This is a hell of a set of announcements! Sony is really doing some exciting things, and I can only hope this lights a candle under the collective asses of the competition.

The RX1 looks positively stunning--it's exactly what a lot of enthusiasts have been asking for (EVF is optional, but at least it's available). That is, it will be if it performs as it should. The asking price is amazingly high, but I have no doubt it'll sell if the initial reports are good. I'd love to have one, but that's too rich for my blood.

I'm not particularly in the market for something like the A99, but I appreciate what they're doing, and it looks like they're continuing to bet big on the EVF, which is interesting in this space.

The NEX-6 also looks good, although I wonder if there aren't getting to be too many models in that line-up. It's not quite clear who the different buyers of some of these models are supposed to be. In any case, it's clear that Sony is throwing out a lot of bets and seeing what's successful.

This is a great time to be in the market for a Sony!

Hook was the cutest kitten I'd ever seen. He was at a local pet food store, brought there by a rescue shelter along with his brothers and sisters, to be adopted. He'd just recently been born and was being bottle-fed, his mother having died giving birth to the litter. His tail was broken in the process of being born, and it made a distinctive hook shape. He was the feistiest of the litter, pouncing all over the other cats in the pen with him, which instantly endeared him to me. The people at the rescue called him "Hook Tail", which we shortened to Hook on adopting him.

Hook was a pet that only his owner could love. He positively hated strangers, hissing and baring his teeth at them. No one would believe me when I told them how affectionate he was with me when they weren't around, but it was true. He was a tabby, with soft, beautiful fur. So soft and beautiful in fact, that those qualities would entice people to pet him despite my warnings, and he often rewarded such a gesture with a swipe.

I'm a terrible singer, but for some reason, he couldn't resist my singing. No matter where he was or what he was doing, he'd come to me if I sang. It was weird and great at the same time. He'd come sit on my lap and purr his fool head off.

He was with me through marriage, divorce, marriage again, and the birth of my daughter. The latter was something of a concern, given his behavior with strangers. It wasn't a problem; he accepted Ainsley as family the day we brought her home. As soon as she was able to walk, she terrorized that poor cat and he endured it without (much) complaint.

It was a good eighteen (!) years, and they came to an end this evening. I got home from work, sat with him a bit, sang his favorite song, and he passed on. Val thinks he waited for me to get home to say goodbye before he went. Cats are a pain in the ass, but Hook has been an indelible part of my life, and I'll miss him.

My house has a little separate building in the backyard. When we bought the house, the building was billed as an "artist's studio". "The studio" as we've instead taken to calling it, based mostly on our discomfort at indirectly referring to ourselves as "artists", is a nice perk to the house. There are two rooms in the studio, and I use one as a home office. It's great for this purpose, except one thing: the wifi has always sucked.

I've long thought of spending some time running ethernet out the studio, but that's a project that would get me under the main house, drilling up into the walls. That's enough of a pain-in-the-ass that I've never done it. I've had a few days off this past week and I've spent some of them in the studio working on personal projects. The connection finally hurt for long enough that I decided to do something about it.

First, I moved the wifi base station (an Apple Airport Extreme) to a different location in the house. (This had a side benefit of getting it close to the entertainment center, and the components there are now wired directly to it; something else I've been meaning to do.) I had a Time Capsule extending the network in WDS mode at the back of the house, but that hadn't been working well enough to extend the signal out to the studio, so I tried actually moving it into the studio to see if it would be any better there.

As a quick aside, I should mention a couple of wifi measuring tips. First, there's a "Wi-Fi Diagnostics" app built in to OS X (Lion and Mountain Lion, at least) at /System/Library/CoreServices. Command-N in that app brings up a handy set of tools including signal and noise information about wifi networks in your area. I also ended up using an app called iStumbler, which worked pretty well too. Unfortunately, all these tools told me was that moving the access points I have around wasn't helping.

This outcome isn't terribly surprising. As terrible as our 1920's-era house is at keeping the weather out, it's good at blocking wifi signals. It's made of lath-and-plaster, and there's a decent amount of wire behind the lath to help keep the plaster on the walls, which doesn't help with radio signal transmission. I finally headed off to Fry's.

My solution, which I'm happy to say is working well, is the Amped Wireless Pro Smart Repeater. (I'll call it the PSR for short.) The PSR has 2 main components: a bi-directional antenna connected to a 600 mW amplifier and a small Power-over-Ethernet adapter. The antenna/amplifier has brackets to mount it (including outside; it's weatherproof) and the PoE adapter takes ethernet from the antenna. The PoE adapter has a power adapter and an ethernet port for a router or computer. I ran the included ethernet cable from the antenna to my desk, plugged the whole thing in, ran through a simple installation wizard, and POW! I was connected at decent speeds finally!

All this is to say, that if you have a long or complicated haul for a wifi signal, this gizmo did the trick for me, so give it a shot.