www.ac4lt.org

The keyboard has been sold. It is no longer available.

This is an 11 year old Roland A-90EX midi keyboard. It is a full-size 88-key keyboard with piano key action.

The unit is in good shape except for the two lowest black keys which have fallen off the mechanism that holds them up and therefore they can’t be played. This should be fixable though I’m not certain what would be involved. Other than that, the keyboard is in working order.

It includes the manual and and foot pedal and a stand. A bench will be included at no extra cost if you want it.

Though I have the original box, it’s not in good shape for shipping. I am willing to meet within a three hour drive of Washington, DC to deliver the keyboard.

Please contact me if interested. Asking: $200. The keyboard sold for $900 when new.

The GPS has been sold. It is no longer available.

This is a used Garmin StreetPilot 2730 GPS. It includes the GPS, the XM radio reciver (and extension cable), remote control, 12V power adapter for the car, AC power adapter (for the computer), USB cable and dashboard mount.

It also includes a bean bag mount that did not come with the unit but can be used if you prefer not to use the adhesive disk on the original mount.

The included map data is Garmin’s City Navigator NT 8 which came with the unit when new. These maps can be updated on Garmin’s website if you choose to update them.

The firmware is up to date and the unit is in excellent condition.

Asking $75. Please contact me if interested.

SmugMug is another photo sharing site and it looks like it’s gotten quite a bit better since I last looked at it a couple of years ago. Perhaps it could replace flickr.

I created a trial membership to see and the jury is mixed. It does provide an RSS feed of albums (or galleries in smugmugese) but the feed contains almost no info. Unlike Picasa Web Albums, the album doesn’t have a geotag or a date (other than the modification date for the album) associated with it. That makes it tough to automatically order albums chronologically. The album description also isn’t in the feed making it not terribly descriptive.

The image display on the site is interesting. There’s a fair amount of customization possible, but you can’t get a display of image, EXIF and map all in one view as you can with PWA. Overall, I’d give it a mixed review. It’s more expensive than either flickr or PWA but only gives me moderately more desired functionality compared to flickr and less than PWA. Of course, Google hasn’t responded to the multiple pleas for help regarding the name tagging problem many of us are experiencing on PWA so who knows if that will ever be fixed. It’s a problem that some have experienced for at least a month.

But, I digress, the question of the moment is could smugmug satisfy my needs. My initial reaction is no, but it’s a cool product and it’s worth considering if you’re in the market for a photo sharing site and want more options for display than either flickr or PWA offer.

The issues with name tagging on Picasa Web Albums still remain. From posts on the PWA help forum it appears that all of us who had name tagging stop working are still in that broken state and Google hasn’t even acknowledged the issue.

I’m going to post my last couple of albums from 2009 on PWA then put that aside and look at ways of solving the lack of the flickr photoset rss problem. Perhaps it’s time to write  a small standalone program that polls flickr and generates the desired rss.

Perhaps my relationship with Picasa Web Albums will be short lived. I’ve gotten it into a state where PWA no longer will accept name tags either from the desktop client upload or from the user interface. Nothing I’ve tried has been able to prod it back into accepting name tags on new uploads though existing name tags are still there.

If I try to add a name tag in manually from the UI, it doesn’t accept the entry. The entered name blanks out and the tag is labelled “unnamed.” If I navigate to another photo and then back, even that unnamed tag is gone.

If I delete the album and re-upload it from scratch using Picasa for Mac then none of the name tags are transferred. But, up until yesterday, this was working properly. The evidence indicates a problem on the server side and web searches indicate others have run into this problem but nobody’s come up with a solution and Google doesn’t seem to be saying anything.

Perhaps its time to look at plan B.