moebius recursive

I just discovered a nifty little trick for uploading pictures to Zooomr if you are using Aperture (or iPhoto). You can drag and drop photos directly from Aperture onto jUploader and click the upload button. jUploader will then upload the full size image from Aperture. Maybe this is obvious to others, but I was pleased to find that I didn’t have to export to jpeg from Aperture first to use jUploader.

One side effect of this for me, is that I will be uploading a lot more of my stuff to Zooomr as it has just become so much easier.

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webtools, photography, zooomr, aperture, iphoto

Photo contests always seem to be very subjective things to me where more often than not it seems that a ‘good’ photo is one that matches the judges own person style or taste and not one that necessarily has objective merit to it. I certainly sense some of this in the results of the National Geographic Traveler photo contest.

For example, I find the first place photo sort of mundane and the second place shot too predictable. However, I find merit prize 5 and merit prize 8 to be much more interesting. This merit prize shot is exceptional for its spontaneous nature and probably would have suffered if it had been staged.

Don’t get me wrong, they are all great shots; I’m not sure that some of them are ‘all that’. Which brings us back to the subjectivity thing.

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photography, ideas, nationalgeographic

If you are the sort of gadget person who needs to have the top of the line (ie the bigger number) of everything Hasselblad has the new H3D-31, a 31 megapixel camera that will set you back around $25,000USD. I can only imagine what lenses for this thing are going to cost.

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gadgets, photography

These are probably a really bad idea of there is any likelihood that the other guy is going to be toting the real thing.

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gadgets, fun

I thought that this posting on Learning in Grayscale was interesting and might prove to be an interesting thought exercise the next time I am out taking photos.

My stumbling block with this technique is that I typically find black and white photography to be sort of self conscious, stilted and one dimensional — where the photographer twiddles a color shot into black and white thinking that a B&W shot is instantly going to have more cred. B&W is not going to fix crap composition and other flaws.

I realize that this a drastic generalization. It is just that I have seen a number of instances recently with people trying to ‘legitimize’ their photos by casting them as B&W shots.

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ideas, visualization, photography

This site has some of the most creative photography that I have ever seen. These are definitely in the category of created images, but they are incredibly creative.

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photography, design, style, imaging

Friday evening saw the crash of my iTunes library (and me basically spending the weekend trying to recovery from it). I have been running iTunes since, well, there was iTunes (I started with OS X 10.0.0). This meant that I had 5+ years of play counts, ratings, playlists, etc built up that were basically lost in the crash.

I’m not even sure what caused the crash. I was listening to my iTunes library while ripping a new CD I had just purchased. The only out of the ordinary thing was that the Software Update dialog had popped up telling me about the new security update. About five seconds later, I was presented with a ‘iTunes has quit unexpectedly’ message. Then the fun began. I restarted iTunes, only to be told the my iTunes library was damaged and that the file was being renamed with ‘damaged’ appended to it. This seems a rather purposeless thing to do, because I have yet to find a tool that will allow you to recover your damaged library or even analyze it. However, the file it should have made a backup of is the ‘iTunes Music Library.xml’ file. It turns out that you can recover from a library crash if you have an intact copy of the .xml file.

Assuming that you have a good copy of the XML file, you can recover by moving the XML file to another directory, deleting the binary iTunes Library file and starting iTunes. You will notice that iTunes is empty — don’t panic, simply go to file, import and point it at your saved copy of the XML file. All of your play counts, ratings etc will be restored. IF you have a good copy of the XML file.

As luck would have it, my XML file (which was around 29MB), was replaced with a nice fresh one that was around 8K, so basically I was screwed. As I have about 100 GB of music (yes, it’s all legal, trying to find storage for all the CDs is a pain) I had a big task in front of me to recreate playlist and reassign music to the playlists.

You can bet that that the next thing that I did was setup an automatic process to make a copy of the precious iTunes Library XML file and tuck it in several safe places. What a great time to have the time machine feature that will be available in Leopard!

Oh, and Apple, you might consider having iTunes make its own backup copy of the XML file, especially when a crash is involved. Having a copy of the binary library file is useless for recovery, whereas the XML file is vital. Think about it.

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suckage, apple, mac, itunes

22 Ways to Overclock Your Brain.

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ideas, intelligence, brain, neural

Interesting article at ComputerWorld about how network attached printers may become the next security threat. It is difficult to say from the article the extent of the threat and how much is theoretically possible versus likely (or already hacked for that matter).

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security, news, printers

There is just so much high quality writing over at the Britannica Blog that you really should add it to your feed roll and read it everyday. Recent favorites include:

Auguries of Innocence

More Americans to Die for Iraq’s Pro-Iranian Theocracy

Some Notes on Orion

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blogging, britannica

Casio has recently celebrated the sale of its one billionth calculator. It is amazing to think about the progression of calculator functionality and form factor over that period of time as well as how they went from being an expensive novelty to an everyday item that is practically given away.

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gadgets, technology, history

Apparently one of the disadvantages of having a place like eBay where you can sell most anything with so questions asked is that it makes for a fine fencing mechanism for stolen merchandise. Just be a little smarter about including serial numbers, etc in your listings (not that I am in any way encouraging criminal activity or this particular use of eBay).

Technorati Tags:
webtools, security, stupid, ebay

Got back on New Years Eve from a week on a lovely island. A few photos can be found on flickr. Now to get re-organized enough to find time to blog the backlog.