Stimulating Pixels

I’m pretty impressed with the camera on the iPhone 3GS. Here’s a snap. All I did to this was crop a little to straighten the image, resize down to 550 pixels wide and then apply “Smart sharpen” in Photoshop.

Pretty damn good quality considering it’s a tiny camera on a cell phone. (Also, the wind was blowing a little so the blooms were moving a decent amount. It was bright enough that the action was stopped pretty well.)

Note: I know that the image is breaking the current design. Eventually, when I get time to drop in a real template it’ll fit…..

I ran into some issues installing the upgrade to Adobe Lightroom that required me to call their Customer Support. My standard operating procedure for this is to dial in and put it on speaker while I wait for a person to pick up. Like a lot of companies, Adobe has hold music to keep you company while you are waiting. This is nice in theory as it lets you know that you are still connected, but there really should be a way to mute it. Or, at least switch to a simple beep every few minutes. Not only do I have to wait for them to pick up, but I really can’t do much else with the music blaring in the background. Event with the speaker all the way down, it’s still pretty loud.

So, to all you phone service providers how about a little message in front of the hold music that says, “If you would like to turn off the hold music while you wait, press *7.” Same thing goes for conference calls and any other place where hold music is presented on the phone.

When I was running a windows machine, I installed TortoiseSVN to make Subversion a little easier to deal with. It worked well, but always freaked me out a little that it looked at everything in windows explorer to see if it was a working copy. Occasionally, this would really slow things down when navigating through network drives.

After switching over to using a Mac, I reverted back to doing everything for Subversion with the command line. Like lots of things, with a little practice, it’s easy once you get the hang of it and probably faster to boot. Even with that being the case, I wanted to see what GUIs were available and found svnX. It’s a stand alone piece of Free Open Source Software that provides a way do browse and work with repositories and working copies.

After a quick run through, it looks like a nice little application. It’s a little slow when looking at the repository across a network, but for someone who doesn’t want to have to mess with the command line, it’s should make dealing with Subversion approachable.

On Macs, there are two great hot-key combinations that can be used for doing screen captures.

• command + shift + 3 = full screen capture
• command + shift + 4 = a partial screen capture based on a box you draw.

By default, when you make a grab with these commands the output files are saved directly to your desktop. If you have a messy desktop, they can be hard to find. Using a little command line magic, you can change this output location to any directory you choose. The command itself is:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture location /output/path/directory

You would just need to change “/output/path/directory” to the location where you want the screen grabs to go.

I got found this command on this page from the Mac Developer Tips site. Just putting it here so that I can find it easier in case I ever need it again.

I’m a stills guy. Not a video guy. It took me over a year with my latest point and shoot to actually think about the fact that it has video and to give it a try. Even longer to get the first real clip shot and posted. Today is the day. Here is my first video internet post.

This is the tail end of the crowd leaving Bryant-Denny after the 2008 Iron Bowl where the Tide beat the stew outta Auburn. Final score, a 36-0 shutout. Watching the fans move at roughly the same speed across caught my eye and I decided it would make a worthy video. This was after most of the fans had already filed out. Next time I’m there, I’ll see if I can get on the ramp earlier and see what it looks like with more people packed together.

While I’m sad that Battlestar Galactica is over, I’m happy with the way it ended.

Going into the last few episodes, I would wait longer and longer to actually watch each one after the broadcast. I think there were two reasons for this: 1) I didn’t want one of my favorite shows to be over and, 2) I was afraid I wouldn’t like the way it ended. All in all, my fears about how they would handle the final chapter was unfounded. Some parts didn’t get quite as much focus as I would have expected, but overall, it worked for me.

I’m not one to do a lot of extra research on a show, but I wanted a little more on this one and came across this interview with the producers that answered a few more questions about the show. I’m glad I read that. Makes me even happier with the show.

Here’s to resolution, redemption and clean slates.

The web has its own version of the time/space continuum. It’s kinda two dimensional when you look at it on a screen, but those dimensions are fluid. It’s also kinda no dimensional since the bits and electric pulses that make it up aren’t really physical. The sense of Time on the web is getting slipperier every day. You have to push out something new all the time if you want to get noticed and stay relevant, but all that content can stick around in weird ways.

Case in point, I just googled “camera bits” which is the company that makes Photo Mechanic. Even though the link I wanted was the first result returned, the fifth link on the page caught my eye because it had a long title. Specifically, “Rob Galbraith DPI: Camera Bits announces Here I Am photo tracking“. I glanced at the article and it didn’t make sense, it’s about tracking software that can be slid into photos that allow them to be tracked. Because of the way photos are stored on computers this shouldn’t be possible, so I started to read for real. Then I noticed the date the article was published: Friday, April 1, 2005.

Dates in articles are generally blind spots that we blow right past. In this case, it created a little dissonance since I wasn’t ready for an April Fool’s Day joke on March 11. Welcome to wobbly internet time.

The good news for the folks at Camera Bits is that their actual company still gets top google results, but it’s not too hard to imagine the fake article getting the top billing. While most users would make it to them eventually, it would be a tough break to try to deal with. If you run a business and you want a reminder of why you don’t want to piss off search engines, this should do. Imagine if customers searching for your site were all directed to joke pages about your company on other web sites.

The internet is a wildly powerful communications tool, but we’d all do well to remember that just a few companies and organizations have immense control over the direction of that power.

I’ve heard one of the reasons you see skulls in old paintings so often is that artists used to keep one around as a reminder of their mortality. This seems like a good idea to me. Following along the line of making sure that you live every day to its fullest and to try not to let the little things get to you. So, I went in search of a skull. They are really cheap these days. Like under $10.

The one I ended up with is this one. It’s very well detailed but a little smaller than I expected. No big deal, I really like it. The funniest part of the shopping experience to me was where Amazon had the skull categorized: Home and Garden. Here’s a grab of the search results.

I’m not sure where I would have expected it, but Home and Garden would have been way down on my list of guesses. I’m not a big shopper of that department, but I’ll have to browse around a little to see what other interesting surprises are there.

I really like the video. The song is groovy, and I like it too. I probably would have liked the song on its own, but it got a nice bump from the video. The visuals are so good they definitely influenced my first opinion.

NSFW Language, but well worth it if your ears aren’t too sensitive.