An ark has been built

An ark has been built in Holland, virtually single-handed by one believer.
I wonder if somebody has calculated how much space it would actually take to transport a couple from every species on the Earth, plus food and supplies and a competent crew to keep them sound, but one thing is for sure: this guy is not afraid of a little labor!

21st century vinyl

The Crossley Revolution is a new turntable. It's compact, can run on batteries, has built-in speakers and a USB port for digital conversion!

What's next? Hardcover books with wifi for synchronizing bookmarks with Kindle?

Glitchy Digital Images are Artist’s Inspiration

Glitchy Digital Images are Artist’s Inspiration, pic post.

Oil paintings based on corrupted JPGs. Goes to show anything goes in art.

More HDR (updated)

Update: here is an older post which shows how non-trivial this is to do if the camera doesn't do it (and only a few cameras do, yet). 

Here is one of the clearest examples I'd done where you can see the advantage one can get from High Dynamic Range technology, even the one built into the iPhone 4. (I'm starting to regard that device as a camera with a built-in phone.)
You can see that in the standard shot, most of the indoor red color is lost, and the color in the highlights and the blue sky are virtually all lost. These are saved in the HDR version (a combination, in-camera, of three exposures).
They are not computer-manipulated except for slight cropping.

(The first to comment on the quality of the window washing wins the opportunity to come over and prove he can do it better.)

Excercise for middle-aged nerds

Begin by standing on a comfortable surface, where you have plenty of room at each side.
With a 5- kg potato bag in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can.
Try to reach a full minute, and then relax.

Each day you'll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer.
After a couple of weeks, move up to 10- kg potato bags.

Then try 50- kg potato bags and then eventually try to get to where you can lift a 100- kg potato bag in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute.
(I'm at this level.)

After you feel confident at that level, put a potato in each bag.

On Avatar

I've tried three times now to sit through Avatar, and I totally fail every time. Apart from fx, it just does not seem interesting. Is it just me?

Mate making amongst the well-off

Thanks to Ian from SA for this. I think it's interesting. And honest. Be sure to read both sides of the conversation.
(A Rand is currently about a seventh of a US dollar. So she's talking about for $100k/year. Not excessive.)

 

 ... A funny thing is that the girl only stipulates income, not how much of it he would be willing to spend on her... Just because a guy is comfortable does not guarantee he's willing to buy swimming pools and mink coats.

Cursor positioning improved

I must learn better yet to not jump to conclusions. For example I had believed that the iPad was a very poor tool for editing text (as differentiated from writing it), because normally, even with the little loupe, positioning the cursor is clumsy and tricky.

But QuickOffice for iPad has invented a thing which I hope others will borrow: you point and hold on some text, and the app rapidly zooms in to something like 300%, and moves the line and the cursor up to just above your fingertip. This makes positioning the cursor not just as easy as, but even easier than it has ever been on a desktop computer. Wow.

I believe that almost all the unnecessary limitations of the iPad are just a question of software refinement. Apart from those which will buckle under for normal hardware evolution.

MacHeads

MacHeads, free, full movie. Thanks to Norm.
(Unfortunately it's Hulu and can only be viewed in the US. I could watch it at Lovefilm.com because I'm a customer there. But I don't know if it's hosted for free any other places.)

It's amazing how this documentary divided the audience. Many hated it, but for wildly different reasons. I quite liked it, it had a succinct history of Apple and the Mac Community, and it featured people I know and like, for example Shawn King, Adam Engst, and Andy Ihnatko. I think it makes many good points too.

Background colors

If Apple was serious about photography, they should get rid of that handful of silly colors (including about *two* useful greys) one can select as full-color desktop background, and instead just give us the whole spectrum to choose from. How hard could that be? They already do it for the background for an image.

In the meantime, there are two solutions for serious photographers: make your own backgrounds in form of a one-color image, make several in the tones and shades of grey you like.

... Or one could get really smart, make a small GIF image, which only consists of transparent pixels. It seems that in order to accomplish that in Photoshop, you have to make two layers, the background one deselected (invisible), and remove everything from the upper one, then save as .gif. Seems one can't remove everything from the background layer, it just takes on the current background color set in PS.

... And then you just set this empty image centered, and set the desktop background to the exact tone you want.

Update: Craniac said:
To make a transparent image in Photoshop simply rename the Background layer by double-clicking the name and changing it to anything other than Background. It then becomes like any other layer and can be transparent. It seems that there is special connotation attached to the lowest level having the name Background.
.

A happy little comment

[My twin Leonard Lightfoot weighs in for a mo.]

Oh, Darlings, isn’t the 11-inch Airbook just to die for? Eleven inches, one kilo, just the thing I’ve been wanting to stick in my backpack. I just hope it'll fit! Tee-hee! I am sure just fingering its smooth surface will be pure delight.

But, oh my, couldn't they have selected a new wallpaper by now? I know it's the signature of the sexy "Snow Leopard" system, but really, the purple thingie by now is so... 2009. The hardware is to die for, sure, but to die in last year's fashion is not something a gentleman wants!

Sandisk MicroMate

Sandisk MicroMate is a lovely little thing I may never have found out about if I hadn't gotten one once in a bundle with a memory card. It's simply an SD-card reader with no cable, the USB plug is right on it. Which means it's not much bigger than an SD card. Cheap and handy for getting your pictures or data into your computer. You just take the SD card out of the camera and stick it in the MicroMate (it has a slot at the bottom), then plug the micro-mate in the computer’s USB port.
(With an empty SD card in it, this thing can also be used like a "thumb drive", to transfer information between computer, or to put confidential data on away from the computer, etc.)
Given a free USB port, you may even just let it sit in the machine (if it's not moved around much), no unsightly cables to lie around on the table top. 

(The blue part is just packaging of course.)

(By the way, I didn't mean to feature Sandisk as if it's special, I don't think it is. It's just that I did not see similar products from anybody else.)