My camera has accumulated some dust on its chip over the past 3 years and I want to clean it. Do you have experience with cleaning your camera's sensors on your own with appropriate gear? Do you suggest doing it? Or should I see a professional?
Possible Duplicate:          Can anyone offer me advice on how to clean my camera's sensor?   Should I do this myself, or take the camera to a professional? Is it precarious, or easy with the right amount of care?   I have a Nikon D3000 that has a small dot off-center of the sensor. I believe it is dirt, and I would like to remove it. I'm tempted to use a cotton-bud, but I'm afraid that I might damage the sensor.  The dot appeared after a trip to a tropical area where the camera became wet. I took the lens off and a lot of moisture, and possibly some dirt, went into the camera. The lens became fogged-up.  When I returned from my trip I ran a hair dryer for (air only, without heat) 10 minutes through the battery compartment, believing this would circulate around and dry the camera. Consequently, I noticed many speckled dots around the sensor. I also believe there's a subtle but persistent haze when I look through the lens, but I could be wrong.  It's worth noting that the photos are fine, with no evidence of distortion or blurring. The camera is now dry and it's been months since this happened. But the dot on the sensor has been there since, like an itch I can't rub.
Why is \[ ... \] preferable to $$ ... $$? I've heard that you should use \[ ... \] for displayed equations instead of  $$ ... $$, but why is that?  I'd assumed that it's so that you can more easily tell which are starting and which are ending delimiters, but if I always use a syntax-highlighting text editor, I can see that easily based on the color of the symbols.  Is there any reason for this suggestion? My phone was just stolen an hour or so ago. Are there any options for tracking? I realize this is a long shot, but my phone was lost or stolen a few hours ago.  At the time it was stolen, I didn't have any specific applications installed to track it or wipe the data. So... my bad. I'm hoping the fact that I have a pattern lock will at least prevent anyone from accessing my data.  My question is, do I have any options for tracking or data wipe after the fact? (I'm more interested in tracking.)  Note: I have read similar questions, but unless I'm mistaken, they all address the question in terms of preparation before losing the phone. I'm asking about fallback options after losing the phone. How do you remove a file whose filename begins with a dash (hyphen or minus) -?  I'm ssh'd into a remote OSX server and I have this file in my directory:  tohru:~ $ ls -l total 8 -rw-r--r--    1 me  staff  1352 Aug 18 14:33 --help ...   How in the world can I delete --help from a CLI?  This issue is something that I come across in different forms on occasion, these files are easy to create, but hard to get rid of.  I have tried using backslash  rm \-\-help   I have tried quotes  rm "--help"   How do I prevent the minus (dash or hyphen) character to be interpreted as an option? Cannot Upgrade Xcode 11 to Xcode 11.1 I'm unable to upgrade Xcode 11GM to 11.1 for some time on my Mid 2014 MacBook Pro running macOS Catalina. I've installed Xcode from Mac AppStore ages ago (IIRC circa 2014), and upgraded step by step since then. Currently, I'm experiencing the following loop:   AppStore reports that I have an update. I open AppStore, open updates, click "Update" on Xcode. Mac Downloads ~2.5GB first. Installs that patch. Continues to get the full package (~7.6GB). It starts to install. After some churning and install, it reports "Cannot download Xcode now, please try again later."   I have more than enough space on the disk, and nothing is modified in Xcode or in the OS (no homebrew or something similar).  Did anyone experience something similar? Are there solutions to this? I'm creating an application which lets you define events with a time frame.  I want to automatically fill in the end date when the user selects or changes the start date.  I can't quite figure out, however, how to get the difference between the two times, and then how to create a new end Date using that difference. Sometimes when you're downloading an image and the connection breaks mid stream, you are left with a half downloaded image. If you try to view it you get the upper part of the image and the bottom part is usually coloured grey or green or some other color.  In other words, it is corrupted.  Is there a way to check whether the image is damaged in that way or otherwise corrupted? Will factory resetting my device remove the Android upgrade? I have upgraded my phone to Android 2.1. I need to reset my phone but I don't want to lose the upgrade. Is it possible to do this? How? Can I hire my kid and start a Roth IRA for him? I own an LLC, of which I am currently the sole member. It's my main source of income.  I am wondering if there is a reason why I could not do the following:   Hire my child as a part-time employee of the LLC, for an annual salary of $5500. Start a Roth IRA for the kid and put the $5500 into it. Deduct the $5500 as a payroll expense for my LLC, thereby reducing my amount of taxable income.   To me, this seems attractive because I'd lower my LLC's tax liability. Meanwhile, my kid would not have to pay any taxes on the $5500 because it is lower than the standard deduction. And by putting the money in a Roth IRA, he'd get an investment that would grow tax-free. It would essentially be like getting the pre-tax benefits of a traditional IRA with the post-tax benefits of a Roth.  The way I see it, I'd win, my kid would win and the IRS would lose, for once.  Is there any reason this wouldn't work? There is no minimum age or income for contributing to a Roth IRA. So as long as I could legally hire my kid, I don't see any obstacles. Test -n gives unexpected result I understand test -n &lt;expression&gt; to return false if the expression evaluates to a string length of greater than 0.  Why then does the following happen?  Macbook:~ echo ${#undeclared_variable} 0 Macbook:~ test -n $undeclared_variable &amp;&amp; echo Foo Foo   Bash 4.x  My expectation is that since test -n $undeclared_variable should evaluate false, that Foo should not be echoed.  If I use [[  ]] instead of test, it works as expected. Accessing my Windows 7 files from my Ubuntu account Can we use sine and cosine graphs for varying temperatures? I have been researching for a while looking for what to include more than just deriving the equation of Newton’s law of cooling and a website gave me inspiration by stating what if the temperature of the environment is changing (± C). In conclusion, I wasn’t sure if that person carried out the mathematical process in the right way and the only place I could ask for accurate information is here so please let me know what you think about the mathematical process he went for and if it is right or wrong. Thanks a lot. Website: Create default home directory for existing user in terminal How do I do this? I created a user without a home directory and now I want to create one. Not just a folder called new_user, I want the default home directory with all it's folders and hidden files, etc. How do I connect to a MSSQL database using Perl's DBI module in Windows? Is $\frac{x^2+x}{x+1}$ a polynomial?  Fist question can be: on which field/ring or etc? In basic, let's take over $\mathbb R$.  Actually, it is $x$ if $x \ne -1$.  Can we say again it is a polynomial, or a near-polynomial or what?   Can we say it is a polynomial over $\mathbb R - \{-1\}$? But there is structure here for $\mathbb R-\{-1\}$.  This question can be academically, not sure, but I want to ask it in the level of primary school, then academically. $a =\prod_{i = 1}^{r} p_{i}^{ai}$ with $a_{i} > 0$ for each $i$ is the canonical representation of $a$... touchdown held down libgdx No Sound (Dummy Output) error Ubuntu 19.10 What regex pattern would need I to pass to  java.lang.String.split()  to split a String into an Array of substrings using all whitespace characters (' ', '\t', '\n', etc.) as delimiters? restore table from .frm and .ibd file? I have previously saved a copy of /var/lib/mysql/ddms directory ("ddms" is the schema name). Now I installed a new MySQL on a freshly installed Ubuntu 10.04.3 LTS by running apt-get install mysql-server, I believe version 5.1 was installed. After I copy the ddms directory under /var/lib/mysql, some of its tables work fine, these are the tables with an associated set of three files: a .frm file, a .MYD file and a .MYI file.  However, there are two tables with a different set of files: a .frm file and a .ibd file. These two tables didn't show up in the table list in phpMyAdmin. When I look at the error log, it says:  [ERROR] Cannot find or open table ddms/dictionary_item from the internal data dictionary of InnoDB though the .frm file for the table exists. Maybe you have deleted and recreated InnoDB data files but have forgotten to delete the corresponding .frm files of InnoDB tables, or you have moved .frm files to another database? or, the table contains indexes that this version of the engine doesn't support.   Please help with restoring these two tables. Thanks. Poll on best VNC / remote desktop software for assisting others on Windows/Mac machines from Ubuntu?    I've heard good things about TeamViewer and Fog Creek Copilot, but I'm wondering if the included GNOME Vinaigre VNC client is good enough for this.  To specify, I'm looking for best option based on:   SIMPLEST ease-of-use for client to download/use on their end. See #1. Works cross-platform I am able to control client's mouse and/or keyboard from remote machine.