Wednesday, September 10, 2008
Tuesday, September 09, 2008
New iPods
Apple introduced new iPod models today, and iTunes 8. Included is "Genius", software which builds song list recommendations based on reviews/comparisons by yourself and by iTunes users.
And finally some cool iPod Nano colors. I thought they had been pretty lame so far, considering the potential. (Must be a bit of an inventory nightmare with this many colors, though.) I need a purple, a green, a yellow, and an orange. (I wonder if they will sell the whole set at a discount. They really should.)
Intro video here.
Hmmm, both the front and the back is curved. I wonder if that will make it less practical for my favorite use: on the top of my dresser, for reading audiobooks in bed.
TV ad here. If it had been me, I would have made it just like the great "She Comes In Colors" iMac ad from ten years ago. Although I admit I think this ad is really beautiful.
Update: Steve Jobs' speech has just been posted.
... Just watching it... it is just stunning how much streaming QuickTime video has improved. When it was fresh a few years ago, the picture was thumbnail sized, and froze all the time. What I get now, due to improvements in both bandwidth and compression, is TV quality. Great.
And finally some cool iPod Nano colors. I thought they had been pretty lame so far, considering the potential. (Must be a bit of an inventory nightmare with this many colors, though.) I need a purple, a green, a yellow, and an orange. (I wonder if they will sell the whole set at a discount. They really should.)
Intro video here.
Hmmm, both the front and the back is curved. I wonder if that will make it less practical for my favorite use: on the top of my dresser, for reading audiobooks in bed.
TV ad here. If it had been me, I would have made it just like the great "She Comes In Colors" iMac ad from ten years ago. Although I admit I think this ad is really beautiful.
Update: Steve Jobs' speech has just been posted.
... Just watching it... it is just stunning how much streaming QuickTime video has improved. When it was fresh a few years ago, the picture was thumbnail sized, and froze all the time. What I get now, due to improvements in both bandwidth and compression, is TV quality. Great.
Sony full frame
If you disregard the still-born Contax attempt early this decade, and the Kodak camera which was awful and short-lived, then Sony is only the third company to present a full frame camera, with the $3,000 A900. Will be interesting to see how it stacks up against the formidable competition of Nikon and Canon.
"The Sony DSLR-A900's full-frame imager is an Exmor CMOS type, with a whopping 24.6 megapixel resolution. Impressively, Sony has also incorporated its SteadyShot in-body image stabilization, making the Sony A900 the world's first full-frame DSLR to offer the capability."
Of course an issue is: does Sony have the lenses necessary to match a professional full frame camera? Even Canon and Nikon are struggling with this, and they have a head start.
I am guessing though that now we have two professional-rated full frame cameras under $3,000 (this one and Nikon D700), Canon may have to reconsider the $8,000 price for the 1Ds. Especially since the Sony has an even higher resolution than the Canon, which until now was unchallenged in this area. Seen from that viewpoint, the price of the Sony is a bargain.
Granted the big Canon is on a slightly different level regarding ruggedness and so on, but I think that there are many, many photographers who want the high resolution but don't need that ruggedness (or bulk and weight), and who will be only too pleased to save $5,000 in the bargain! Landscape photographers, architecture photographers, travel photographers, art photographers, etc. This camera may shake things up a little.
Imaging-resource continues:
"First, the Sony A900's image quality is truly awe-inspiring. Opening a file in Photoshop and hitting Command + to get to 100% reminds me of that scene in Blade Runner when Deckard uses the Esper photoanalysis machine."
OK, I've decided I don't need such resolution for the time being, but this still sounds like fun.
"What's sure is that the Sony A900 is a fit rival for Canon's best camera, which costs $5,000 more."
Sadly it seems that high-ISO noise is not pretty, just like with the smaller Sony models. So it won't compete with the Nikon D3 for reportage!
Back in 2001, I bought the then-revolutionary Canon D30, which was 3 megapixels. That's one-eighth of the revolution of this camera, it had nowhere near the same features or speed, and it was the same price. Dang.
Below is a screenshot comparing the Sony with the D90, both at ISO 3200, and both after Noise Ninja has been applied. The Nikon picture is viewed at 140% because of the difference in resolution. The Nikon is actually less noisy! A tremendous accomplishment by Nikon. The Sony is clearly sharper, but remember this comes at the price of a much bigger and more expensive camera body and lens. (Thrice the price and twice the weight.)
LumLand has a hands-on trial of the A900.
"The estimated price for this camera is AUD3999 for a body-only. Given that this is well under half that of the well regarded Canon 1DsM3, and that the images are very close in quality, then this has to be a great deal. You could buy the body and two top Zeiss lenses for much the same as the Canon.
As far as image quality is concerned, bear in mind that I had to look quite closely at the files – serious pixel-peeping really – to see the differences. I always figure that if I have to look this closely then the differences are probably so close as to be insignificant."
Monday, September 08, 2008
Cook up a good beat
Fun video.
Like Pogue said: "First couple times I saw this, I would have bet you money that the beatbox sounds were audio samples, added during the video editing. But once I visited the guy’s Web site, I realized that he’s probably the world’s greatest beatboxer—and that he probably made all those sounds himself as the camera rolled."
TTL informs:
Beardyman is the name of the guy cooking the "Electro Funk Daddy Superstar Break".
I find lots of subtle things that make the performance great: the overall rhythm of his delivery, how he switches from narrative to beat boxing and back; brilliant writing, like when he filters the low and middle frequencies out of white noise using a household sieve; and the believably "enthusiastic" style of some show host in a routine cooking segment, all of which when combined to his virtuoso command of beat boxing technique gives a rather surreal effect.
There are also things which to truly appreciate you have to now a bit about the history of music technology. For example his Roland 808 clap sounds exactly like the real thing from 1980s. Also, how he feels the need to include both a 808 clap and a 909 clap snare in the recipe and then perfectly renders the sonical differences of those two devices in the beat.
Also he does simultaneous stretching and low pass filtering of the "signal" when he slows down the beat. Not to mention doing it while playing the beat backwards!
Like Pogue said: "First couple times I saw this, I would have bet you money that the beatbox sounds were audio samples, added during the video editing. But once I visited the guy’s Web site, I realized that he’s probably the world’s greatest beatboxer—and that he probably made all those sounds himself as the camera rolled."
TTL informs:
Beardyman is the name of the guy cooking the "Electro Funk Daddy Superstar Break".
I find lots of subtle things that make the performance great: the overall rhythm of his delivery, how he switches from narrative to beat boxing and back; brilliant writing, like when he filters the low and middle frequencies out of white noise using a household sieve; and the believably "enthusiastic" style of some show host in a routine cooking segment, all of which when combined to his virtuoso command of beat boxing technique gives a rather surreal effect.
There are also things which to truly appreciate you have to now a bit about the history of music technology. For example his Roland 808 clap sounds exactly like the real thing from 1980s. Also, how he feels the need to include both a 808 clap and a 909 clap snare in the recipe and then perfectly renders the sonical differences of those two devices in the beat.
Also he does simultaneous stretching and low pass filtering of the "signal" when he slows down the beat. Not to mention doing it while playing the beat backwards!
New generations, and gone ones
Isn't it funny how many graveyards are smack in the middle of town, prime real estate?
New computer art (updated)
Orange Swirl
Gold Death Star
TTL said:
I wanted to see your earlier Artmatic renderings and went to Stobblehouse.com but couldn't find them. Are they not there or am I just unable to locate them?
eolake said...
I never put them there for some reason.
... I've done so now.
Gold Death Star
TTL said:
I wanted to see your earlier Artmatic renderings and went to Stobblehouse.com but couldn't find them. Are they not there or am I just unable to locate them?
eolake said...
I never put them there for some reason.
... I've done so now.
Minox spy camera
Remember the Minox "spy camera"? Well, now there's a digital version. Amazing it took them so long, actually, considering a digital sensor can have much higher resolution than film.
I was actually surprised to read that these cameras were actually used by real spies, it wasn't just a promotional gimmick. I don't get how a 8x11 negative with a 1950's film (grainy), in indoors light can pick up enough detail to copy "documents". That negative is the same size as as the Kodak Disc format, which went under because the picture quality was awful even in 4x5 inch prints. And that was with much better/later films.
When Titans Clash
Way hotter than Gene Simmons
Damn, and she had to be a redhead, my only weakness...
(By the way, the sideways thing, Dakota Fanning can do too.)
(By the way, the sideways thing, Dakota Fanning can do too.)
National Novel Writing Month
National Novel Writing Month. Write a 50k words novel during November.
I don't think you have to be American to participate, I am guessing that the "National" part is just a leftover from the olden days when nations mattered.
If I am to do it, I think an interesting strategy might be just to deliberatly write crap, anything at all. It'll blast through all the internal-editor blockages, and I suspect a lot of ideas and qualities will seep in anyway.
L. Ron Hubbard, who was a high-volume pulp fiction writer, told a story about a lecture he had give at a university, where he said that "when you've written about 200,000 words, you'll know if you have a style". He felt he was being very conservative about that, but it seems he terrified these academia students, because they each tended to write something 5,000 words a month!
I don't think you have to be American to participate, I am guessing that the "National" part is just a leftover from the olden days when nations mattered.
If I am to do it, I think an interesting strategy might be just to deliberatly write crap, anything at all. It'll blast through all the internal-editor blockages, and I suspect a lot of ideas and qualities will seep in anyway.
L. Ron Hubbard, who was a high-volume pulp fiction writer, told a story about a lecture he had give at a university, where he said that "when you've written about 200,000 words, you'll know if you have a style". He felt he was being very conservative about that, but it seems he terrified these academia students, because they each tended to write something 5,000 words a month!
Margaret Cho
"I slept with this woman on the ship. And I went through this whole thing; am I gay?! Am I straight?! And I realized: I'm just slutty.
Where's my parade?"
- Margaret Cho
Where's my parade?"
- Margaret Cho
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