Decided to get an external microphone for my Canon 60D DSLR, to record video at concerts with decent sound. After a bit of googling and brainstorming with @theproof, the focus settled on RODE products.

Today I did some big mass emails via Amazon SES. Delfin released a new music video, and I had to send a press release to about 1650 journalists’ inboxes and to 6500 inboxes from the fan base. A few numbers and a slap on the wrist from Amazon below the cut.

Installed the new Windows Developer Preview in VirtualBox. It started up on the third try, but it did. The new Metro interface gave the impression that it’s entirely aimed at tablets and finger control.

The weekend was spoiled by my MacBook Pro: it had gone to sleep at the office, woke up at home, and a few seconds later froze solid. Had to do a hard reset.

The OS refused to boot — neither from the main partition nor from the Recovery HD partition that OS X Lion creates for restoring/reinstalling the system. Although the MacBook could see both partitions. I managed to boot from a USB stick.

My first thought was something wrong with the hard drive — either partitions had detached or the disk was dying. I pulled the drive, hooked it up to my second Mac via a USB enclosure. All files in place, no signs of trouble. OK, I figured, time to reinstall macOS from scratch — looked like a software glitch, those upgrade-from-previous-version updates can be flaky.

Backed up everything, ran Disk Utility’s repair, it fixed something I didn’t understand. Stuck the drive back in — decided to try booting from it — and lo and behold, everything worked. I breathed a sigh of relief, shut down, started up, slept the laptop, woke it — all fine.

Needed to mount a drive with the HFS+ file system (the one Mac OS X uses). It’s pretty easy. Ubuntu’s repos have a package called hfsplus.

sudo aptitude install hfsplus
sudo mount -t hfsplus /dev/sdf2 /home/username/folder

To unmount:

sudo umount -t hfsplus /dev/sdb2

Hooray — got myself a new body, the Canon 60D. I’d been wanting a 7D for a long time, but eventually, thanks to @theproof and a couple of other people, it turned out the 60D has the same internals as the 7D — same processor and same sensor. The 7D just has two processors, which only really affects burst-shooting speed and how many frames in a row it can manage. A few photos taken on the way home, below the cut.

Another post — to help things settle in my own head. About working with JSON in Objective-C, using parsing of tweets from Twitter’s public timeline as an example.