A preview feature

Here's another feature in Mac OS X Leopard, I discovered it by accident: if you have a file (or folder) highlighted in Finder, hit the space bar, and a huge preview will appear. This is neat because you can navigate a lot of files with the arrow keys and instantly get a full-sized preview of any kind of file, picture, text, Word, PDF, etc. And you don't have to have the app open. (And even if you do, opening a file in an app takes longer.)

This is not the same as coverflow, and may be more useful, because the files are not covering each other.

If you select more than one file and hit the space bar, you will get a slide show which you can leaf through with the arrow keys. I can really use this.

Update: in the interest of balance, I should also report that Leopard is less stable on my Mac Pro than Tiger was. Tiger very rarely crashed, Leopard so far has crashed at least once a week, mostly when I wake up the machine. Poor show.

Screen Dictionary

In Mac OS X Leopard, if you hold down ctrl-command-D, it will give a pop-up dictionary panel for any word you point at.
(I only wish I could resize the panel, it's too small to hold more than a few lines of text.)

Oops, I posted too fast, this seems to work mainly in Safari.

Sigma announcement

Sigma attracted a lot of attention from discerning photographers when they announced the DP-1. But the camera has a much longer time to market than expected. So they have just made this announcement.

I think it's refreshing, both that a big company takes quality so seriously, and also that they will make an announcement like this directly to their customers, instead of talking only to the press and to dealers.

It also gives a small impression of how damn complex making a good digital camera is. Personally I don't get it, I'd have thought all the basic problems would have been ironed out years ago. But this is clearly not the case. This is also illustrated by the fact that big, venerable companies like Kodak and Contax brought out big, very expensive cameras which were failures because they simply weren't good enough.

Flickr

Flickr is one of those sites you will have heard about even if you've never been there, like FaceBook, Amazon, MySpace, and ladieswithwhips.com.

I went there, and imagine my astonishment when I realized that I at some point had created an account, with head shot and everything, and never used it. Not only that, but thirty-seven people had searched on my name on Flickr! And not found any photos. Whattawaste.

So I have uploaded some. I must admit, the photo uploader app they give you is a fokload easier and faster to use than adding images to Blogger or my own site.

Pogue on Kindle

David Pogue reviews the Amazon Kindle. He confirms many of the impressions I'd gotten, for example that the was a bad idea to make the Next Page button be the whole of the right edge of the device. Sure, make it easy to hit, but also make it easy to avoid when you want. But he also confirms my suspicion that the thing has the rudiments really right.

Toddlers want tech gear

I didn't see this coming: now small children want real tech gadgets, not toy ones.

Predictably, some educators say that technology "stifles the imagination", however they figure that. Probably the same way some people claim porn causes rape. By emotional decision. (Factually rape statistics have fallen in any country were porn has been legalized.)

Quote:
"The American Academy of Pediatrics advises against screen time for children ages 2 and younger, and it recommends no more than one to two hours a day of quality programming on televisions or computers for older children."

I can hear the answer now: "don't worry, none of what my kids watch could be called quality programming."

Gunnery Sgt. Hartman said:
I am in favor of limiting some kinds of technology in schools, like the use of calculators which makes a lot of people - especially if they're not good at math already - too dependent and impairs their ability further.

Does anybody learn how to divide two numbers on paper anymore? I learned it before calculators, but I'd be hard pressed to try to do it now.

Derivatives bubble?

Gobal financial derivatives ("an investment that derives its value from another more fundamental investment") are now valued at ten times the actual worth of the actual physical planetary assets and production.
Time to buy gold and real estate?

Internet issues

I read last week that there may become Internet connectivity problems, at least around these parts, due to increased video downloading. It was said that big ISPs need to invest some ridiculous figure, like 100 billion, otherwise we will get "brown-outs".

I did not take it seriously. But I'm beginning to wonder after today. Because today one of my internet connections (cable) has totally failed, and I keep having problems with my backup connection (DSL). I must say I don't like it.

Phone cameras or camera phones

I use the camera in my mobile phone once, and then I got tired of it when it turned out I couldn't figure out how to transfer the pictures to my computer. So I have not been interested since.
But similarly to the arena of ring tones and sports, I'm in a minority with my lack of interest. It seems the future of snap-shot photography belongs to the phone camera and online sharing sites.

I am curious by the way, about young people's acceptance of tiny pictures and tinny music. They seem perfectly fine with viewing pictures on a 2-inch screen, and to listen to music via an external micro-speaker in their MP3-enabled phone! I just don't get how that kind of experience can give them any kind of pleasure.

Litigiusness...lessnes...ity

If like me you have a love-hate relationship with "the stupidity that is humanity" stories, here is one more.

Chank fonts

I've been a customer of Chank fonts since the millennium. (I use his font Space Toaster for the Domai logo.) I see him as a poster boy for the one-man web business.
Here are his free fonts.

Fall Day photos

From today. It's the first shoot with my new little Canon Ixus 960 (which I finally got tuesday). (Known as SD950 in the US.)
Below are the first and the last picture I took. The blue one is perfect for a desktop (wallpaper) picture.
Here is the full gallery, 12 photos. (Large.)



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By the way, isn't it funny how you can be snobbish about anything? :)
You can be: "I'm making my pictures on a camera costing twenty grand and the size of a bread box. I'm the business." But you can also be: "I'm making my pictures on a $200 camera which fit in my breast pocket. I rule."

But then of course one might also simply get pleasure from any of these facts without being snobbish about it. There's a world of possibilities.

Update: I almost omitted the bricks/fence picture for being too boring. But then I got the idea to make it monochrome, and I very much like it now.