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MiFi Money

MiFi

I got my MiFi less than 24 months ago, and I wrote about it six months later, with this bit about the costs:

I liked the idea of a prepaid account because I just wanted to buy the device and the “pay as you go” model fit my usage. Of course you can’t predict the future, and those Virgin Mobile folks have changed the pricing more than once. When I was planning to buy one, the 3 options were $10, $20, and $40, and by the time I bought one weeks later, it was $20, $40, and $50. And who know? They may change again…. Urgh.

Just dropping this in as a point of reference… the current prices are $35 for 2GB per month, and $55 for 5GB per month, and there’s an “unlimited” for $50 per month which gives you “3G speeds up to 2.5GB” which I assume means any data over 2.5GB will be delivered at the speed of a 14.4 modem. I’m not sure if the $50 is available to me because I’m grandfathered in, or not, but this is the kind of shit that drives me crazy. I mean, I knew the price would increase, just like I’m sure the price of Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription will increase, which is why no matter how “cheap” it is right now, I can’t be convinced it’ll be some amazing deal in the long run…

I’m not sure that Virgin Mobile is still the best solution for my MiFi needs (which end up being maybe 3 to 5 times per year) but I don’t know what the other (cheaper?) options might be… I did find TruConnect, which might be an option, but I’m open to suggestions.

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Nikon D3200 – Start!

Hey, we got a Nikon D3200 in the studio… how does it work? Just fine. I mean, there hasn’t been a ton of evaluation time with it yet, but I’ll mention one thing.

When we got in a Nikon D3x a few years back the biggest pain point was that we could not open the NEF files without using Nikon’s ViewNX software. (At least not until some software updates.) My workflow is built around using the Adobe Camera RAW converter in Photoshop, so that sort of sucked. Things got solved over time, but right now with the NEF files created by the Nikon D3200, I’m out of my simple NEF -> Photoshop workflow.

DNG 7.1 Converter

The solution for now is to grab the Adobe DNG Converter “Release Candidate” software, which lets you convert NEF files to DNG files so you can open as RAW in Photoshop. (And yeah, I’m still running Photoshop CS 5, btw.)

The version I got says “7.1.0.342 beta” and when you launch it you see that it will expire in June. (We assume a new release, or worse-case a new beta, will be out by then.)

DNG Expires

The Camera Raw plugin you see listed on that page? It didn’t work for me. In fact, before I could install it I had to install the Adobe Application Manager, and then it told me it couldn’t install again. I dug through the install files, and while I did find support files for the Nikon D800 (which we’ll get in soon… I hope!) there are no files for the Nikon D3200.

DNG UI

So for now I’ll just stick with converting NEF files to DNG files, and then opening those in Photoshop. It’s another step, and it’s a PITA, but it could be worse. And while Nikon’s new ViewNX2 is a big improvement to the crash-worthy ViewNX, I still don’t care for it as part of my preferred workflow.

So here’s hoping Adobe gets that RAW plugin updated soon, and that it’ll work with Photoshop CS 5.