Digital Photo Professional cannot edit CR2 RAW files

Today I spent almost one hour trying to figure out why Canon DPP was not able to edit some pictures I took a while ago. All the pictures in one folder were shown like this:

Notice the glyph on top of each image indicating editing was not allowed.

I searched 3 times the menus for some option to unblock editing, but there was none. I thought of files being read-only on disk, having wrong ACLs. Nothing. Some website suggested for images being edit-protected from the camera to access an unblock option from the Info window, but that was completely empty instead of displaying EXIF info.

It was only happening with images in one folder, so I moved an image out of that folder, but nothing changed.

Hours later I viewed the images in Explorer from a different computer, and then I noticed something odd – why was the CR2 size so small as compared with other pictures? Were they corrupted?

And then it hit me – when I took those pictures the camera battery run out on my 5D III and I had to use my old camera, a Canon 20D. And DPP was not able to open the files from this older camera…

After a little digging on the net, I had the confirmation: Canon has released Digital Photo Professional 4.0, but only for 64-bit computers and only for certain cameras like Canon 5D Mark III. Older camera like Canon 20D are not supported by DPP 4, and instead I had to download the previous version, DPP 3.14 to edit the raw files. It turns out that even new cameras from Canon like 7D mark II are not supported by DPP 4.0, on either 32 or 64-bit Windows. Hopefully Canon will reconsider and add compatibility support for all the cameras when they release a new version of DPP 4…

How to install Active Directory (AD) tools on Windows 8

Start by installing Remote Server Administrator Tools For Windows 8.1 to get the 'Remote Server Administration Tools' components, then Turn Windows features on/off, and make sure to select 'AD DS Tools'.

This article describes in great details the steps
http://www.technipages.com/windows-8-install-active-directory-users-and-computers

My Wi-Fi connection not using full speed of 300Mbps

 

I have two Netgear Wi-Fi routers that have Wi-Fi connections enabled with speeds up to 300Mbps. However, the laptop, tablet, etc connects to them with speeds usual in the 78-144Mbps range, never over 150Mbps. This didn’t bother me much as these speeds are still over my broadband connection speed (60Mpbs), and I don’t transfer many files between laptop and other computers in the network. But still, why does this happens?

The documentation says “The WNR3500 router will use the channel you selected as the primary channel and expand to the secondary channel (primary channel +4 or -4) to achieve a 40 MHz frame-by-frame bandwidth. The WNR3500 router will detect channel usage and will disable frame-by-frame expansion if the expansion would result in interference with the data transmission of other access points or clients.”

I thought the low speed was caused by router settings. My router had channel 4 set as primary, which left only 4+4=8 as secondary. I thought some interference on channel 8 was preventing it to be used, so I changed the primary to 5, with 1 and 9 now as options for secondary. But that didn’t increase the connection speed.

Today, after digging more, I looked on laptop at adapter’s settings. There, the Channel Width on 2.4GHz range was set to “20 MHz Only”. I set it to Auto, let the laptop reconnect, and voila! Now the speed increased, reaching values in the 270-300Mhz range, as it should have.

It didn’t make sense, why won’t be this set to Auto by default? Then I remembered. It was.

3 years ago I was experiencing frequent connection drops, and a lot of reconnecting – I was not able to maintain a RemoteDesktop connection to work without the laptop pausing for reconnect every couple of minutes. It was really annoying. And it was me who limited the channel width to 20MHz, which seemed to reduce the number of connection drops.

Well, now I have a second Wi-Fi router to extend the range, and the laptop’s connection at 300Mbps seems more reliable now. So I guess I’ll keep the laptop’s channel width back to its default settings.

Unfortunately the Surface RT’s network adaptor doesn’t have a similar setting, so the tablet will have to connect to 150Mbps max. No loss there until Comcast will allow such speeds at reasonable prices.