authenticating is helpful in larger networks. Instead of providing all the devices with several usernames and passwords you can use a centralized RADIUS server for authenticating on all those devices. If that RADIUS server uses the Active Directory as a user database you can login on your network devices using your regular username and password.

The RADIUS server of choice (at the moment of writing this) is Cisco Identity Service Engine (ISE). Overkill for this specific blog post, but fun to do.

Posted on January 22, 2014 by Willem and filed under Junos, Security, Tips'n Tricks and tagged Cisco ISE RADIUS Splunk.

Export Photos From Lightroom As Fine Art Prints

Usually, I export my photos from Adobe Lightroom for print or for online display. The exports for online use (SmugMug, Flickr, or several online forums contain a watermark in the bottom right corner. Something that can be done by using the export module in Adobe Lightroom.

I wrote an article a while back on how to do this using Photoshop actions, but this time I want to use a different approach. One without (or at least minimizing) the use of Adobe Photoshop, and using the power of Adobe Lightroom (plugins).

Posted on January 17, 2014 by Willem and filed under Tips'n Tricks, Photography and tagged Adobe Lightroom fine art border mogrify.

Expired SSL Certificates

When I'm doing my thing on customer projects, and there's some SSL stuff involved, I always keep reminding them to make sure that they renew their certificates in time. Why, because they almost always forget it the renew them in time, and after the expire stuff stops working, and they call us.

Guess what? My certificates expired this evening, so I got numerous warnings and errors in several applications that use those SSL certificates. Thankfully I run my own CA (XCA), and I documented where I use them, and how to replace them, so I was back in business in 10 minutes.

Lesson(s) learned: make a notification in my calendar to replace them ahead of time.

Posted on January 5, 2014 by Willem and filed under Security, Tips'n Tricks and tagged xca ssl certificates expire.

Using EX Firewall Filters With UAC

Network Access Control (NAC) is hot in Enterprise environments. NAC offers an excellent mechanism to (safely) allow various devices network connectivity and staying in control as a network administrator. There are numerous ways to allow iOS devices, BYOD, CYOD, Corporate laptops onto your network without compromising valuable corporate resources.

In my line of work I deal with several vendors / solutions to create these NAC protected environments. The most popular at the moment are;

Identity Service Engine (ISE) from Cisco
Junos Pulse Access Control (UAC) Service from Juniper

Both solutions have their pro's and cons. Juniper has an excellent client for the desktop to safely connect to the network, and an integration with their SRX firewalls to (dynamically) enforce firewall policies on a per user basis. Cisco on the other hand has a more flexible way of creating access policies, and the use of so-called downloadable Access Lists (dACL).

Posted on December 20, 2013 by Willem and filed under Junos, Security, Tips'n Tricks and tagged Junos firewall filter Juniper dot1x RADIUS Pulse UAC NAC Network Access Control.