Data recovery is expensive. For the crashed external Maxtor 5000DV I wrote about a few days ago, I was given an estimate of $500 - $1000. Before I pony up the loot, I was wondering if there aren’t any safe DIY remedies.
I Googled “hard drive spin down force”, “hard drive resurrection”, “hard drive repair” and […]

One of my external hard-drives recently crashed. Everything on it was backed up, but not “to date” — the backup is about a month old. I’ll soon post more on that crash as well as some new backup strategies I’ve been playing with.
Anyway, in devising one part (or hierarchical tier) of my new risk-mitigating backup […]

This image is one of approx. 200 sequentially-photographed still frames — shot approx. one frame / 0.25 sec. –  from a slowly-moving bicycle. The goal was an attempt to create a “unique” type of time-lapse sequence. I attached the camera to a horizontally-”mounted” tripod — the tripod was bungee-corded to the rear bike rack. In […]

Here’s a dusk-time, south-facing view of the “South Bay” (aka Santa Monica bay) from about 1,000 feet up in Temescal State Park (part of Topanga State Park). This image is actually one frame (of about 120) in a time-lapse sequence I captured in November 2005. Temescal Park is in the Santa Monica Mountains, which hug […]

Her name is Araneidae and she lives roughly six miles from me. Her pad is on multi-million-dollar property, located about 1/4 mile from the beach (in the city of Manhattan Beach).

The images above were taken 2005-09-20. These spiders only come out for a few weeks in the early fall.
The images above remind me of a new BBC nature-series […]

I added these floral images to this site recently, but I’m not sure what many of them are commonly called. The botanical garden I visited only labeled a few of their species. (The “missing” labels may very well have been hidden under leaves or bushes; I didn’t actively look for them). 
To start off, this floral species […]

About a week ago, I finally visited South Coast Botanical Gardens – about 14 miles south of my home in Gardena – and snapped a couple of shots. Many of the flowers are spring-blooming here in California, now. We had an especially “cold” winter — by So Cal standards — so “spring” really feels like a new […]