CAW Christopher Wichura
Jaikus from CAW
Monday, 9 March 2009
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If I owned a Kindle, the Whispersync feature would be pretty sweet. But I don't own a Kindle; I own the Sony PRS-505 and have a fair sized library of books for that already. Looking at the Amazon Kindle store, they seem to have a pretty similar library to Sony's -- at least for the genres I tend to read. The books Sony doesn't have are the same books Amazon doesn't have, as it's the publishers that are blocking them. So dumping the Sony Reader in favor of the new Kindle 2 is a pretty hard sell for me...
Wednesday, 4 February 2009
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I would have to guess around 1982-1983 for me, too. UUCP mail over a 1200bps modem was awesome. Bang-paths FTW. Er, maybe not...
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And the big 'Shop' button at the bottom has got to go. What a waste of screen realestate!
It also no-longer works proper with MS' PowerTools virtual desktops. It shows on all desktops now, not just the one I actually want it to show on.
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Wednesday, 14 January 2009
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I have to admit, this is one place where Apple really did do the right thing with Time Machine. The average user does not back their system up. Ever. But Time Machine makes it 'just happen' without the user having to think about it or remember to do it, or even figure out how to set up/define a backup job. Microsoft should really provide a similar technology out-of-the box for Windows.
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How big is the HD? Or more specifically, how much of it is personal data vs. OS and app installs? Got a spare drive you could simply dupe/image it to?
Of course, this begs the question: do you do normal backups regularly so you already have everything important elsewhere? :)
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@constantine: I thought it was the high levels of testosterone in males that lead to hair loss. The testosterone interferes with and weakens the roots, causing then to fall out.
Tuesday, 13 January 2009
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I have XM, though with the changes they've made since the merger, I will probably cancel it. XM had the best dance station (82 The System), but it is no longer available (it's "internet only" now, which means XM probably had some commitment deal that requires them to continue to "broadcast" it, but they really intend to kill it in favor of Sirius' lame dance station that is the only OTA dance station now). I know several other people that have already canceled XM since the merger due to their stations also getting axed in favor of the Sirius station (e.g., the classical station Vox that also got axed).
XM has always had better technology than Sirius, especially in the portable players (e.g., compare the Inno to Sirius' laughable attempt at a portable receiver). When it comes to music, you really just have to listen to both and make a decision from there, though. Like I said, for me, XM had the better dance music station prior to the merger. As for the talk radio stuff, that's really down to personal preference as well. I believe both of them let you sign up to get a free sampling of (some of) their stations over the Internet for a week or two so you can get a sense of what they play.
Sat has been nice for the car (except that I don't drive much any more these days) as I didn't have to worry about bringing along my iPod to plug into the car's radio. And for a while, I used an Inno for a portable XM player. But when the NAB (that has a vested interest in trying to kill off sat) got the FCC to crack down on the terrestrial repeaters for XM and Sirius, reception in downtown Chicago got much too spotty to use the Inno for my daily bus commute to/from work.
These days I've been using either my iPod Touch (primarily playing podcasts) or Slacker Portable (G1) on my daily commute. I like that with the Slacker I can set up my own channel of artists I prefer and it just finds music for me. That's why I liked XM back in the day -- it had a good dance station that played new stuff that I didn't have to go find myself and stock into my music library such as the iPod requires. And Slacker now has a client app for BlackBerries and the iPhone (will also work on iPod Touch, but requires a WiFi connection to stream which makes it unsuitable when commuting), so I might ditch my G1 Slacker Portable and just use their app on the BlackBerry. Still need to test how much of a battery performance hit the Slacker app is before I make that decision.
The merger was the worst possible thing that could have happened. Instead of moron running Sirius being content to kill off Sirius and concede the market to XM, he had to buy out the XM execs to get them to merge so he can foist his crap on XM as well, and also kill XM radio. From what I've heard from people who have called to cancel post-merger, their service retention people are really giving people a hard time trying to get them to stay rather than processing the cancellation. And they are acting like "nothing's changed, we still have great stations available" and will not listen when you tell them "you axed the one station I listen to and replaced it with garbage (or in some cases, didn't even replace it)".
At this point, I just cannot recommend anyone go the sat route. They are doomed. Things like Slacker (or Pandora or Last.fm, depending on your preferences -- except that they don't have quite the portableness that only Slacker currently offers) are the future if you ask me.
Friday, 9 January 2009
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Before Aperture, I was using a manual file system organization scheme for my photos. Basically, I had things organized in a hierarchy of "job type"/"more specific"/"date". So, for example, "Model Shoot/Lastname, Firstname/2008-01-31". Within that directory, I'd have a directory for the RAW files out of the camera, a directory for the processed files (convert them to 16 bit TIFF/PSD and then did work on them), and then a "Distribution" directory where I'd have 8-bit JPEGs, etc. Did this for a long time. As my library grew, this became increasingly painful to deal with.
Now with Aperture, I let Aperture manage images for me. I still create a hierarchy of projects in Aperture similar to the old file system mechanism. And I cannot stress this enough: every photo assignment gets its own project in Aperture. This greatly simplifies project archival. If you lump multiple jobs/assignments into one project in Aperture, you will be going down a path of pain.
Now with tagging in Aperture, I can tag people across projects. So a model might have done a model shoot that was just the model alone and falls into the "Model Shoots" top level, but then also been in a shot with other models for some other assignment in a different top level (e.g., "Runway Show" -- and yes I've shot a couple amerture runway shows). Now with Aperture I can still tag them across jobs, regardless of the project hierarchy. And can also tag images with other things like "B&W", "studio" (vs. location and even tag the actual location -- not currently as a geotag but by venue name/whatever). As you build up your tag library (and Aperture helps you keep this unified across all your projects), it makes it easier to search for stuff. Aperture also understands hierarchical tags, so I have Model -> Male/Female -> Model Name as the tag hierarchy for models as an example. Thus, I can search for a specific model, all female models, or any model quite easily without having to manually tag each image with the entire hierarchy -- I just tag it with the most specific tag and the search engine automatically knows how to look up the tag hierarchy itself.
And I also let Aperture deal with tracking the RAW vs. the processed vs. the exported stuff for me. (Plus export plugins make it easy to send stuff to Flickr or wherever, though I don't actually upload all that much.) Aperture's rating and sorting also makes the process of filtering through images and determining your selects from a shoot much easier than when I used to do it with manual file system management (back in the stone ages before Aperture and Lightroom came along and I was using BreezeBrowser Pro). I also like Aperture's "Stacks" feature. If I use something like Silver Efex Pro to make a black and white version of a shot, I'll "stack" the B&W version with the original colour version.
For backups, I do two things. First, I have an Aperture vault (Aperture's built-in backup mechanism) on a Drobo. (The active library is on the internal hard drive of my MacBook Pro, since I can't always drag the Drobo around with me.) So it's quick to hit the 'refresh vault' button and have it sync the library off to the Drobo. (The Drobo is also my Time Machine storage for the MacBook Pro, but I exclude the Aperture library from Time Machine.) For projects that are "complete", I will also export the project to a separate directory on the Drobo for archived projects. (This allows me to remove a project from the online library as needed to reclaim space on the internal hard drive on the laptop.) I then have JungleDisk configured with an automatic backup job to pick up this archive directory and push it up to my Amazon S3 bucket for an offsite backup.
If you listen to TWIP, they gush over the Drobo. And to be honest, I agree with them. I have two Drobos now (one for my MacBook Pro, and one for my desktop Windows box). They are fantastic machines. But you also need offsite backup, and for that I've been extremely happy with the JungleDisk+Amazon S3 combination.
Now, I've never tried using iPhoto or Picasso to manage photos, so I don't know how they compare to Aperture's photo management capabilities. I believe one of the biggest differences (from the all of five minutes I've ever spent in iPhoto) is that the consumer-oriented programs don't let you create individual projects as a management container for images like you can in Aperture. If you don't think or shoot in an assignment-oriented manner, though (which I suspect is most people), then this probably isn't a big deal to you. For me, project-oriented photo management is important.
Thursday, 8 January 2009
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That's probably why they instituted the minimum size then -- to deal with the craptacular cameras in phones these days, which often have terrible minimum focusing distances. The iPhone is particularly bad in this regard.
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.75" is the smallest size they give you in the render options for a tag. I wonder how well it can do with the tag shrunk down even smaller than that. If you use the "all sizes" button on Flickr and then try the "Small" size, does it still successfully scan the tag? (Thumbnail and Square options appear to distort the image, so I suspect they will fail.)
(They also give you different options for the tag + text. That one I uploaded is what I'd describe as the "most text" option. You can also make a tag which is just the tag itself with no text at all.)
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So from an ad campaign manager's point of view, they just know that a tag was scanned. They don't know that that scan actually translated into someone actually visiting the URL. Or did the app automatically launch your directly to the URL after you scanned it?
I just looked at the reporting option, and it's just providing a bar graph with date along the X axis and number of scans along the Y axis. No other information.
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One thing that seems pretty dumb is you cannot have them generate a bitmap image of the tag for you. The only options for the tag file are PDF (default), WMF, and XPS, which are all vector formats.
For those that want to test a custom tag, here's one to try: @N03/3179576767/" target="_new">http://www.flickr.com/photos/13389582@N03/3179576767/
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I made a tag and the last column for it in the tag list takes you to a reporting page where you can stats on the scanning of the card.
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"Microsoft Tag is available via a free beta download for commercial publishers and the general public in the United States starting Jan. 7, 2009; *it will roll out in other countries at a later date*."
Perhaps that's why you are having trouble logging int to create a tag, @jukkaeklund.
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In the US they are used nowhere since nobody has mobiles with QRCode readers easily available, never mind built in. Now, Microsoft is someone that might actually have the weight to push their tagging system and get consumer awareness of it going in the US.
The only place I've ever seen QRCodes in any prevalence has been Japan.
Jaikus from CAW