Cooling Unifi Broadband Termination Unit (BTU) using Vztec NC2165 notebook cooler

The black Huawei brand Unifi Broadband Termination Unit (BTU) has a metal casing. This BTU is supposed to work 24x7, and when you touch on its metal surface, you will feel some heat.

I use a Vztec NC2165 notebook cooler as its cooling solution. After installed, when you touch the BTU metal surface again, you will feel it is cool.

This Vztec NC2165 is USB powered. You can find one USB port in front of the Dlink DIR-615 Unifi Residential Gateway (RG), which can be a good choice for its power source. Alternatively, you can use any available USB port as its power source.

There are many USB powered notebook cooler in the market, most are just too big for this Unifi BTU, and their fan(s) might not match with the place of the BTU ventilation holes on top. As you can see in the picture, this Vztec NC2165 just suit perfectly, and it cost only RM15.

If you are also using Unifi HSBB, I recommend this inexpensive BTU cooling solution for you.

Cleaning camera lens with LensPen miniPro II

How do you normally clean the dirt, dust, grease, fingerprint, etc. on the camera lens of your digital camera and/or handphone? Using special cleaning fluid? Using brush? Wiping with microfibre? Wiping with cloth? Wiping with tissue paper? Wiping with your shirt? Never clean and let it be?

Regardless how you do the cleaning, I believe the bottom line is:

• The glass surface, as well as other parts of the device, won't be hurt or scratched
• The cleaning must be effective

I use a Canadian product called LensPen miniPro II to clean the camera lens of my digital camera as well as my handphone. It is very effective and inexpensive (selling at RM23 only).

LensPen miniPro II contains 2 cleaning parts. At one end, there is a retractable ultra fine brush to brush away dust and other particles deposited on the lens. At the other end, it has a special cleaning tip to wipe the lens. It is claimed that this special tip can do more than 500 times cleaning.

LensPen miniPro II has a compact size, easy to carry around or put in the camera bag. Its cleaning tip is small enough to be used for compact digital camera and the handphone camera lens. There are also LensPen products with larger cleaning tip for bigger DSLR lens. There is also LensPen MicroPro to clean even smaller lens surface.

To let you have a better picture of its length and size, here is my LensPen miniPro II putting together with my Canon PowerShot S95 digital camera.

Luminance histogram and RGB histograms in digital camera

One of the nice features in digital camera that cannot be found in traditional camera is the ability to display histogram.

Histogram shows the distribution of brightness in an image horizontally, and the amount of brightness vertically. A typical histogram looks like mountain as below. It is a handy tool to evaluate the exposure.

If you see the peaks are gathered on the left, the image is dark; and if you see the peaks are gathered on the right, the image is bright.

In normal situation, we would like the peaks to be in the middle, so that there is no under-exposure (too dark) or over-exposure (too bright). However, there are situations when dark is OK (e.g. shooting the Earth Hour scene) and there are situations when bright is OK too. Anyhow, you can make use of histogram to assist you in adjusting the exposure value of your picture.

Canon PowerShot S95 camera is able to show histogram in Shooting Modes and Playbank Modes. Histogram is not available in Auto modes (you won't need it, as the camera is taking care of the exposure adjustment for you), and is available for P, Tv, Av, M modes.

Canon PowerShot S95 has two customizable shooting displays, and the default setting for each of the shooting modes is different. You can use the Custom Display setting to turn histogram on or off for either one or both of the shooting displays. You can switch between the custom displays using the DISP. button.

Histogram can also be shown in Playback screen of Canon PowerShot S95. You need to switch to the Detailed Information Display playback screen in order to see the histogram of the picture. You can rotate among the available playback screens by pressing the DISP. button. You can set the default playback mode with the Review Info option.
Canon PowerShot S95 is able to display the RGB histograms of the picture in Detailed Information Display screen. You can toggle RGB histograms on and off by pressing the "Up" button when you are in Detailed Information Display.

The RGB histograms show individual graph for each of the Red, Green and Blue colour captured by the camera in the picture. This will be good piece of information to judge the colour and white balance of the picture.