To Richard who used the Contact Me form to ask about the Nikon D90

Posted on February 21, 2011 by Andrew

Google is bouncing back emails to the address you left, but here is my response if you happen to visit again:

Richard,

Sounds like you have a pretty good idea of what you want. If you want to quickly change shutter AND aperture in Manual mode then the D90 has a rear thumb wheel and front index finger wheel to adjust both. It also has a DOF preview button.

Truth is I’ve never had good luck with the tracking autofocus on my D90. There just are enough AF points to reliably track a moving subject. I shoot almost exclusively in continuous AF with a single AF point selected and the AE-L/AF-L button configured to lock focus while held. This allows me to always have continuous focusing, but I can still lock focus and recompose if needed.

The D7000 would be a completely different story and I’d likely trust it to track subjects for me.

For quick action you’ll be served well by the D90 or D7000. The D7000 has a more sophisticated AF system and can shoot a little faster (6 FPS vs 4.5 I think). About a $450 difference between the two so that all depends on your budget.

Another thing to think about is lens selection. Most of the cheap lenses start at f/3.5 and get to f/5.6 or even f/6.3 in a hurry. Zooms with a f/2.8 constant aperture can easily cost more than your body.

When you say you “don’t need all the gizmos” are you talking about autofocus and metering or things like HD video and other misc features?

Andrew

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TaxAct Premium Online for $11.90

Posted on December 30, 2010 by Andrew

Tax season is coming and I saw this deal for TaxAct that I’m going to try this year. Pretty much you just have to register using the link below and you’ll lock in a $11.90 price including Federal and State e-file. You don’t pay anything until you e-file.

Lock in $11.90 price for TaxAct Premium Online

I’ve used TurboTax Deluxe Online (need Schedule C) in the past because I got it for free through State Farm, but it’s only offered to their banking customers now. Problem is TurboTax is really starting to jack up prices for State e-filing. TurboTax Deluxe with State is about $55 at Amazon and H&R Block’s At Home (formerly TaxCut) is a little cheaper. The problem is they charge you $30 and $20 respectively for a State e-file on top of the purchase price. Even if they go on sale for $35-40 you’re still looking at $60-70 to do both e-files.

I’ll give TaxAct a try this year and maybe test my return in TurboTax as a direct comparison. Nice thing about the online versions is you can plug in your numbers and see the results without having to pay for anything.

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Google AdSense Kind Of Sucks

Posted on December 23, 2010 by Andrew

I’m sure there are a lot of people who have good success with Adsense, but I could never get it to work on this site. I get a lot of traffic from my WordPress plugins and some other posts. I configured my blog to show Adsense ads to incoming external visitors and ran ads for 2 years. The result? $75.

I think we’ve become blind to text ads if we haven’t already hidden them. I run Adblock Plus so never really see that many ads and even if I do I never click on them. There’s just something about allowing a third party to display content on your site that may or may not be completely relevant or trustworthy. I never click on ads so I’m not sure why I would expect other people to.

I had to close my entire AdSense account to get a pay out. The regular $100 threshold wasn’t too far away, but the way things were trending I doubt I would have ever gotten there. The last 4 or 5 months saw tens of thousands of impressions with zero earnings.

I’ve had much more success with Amazon’s affiliate links during the same time period. I think a fundamental difference is that visitors are getting to my posts because they are already interested in buying something. For example, the links in my posts about replacing the stereo in my Toyota Tacoma have a very high conversion rate. I link to all the items needed at a popular online retailer with low prices and free shipping and I get a cut of their order. I could remove the affiliate links and just put ads up, but I don’t know what’s going to show up, if people will click them and how much I’ll get (probably just a couple cents).

Maybe I just got lucky with my WordPress plugins pushing my other posts up in Google’s search results. All I know is more people bought Tacoma dash kits and wiring harnesses over clicking stupid AdSense ads.

Posted in Geek Stuff | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

Google Reader’s Recommended Items Sucks

Posted on December 22, 2010 by Andrew

Whenever I read or clear out my Google Reader subscriptions I’ll browse through my Recommended Items list to see if there’s anything of interest. The problem is Google populates this list based on some unknown factors and it’s currently impossible to customize. Clicking “Not Interested” does nothing and I’m pretty sure Google knows this considering the number of support threads started about it.

I’d say the current algorithm is about 30% accurate. The funny thing is all the stuff Google is assuming about me:

  • That I like sports in general
  • That I really like baseball
  • That I like the Seattle Mariners
  • That I live in Kansas
  • That I like University of Kansas sports
  • That I live in Tulsa
  • That I’m on a paleo diet
  • That I like Apple products
  • That I participate in the martial arts
  • That I have an Xbox 360

The other problem is some items show up from sites I’m already subscribed to. I’m subscribed to xkcd, but every time a new comic is published it shows up 2 or 3 times in Recommended Items.

Posted in Geek Stuff | Tagged , | 1 Comment

Mass Effect Impressions

Posted on December 12, 2010 by Andrew

Just finished a play through of Mass Effect on Normal difficulty in about 30 hours. Probably could have bumped the difficulty up since it was pretty easy. As far as content goes, the main story line was good, but short. A lot of the side assignments were a little repetitive and just took a good amount of exploring and conversation with NPC’s to collect them all.

I’d give it a solid B, nothing revolutionary. I’ll probably pick up Mass Effect 2 once it’s on sale for $5 like this one was.

Posted in Gaming Stuff | Tagged , | 2 Comments