Kelso Dunes, December 2010

We just spent a few days in Las Vegas.  On the way there, we stopped at the Kelso Dunes.  By our calculation, it only adds about forty miles to the route.  Of course, you had better make sure you have a full tank of gas, because the stretch from the dunes back to the 15 is pretty desolate.  We really like the Kelso Dunes.  I have never had much photographing it, but I tried again anyway, and did come up with some results.  The full gallery of Kelso dunes photographs is here, and here are a selection of favorites.

A few picks:

My China photos: An introduction

This entry is a companion to my selection of favorite photographs from China. You are also welcome to browse all of my China photos in their original galleries.

I travel to China frequently. I first visited in 1987, then had longer stays in 1989/1990 and 1992/1993, and then started traveling there frequently again starting in 1999. Most of my early extended stays were either in Beijing or Taiwan.  Obviously, China has changed a great deal since the late eighties. Unfortunately, I didn't take many pictures on those early visits. I've been trying to make up for lost time by taking lots of pictures recently and sharing them here.  More recently, I have been visiting Hong Kong and Taiwan more often.  I may start spending more time in Shanghai.

I am usually busy with work during the day when I am in China, but at night I often have the opportunity to get out and walk around and take pictures. I prefer to take pictures at night, anyway.  I guess I'm inspired by Edward Hopper's Nighthawks.  I particularly like to take photos of well-lit shops or restaurants on otherwise deserted and dark streets.  More generally, I really enjoy walking around urban neighborhoods and talking to people and taking pictures. Fortunately, I speak Mandarin Chinese. Everywhere I go, people are very friendly, interested, and helpful.

 I have created collections of my selected favorite photos from Beijing, Hong Kong, Shanghai, Taiwan. These collections are probably the best place to start if you want to browse my best photos.  As alluded to earlier, I really enjoy taking pictures at night, thus I have created a collection of selected favorite night photos from China.

You are also welcome to browse the galleries from which the photos in these collections are drawn.  My collection of galleries of Beijing photos is especially extensive: Beijing hutongs, Beijing museums, parks and temples, Beijing Wudaokou, Beijing Zhongguancun, the Great Wall, Peking University, and miscellaneous other Beijing.  I also have galleries of photos from Guilin, Hong Kong, Xian, Taiwan and the Three Gorges.

Also be sure to check out all my blog entries related to China.

My California photos: an introduction

I live in California, so of course I have lots of pictures of the state. Since I live in Los Angeles, many of my pictures are from that city, and the area nearby. I also have some shots that I am proud of from the deserts, the mountains, and the redwood forests on the north coast.

California is an amazing place. I fell in love with the state when I was still in high school and had an opportunity to visit the summer after my junior year. My father and I started out from Las Vegas, drove down to Los Angeles and spent a few days there, came up the coast on the 1 and 101, and spent a few days in the Bay Area, and then drove eastward, crossing the Sierras through Yosemite, and then crossing the White Mountains into Nevada and then back to Nevada.  Based on that experience, I decided to come here for college, and was lucky enough to be admitted to a good school. I went elsewhere for graduate school, but have been here ever since.

I still like to think California is one of the greatest places in the world. The state faces many challenges but I am confident it will muddle its way through. It certainly can't be beat for variety: cities, deserts, mountains, agricultural fields, forests...

Start by checking out my selections of favorite California pictures and favorite Los Angeles pictures.  You can also check out my favorites from Death Valley, Joshua Tree, the redwoods, and the deserts.

You are also welcome to browse all of the California galleries from which these selections of favorites were drawn.  I have collections of galleries for Death Valley, the Huntington Library, Joshua Tree, Los Angeles, Manhattan Beach and South Bay, UCLA and Westwood, Yosemite,  other, mainly coastal landscapes, historical sites, and the redwood forests.

Experiences with Android apps that stream music from a PC: Orb, Subsonic, Audiogalaxy

I've been wanting to use my Android phone (originally a HTC G1, then a Samsung Vibrant, and now a HTC G2) as my primary music devices for some time. I have already bought stereo Bluetooth receivers that I have hooked up to the RCA inputs on the receivers on my home stereos. Streaming music straight to the stereo from my phone is SO much easier than streaming from a PC, or practically any other device, just because the phone is right there in my hand and is easy to control. I have experimented with a variety of apps that stream music, and will probably continue experimenting. In my experience, none of them is quite perfect, in the sense of meeting all of my needs. That said, I thought I would create a post to record notes about my experiences with the apps that I try. I'll update it from time to time.

In this post I talk about my somewhat limited experiences with apps to stream music from a PC.  There are three apps in this space that I hear about most frequently, and have tried out: Orb, Subsonic, and Audiogalaxy.  I  have another post about services like Rhapsody, MOG, and so forth that stream from the cloud.

Orb

Orb streams music and other media from a PC that is set up as server.  The web interface that allows you to access your collection is very feature rich, allowing searches for tracks based on any of the meta data, including tags.  Creation of playlists based on search results is very easy, via drag-and-drop.  So for example I can search for all my classical tracks that I have rated four stars and above, yielding two thousand tracks or so, and then drag and drop the resulting list to create a new playlist.  It can even stream video, so when it is working properly, in principle you can stream home video from your server at home to your handset.  Setup of the server is very straightforward and it seems to have no problem at all working on a machine behind a corporate firewall, or behind a home router, and doesn't require mucking around with port forwarding or opening up ports.  Overall, it is immensely ambitious in terms of its functionality, and if it worked as intended, it would hands down be one of the best apps out there.

In spite of my enthusiasm, I have reservations.  I have been dabbling with Orb for years now, even before an Android app was available, and it has never been glitch-free.  When I tried Orb over the summer, the main problem was simply that the app was not robust or stable.  It was almost impossible to listen to more than a few songs at a time without the music skipping or cutting out completely.  Video streaming worked only occasionally.  Sometimes the app locked up the phone.

I used again for a few weeks and it was working better than it did over the summer.  I have even gone running with it, streaming my exercise playlist over 3G for well over an hour, and it worked fine.  I don't think there has been a new version of the Android app, so perhaps there have been improvements with the server software.  The app generally seems to work well, though sometimes there is more of a lag after making a selection than I would normally like.  The Android app hasn't been updated since mid-2010, however, so I don't know what the future holds for the app.  Orb seems to be putting most of its effort into its Orb device. (Updated 12/31/2010)

There are some other minor annoyances.  I could never get the Orb server to import m3u playlists created by Mediamonkey playlists.  Songs were randomly dropped from the playlist, and no playlist that was imported seemed to end up with more than a few hundred songs.  That is less of an issue now that I have figured out how to combine search in Orb with drag and drop playlist creation to quickly produce very large playlists.  Another oddity is that Orb reads in ratings with one more star for each track than I assigned in Mediamonkey.  Go figure.

Subsonic

The comments about this app looked pretty good, so I decided to give it a try.  In fact, I tried it twice.  I installed once on my office machine and once on my home machine.  The installation and configuration process is not intuitive at all.  After I went through all that, in neither case could I access the server from anywhere else.  I tried paying for the custom URL functionality but that didn't work either.  There seemed to be a lot of stuff about port forwarding or changing ports or opening up ports, but I can't muck around with that at all on my office machine, and I don't feel like messing with that on my home machine.  I want anything I install to be up and running in moments, not hours.

The comments at the Market are extremely positive, so I guess for some people who have the right configuration to begin with, or spend the time to open up or change ports or customize the port forwarding and so forth, it probably works really well.  That said, I don't think I would recommend this for anyone who isn't technically sophisticated, and who doesn't have complete control over their firewall and router settings.

Update (3/18/2011): I tried again with Subsonic, setting up my home machine as a server, and it works pretty well.  I did have to manually set up port forwarding on my router, which wasn't that difficult.  I am pretty impressed with the performance.  It is definitely much less glitchy than Orb.  It is extremely robust.  Sometimes after very extended listening the app simply crashes, but it is easy to restart.  Unlike Audiogalaxy (below) it imports .m3u playlists.  Although I think it seems to choke on very large playlists, i.e. ones with thousands of songs.  Searching my music library works like a charm, and has a nice variety of views.  And it streams video pretty robustly!  So I'm sold on Subsonic now.   I wish I could run it from my office machine, but that isn't Subsonic's fault.  I suppose I could ask tech support at the office to open up one of the ports for my machine on the company firewall, but that isn't worth the effort.

Subsonic's business model is a bit odd.  The app is free, but you have to pay for the server on your PC after the trial period is over.  I guess I would like it to be the other way around, since buying an app is so easy, whereas paying for software on a PC requires me to whip out a credit card and type.  Also, as far as I could tell, you need to make a donation for each PC on which you install the server.  I uninstalled from my office machine and installed on my home machine and it looked like if I wanted to continue with the added functionality after the trial period was up, I would need to make another donation.

Audiogalaxy

I tried this out.  Installation was easy, even on an office machine behind a firewall, and it seemed to work as promised.  The app was definitely very robust.  I didn't pursue it, however, since the functionality seemed pretty limited.  For one thing, there was no easy way to import .m3u playlists.  Apparently it is possible to import iTunes playlists, but I don't run iTunes.  More of a problem was that it only allowed browsing by artist and album.  I didn't see any way to browse or search on ratings or other meta information.  Orb has very powerful search on metadata and allows for quick creation of playlists based on the results.  I didn't see anything comparable in Audiogalaxy.  I think Audiogalaxy is the most robust of the three streaming options I have talked about here, but has the least functionality in terms of user interface.

My Beijing photographs: an introduction

This is the first in what I intend to be a set of entries introducing collections of my favorite photographs from specific places, or on specific subjects. I have been putting this sort of text in the gallery descriptions at my Smugmug site, but I find that isn't really the best place for displaying long blocks of text.

This entry is a companion to the collection of favorite photographs from Beijing at my Smugmug site.

Until about 2008, Beijing was the city in China that I visited most. I first visited Beijing in 1987, when I was an undergraduate and spent the summer at Peking University. I then spent several more months there in the first half of 1990. After a long hiatus, I began visiting regularly again in 1999. The city has been transformed completely in the time since I first visited, yet I still find it the most interesting and enjoyable place in China.

One of my regrets is that during my initial visits to Beijing, I didn't really take many photographs. The city that existed then is now gone, and I don't have anything except memories. Now when I am there, I make a point of spending my free evenings taking pictures in various neighborhoods to preserve some feeling of the city as it is right now, on the assumption that it will change again soon.

I really like the people of Beijing. They are garrulous, even loquacious, but rarely mendacious. Complete strangers are happy to share their opinions on international relations, Michael Jackson, the Lakers, American politics, history, or practically any other subject as soon as they realize I can understand Chinese. I don't get this anywhere else in China.

I have many galleries of Beijing photos, organized by location. These include Peking University (北京大学）, Wudaokou (五道口), Zhongguancun, some of the hutong (胡同)　neighborhoods, especially Houhai (后海)　and Nanluoguxiang　(南锣鼓巷). I also have a collection of galleries for Factory 798, the Military Museum, and some other miscellaneous but interesting places. For good measure I have a collection of galleries of photos from various sites on the Great Wall.

You can also view selections of my favorites from the hutong neighborhoods Houhai and Nanluoguxiang, Wudaokou, Zhongguancun, the Great Wall, and Peking University.

Be sure to check out all my other blog entries tagged Beijing

Downtown Palo Alto, in December 2010

I was up in Palo Alto for a few days earlier this week.  I didn't have much time for photography, except that one evening while walking to a restaurant to join a dinner, I brought my camera and  took a few random pictures.  The full gallery is here: http://www.canghuixu.com/California/Downtown-Palo-Alto/15118175_PGeGD.

Here are a few that I liked...

Facebook Fan Page

I created a Facebook Fan Page as a companion to my photo site and blog:  http://www.facebook.com/pages/Canghuixu-Photography/183163141698781

If I have this set up properly, my blog, Twitter feed, and photo galleries should now all be accessible there, so you can keep up to date without ever having to leave Facebook.  So go visit the page and 'Like' me.  We'll see how that goes.  I used the SmugmugTab app to create a tab to provide access to my Smugmug galleries, and so far it seems to work reasonable well.  I also added the GraffitiRSS to import my Twitter and blog RSS feeds into the Fan page, we'll see.