Quiet Admin

Author: James

  • My Cameras

    My Cameras

    I’m now on my fifth body. I started with the modest Olympus E-510. A 10 MP, 4/3rd system (Sensor & Mount). After a few years, I upgraded to the E-620, same 4/3rd system but with a 12 MP sensor and an upgraded AF system. I should have done some more research before that purchase though. I liked the higher resolution, but it was noisier.

    Despite being a DSLR, the Olympus cameras were very small, as were the lenses and they were easy to carry about. I, however, started having issues with the AF system. I also found manual focus without focus assist to be difficult for far away subjects. These struggles and mounting frustrations led to me falling out of photography for a while.

    After a few years, I was dying to get back into things, but I really wanted a new camera to address my frustrations. Pretty quickly, I was looking at mirrorless systems due to their EVF. I know for many photographers, the EVF is a travesty. For me, having focus assist in the EVF and that the image would change to match the set camera settings were very desirable.

    After much research, thank you dpreview.com, I settled on the Sony a6400. It hit the right price, all of the features, and was well reviewed for photo quality. This is an APS-C sensor with the Sony E-mount for lenses. I had purchased this with the 16-55 kit lens, but shortly thereafter I purchased the 70-350 G lens. The kit lens was pretty soft, so I upgraded it to the 16-55 G lens.

    After a few years, I was wanting to upgrade to Full-Frame, and I had a trip to Yosemite coming up, so I opted to pull the trigger. I first opted for the Sony A7 mark 4. This was brilliant, but the location assist annoyed me, and at the same time Sony had a massive discount on the camera I really wanted. The Sony A7R mark 4. I returned the a7 in favor of the a7R, and I was in heaven.

    With the move to full frame, I needed to upgrade my lenses, too. I started with the 24-70 Sigma Art, and the 70-200 G lens. After a bit with them, I did return them and I upgraded to the 24-70 G Master (mark 1), and the 100-400 G Master.

    I have been very happy with the results on these upgrades. I love the 61 MP images.

  • WordPress on Synology

    WordPress on Synology

    I’m fond of Synology in general. It is an affordable and capable solution. I wanted to start a website, and although there are a lot of affordable hosting companies out there, this wasn’t really something I wanted to spend extra money on.

    I already had a Synology, and I knew they had web station, so I went to package center, and there was a WordPress package, along with MariaDB, PHPMyAdmin and PHP.

    I installed all of the apps, and immediately I had a functioning site. I was excited and got to work. I have done a lot of web server management at work, and my first thing was check site health and see what it had to report. It noted that I was unable to check for updates, but everything else was showing okay.

    I was content, and began to proceed. Next thing was installing some plug-ins. Two of the three plug-ins I wanted wouldn’t install because WordPress was too out of date.

    Naturally, my next plan of action was to update WordPress. This was more challenging than I expected. I couldn’t update via WordPress, there were no app updates through the package center. I downloaded the latest copy from WordPress, SSH’d into the Synology and overwrote the WordPress files. That worked, kind of.

    WordPress was no showing up to date, but I had to fix permissions on all of the files to get the site to work, Updates were still weren’t working the way WordPress intended, so I decided to abandon the built in package and try manually.

    Using web station, I created a new site, created a database manually, copied the WordPress files. It took a lot of persuasion, but I was able to get WordPress running as expected without the built-in apps. I’ll dive into more details later, but if you’re frustrated with Synology’s built-in WordPress option, you are right to be so. Don’t do that, set it up manually in Web Station.