MuttMutt

Start looking through here and figure out what types of pictures you want to take and head on from there. https://www.slrlounge.com/photography/ The best thing I can say is buy extra storage, in fact the more the better IMHO and there is nothing wrong using a microSD card especially if you have a phone or tablet which can accept them. It's also worth going with a brand name and a fast card which will allow you to record video as well if so desired, nothing sucks more than having a video stop because the card can't transfer fast enough. While on vacation, if you bought a MicroSD card, you can still drop the card into the device and see the pictures you have taken and weed out the really bad ones. Take as many different shots as possible so you can pick the ones you think came out the best. It's a lot easier to find 5 or 10 good ones when you have taken 100 pictures, if you took 15 pictures it will be much more difficult to find 10 good ones till you have developed your skills. And get a filter pack for your camera as well. A circular polarizing filter will remove glare from shiny objects and help make colors pop a bit better especially outdoors but remember in low light situations to take it off before trying to take a picture. UV filters are also nice to have along with a few others. You can easily splurge on a lot of other stuff as well but I like to start off with a bunch of storage and some filters and go from there based on what I am doing. A light kit for portraits can be nice to have available along with some backdrops. But a sheet and a few extra lights around the room can work in a pinch. I am by no means great but I think I can turn out a few nice pictures. This one was taken a few years ago at sunset with a Cannon T3i then compiled in photoshop as an HDR image, basically the camera takes 3 pictures, you set the screen as close to what you see as possible then set the camera to take a picture two stops darker for the sky to have good color and two steps lighter so the ground isn't overly dark. Then the software splices the 3 images together to make one with a ton of color throughout. http://files.ventshop.net/Pictures/Mypics/HDR/southsunset.jpg

I would expect that you would see the output from the azipods pretty quickly when they figure out what is happening. If you watch the video you can see not long after impact the outflow really picks up. I suspect they didn't really know they were that close. Might be time for RCCL to install backup cameras on their ships. Cars are pretty small in comparison and a ton of new cars have them for a reason.

IMHO the smokestack fire on the carnival ship is similar to a chimney fire. The particulate can catch fire as it is oily but usually doesn't since the exhaust doesn't have enough O2 to get going. That equates to a failure in the maintenance department.

Did a search and didn't see a topic so figured may as well start one. Anyway found some video posted online about the accident this morning to tie in with the front page post. The pilot just had a REALLY bad day is all I can say. Glad no one is hurt but have to imagine they will need to put some divers in the water to inspect the hull and azipods and where they are at the water is muddy so not much vis to see what happened. I suspect that will happen at another stop where water conditions are clearer for a better idea of the actual damage.

Nope never tried something like that. It's a bit odd as well because they are not supporting H264 but are H265 and a bunch of lesser stuff. So if you have media already available you will likely have to transcode it for it to be right. It's not a major issue unless you want to take a lot of stuff. I bought my Pi 4 over a year ago and it's mainly just to tinker with when I am in the mood I do a ton more with ESP8266's and ESP32's but that is a completely different subject, LOL. And there are many ways to deal with it, I do my best to not have any need for internet access as I also plug my Pi into hotel tv's or wherever else I happen to be so constantly trying to connect to wifi is a PAIN to deal with every time. But as I probably said pretty much anything with a HDMI output should work but there will be varying levels of success with the media on some stuff. I know the Pi4 supports what all my content is already which is H264 MP4's with AAC5.1 audio. I know a ton of people use the synology boxes and all that stuff but I have no faith in them. They like to use a filesystem called btrfs but it is still heavily in beta for functions that include more than Raid 0 or Raid 1 or even worse they use hardware raid which for a home user really has no benefit, hardware raid locks a drive to only that controller and can even potentially fail with revision changes so if a controller goes out you may be SOL. My server uses ZFS and particularly RaidZ3 so I can have any 3 drives in a vDev fail and all my data is fine. I have actually had a drive start throwing errors and I pulled it out and shipped it back to be replaced and kept my system running. It's a little overkill but my pool will end up with 3 vDev's and if you lose a single vDev you lose the pool so having multiple drives that can fail when you run a total of 33 drives in a system you are much better off. Then again I also have L2ARC (ARC is Ahead Read Cache and is in ram as well) on an SSD and I have considered setting up a few other things but just having the multiple vDev's will be a huge boost when I get more drives. I already am able to read from the pool at around 300 MBps with a file that is not in ARC and when it is I can read at around 600 MBps, notice the big B, that is Megabytes not Megabits like internet download speeds. I can literally transfer a 2GB file in a few seconds to my desktop. With 3 vDev's I should be able to push the uncached reads to around 900MBps at which point I will be striping a couple SSD's for L2ARC. I built my system after having multiple drives fail in an XP box and wanted stability over everything, the read speeds and other stuff I can do are just icing on the cake.

If it's available I would say it would only be on the newest ships and that is a big IF because I have never heard anything about it. I would also say if because it would then cut into Royal's rental services that are available on some of the ships. Now if you have the internet package you should be able to stream to your phone or tablet but I have not tried that at all, I rarely keep any streaming service long enough for it to matter. I have done a couple livestreams to YouTube while on the ships though and those have mostly been ok though not perfect.

I mean you should be able to. Basically anything that can plug in via USB and turn on should be accessible. Personally I wouldn't pay that much for a drive so I would look at just getting a bare drive and a case but you can do what you want. 2TB is a TON of movies as well, I have about 5.4 TB of movies on my server and that ends up being around 2700 movies. So that is around 2 GB per movie on average, a 512GB drive once formatted will hold around 200 movies. If you need more than that on a week long trip you should probably just stay at home IMHO but the choice is yours. https://www.electromaker.io/tutorial/blog/how-to-build-kodi-raspberry-pi-media-center gives you some stuff you can look at on how to set a Raspberry PI up. You will probably want to pick up a complete unit that comes with a case and memory card. The MicroSD card is mainly for the OS and a few things you may want to throw on there. I actually use a 256GB MicroSD card and have Retropie installed as I mainly use it for games emulation but KODI is installed so I can also watch movies. The more stuff you want to put on the MicroSD card the bigger it needs to be, however a 64GB one should allow you to install something to just watch movies. This raspberry pi kit is similar to what I am using and it comes with a 128GB MicroSD card. The kits are WAY overpriced right now as they are also being hit by the chip shortage. Adafruit was talking about having them available for MSRP and was limiting people to only being able to purchase one at a time and they have a bunch of hoops to jump through so that bots can't buy them all but they still don't have any in stock so good luck there. KODI will probably want the files to be in MP4 extension, H264 codec with AAC audio. If you don't know what that means you will need to look it up. Can it play other stuff, possibly but there are a ton of things it won't do well. I say that so when you grab the H265 encoded file and it doesn't work you will understand why. I do not know what codecs it will support either but the MP4's in H264 with AAC audio seems to be universal. In this case saving space on a drive will just come around and bite you in the BUTT. I say this with a lot of experience using PlexMediaServer and seeing all the issues people have trying to save a few nickels on drives in some cheap little NAS box by encoding to H265 only to have their devices unable to play the file and the server being so underpowered they can't transcode them and other people throwing graphics cards into machines to transcode but spend cash on electricity they didn't need to so they have smaller files. My server is a BEAST by most people's standards. I have a Dual Xeon X5690 with 96GB of RAM and the ability to use up to 48 3.5" Drives. It's a few years old but it still puts a lot of stuff that people are buying to shame, I still don't want to transcode which is why I suggest H264. You can grab Handbrake for free and use it to convert files to the format but you can not take and rip files using it. Sorry that is something for you to google as I don't want to have someone talking about copyrights and all that stuff or dealing with it on here. You could also take a DVD or BluRay player and some movies along that way, pretty much anything that uses HDMI should work without issue. I am just a geek and like to go over the top for some stuff because of the convenience factor involved. FYI I believe they were saying SanDisk and autocorrect got in the way to call it "scan disk". It's a brand of flash drive and again it will likely not work plugged into the tv's on the ship. I have never tried because I carry a few things on my tablet and use my Raspberry PI for goofing around. Most smart TV's can take the video files and play them but "hospitality" tv's will generally have that turned off as they do not want you messing with stuff or potentially introducing something that will damage their devices.

If you have a raspberry pi with something like Kodi installed with a thumb drive plugged into the raspberry pi and the pi hooked to the TV via HDMI i don't see any reason why it wouldn't work. Just make sure the TV output from the pi is set to automatically output the correct resolution. But can you directly output to the TV and play stuff on them. No. I don't think you can. But using a raspberry pi is very easy to setup and will work on just about any TV.

https://www.cdc.gov/tobacco/disparities/low-ses/index.htm

After a few times on the ships I have seen a few things that I just try to stay away from. It's mostly people who are on the ship that you just fully expect to be an issue. So for one is a grandmother with the grandkids and you can obviously tell the grandkids can do whatever. Grandma says don't do that but they know there is nothing she will do to punish them so they feel free to do whatever anyway. The one I saw the kids were acting like fools and even if someone was already on the elevators they would come in and hit every single button. When they got on the elevators I got off. Another was a guy who instantly said one thing in my mind. Roid Rage. Big beefy burly muscled guy who couldn't reach a post it note in the middle of his back, the type you would see in the gym every single day for hours at a time. What made it worse is this guy had on a shirt proudly stating he had the unlimited get drunk pass package. The first thing that popped into my mind is this guy is going to get drunk and end up in a fight. It just made me cringe to even be around them. So what are the cringeworthy things you guys have seen on the ships. I have seen video's of people so drunk they sat on the deck chairs and urinate themselves but I am sure there are a ton of other things out there.

It's hard to prevent someone from doing something stupid...

Never heard of the dining choice requiring prepaid gratuities at all except for maybe the unlimited dining or something like that. Anyway sounds like maybe it's time to tell them exactly what you think about it and find a new agent to deal with.

Looks like things are progressing nicely then compared to just a few weeks ago when I was through there. Not sure when my next trip through Galveston will be. A little over extended on some things at the moment with our Black Friday cruise coming up but hopefully can put a deposit down to use later on when things are looking better. Hopefully by then the terminal will be open and they will pick up a few more destinations. Otherwise it will be a while for me. I drive most everywhere and heading to Fort Lauderdale will tell me for sure if I am going to make that trip a few times or not. And yes I could fly, however by the time I start checking my SCUBA gear among other things it's a lot cheaper to drive, like usually the cost of a single ticket without baggage covers fuel round trip.

Made me think about something there. I didn't buy anything persay but on my B2B on Liberty everyone staying on who went to the Windjammer ended up with a glass of Champagne or sparkling wine of some sort. I know we were flying high by that point anyway. You could easily take an extra bottle of wine and after you park your car split it with whomever you are traveling with. By the time you are on the ship you should be feeling pretty good. I actually might have to start doing that as well, sounds like it will make starting a vacation more fun.

Not sure but when I was looking at the sailings there were even more underwhelming than Galveston. I am hoping they will bring something in to Galveston to facilitate cruises to the Cayman Islands, Jamaica, and points further south out of Galveston and then start working on whatever they are going to do in New Orleans or at least add something into New Orleans that will give me some options other than Florida to get around in other areas.