Aging rock stars

Google goggles

Embryonic technology, but very promising.

Scratched Glasses Give Perfect Vision For Any Eyesight

Scratched Glasses Give Perfect Vision For Any Eyesight, Gizmodo article.

I'd like to try those, I'm tired of changing 'round between normal and reading glasses alda time.
Hmm, of course they may not help me, since I got astigmatism on both eyes too.

Rasterbrillen or pinhole glasses (see comments):

Neeraj says that the world through the pinhole glasses looks "Funny - maybe like looking through a bug's or fly's eye. As I have mentioned: You have to get used to integrate the superposition of all the single pictures of every hole, which needs some time and training."

Toshiba's glasses-less 3D TV

Toshiba's glasses-less 3D TV, article and sort-of video (well, they say one should get the gist of the video despite it being in Japanese, but I must say I didn't get a ghost of a gist). I don't get how each eye gets a different picture without necessarily being at a very precise spot in the room.

Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck

New Panasonic pancake

One of my mostest favorite lenses ever is the ultra-compact and yet fast and very sharp Panasonic 20mm F:1.7 lens for the Micro Four Thirds system. This is an equivalent of a 40mm normal lens. And now they are coming out with a 28mm-equivalent lens, a 14mm F:2.5 pancake lens (because it's so flat). If this one is even close to the quality of the 20mm one, I shall definitely have it. The Panasonic GF1 with a pancake lens fits in a jeans pocket, and yet is a fast and full quality camera in most respects. (The one limitation being that if light gets really low, you'll need a camera with a bigger sensor.)

It's harder to make good wideangle lenses, but this is a rather slower lens (one stop slower), so I think there's hope it can be about as good as the 20mm.

For sure the size is amazing: even smaller than the 20mm, and only 55 grams! That's ridiculous.

I think a good walk-around gear would be a Pentax K-x or K-r with the outstanding and very compact 70mm F:2.4, and the Panasonic GF1 with the 14mm lens, in a pocket. The Pentax won't fit in a pocket, but you can sling it onto your back when using the wide-angle camera.

Why not use a zoom? Hard to say. There's a bit of snobbery to it, perhaps, but you do get extra zing to the pictures with a good prime lens, and they are much more compact. And there's a peculiar pleasure in composing to a fixed focal length, even as there's also much convenience in the instant composing with a zoom.

(I can't believe they haven't updated the GF1 yet. I hope they'll do something great with it, unlike with the G2, which was a pretty trivial update.)

Saved the whale

[Thanks to Ron]

Saved the whale, nice story.

It's true we shouldn't anthropomophize everything will-nilly, but we also don't have any reason for saying that whales can feel gratitude or want to express it. They are warm-blooded creatures after all, and many sea mammals have exhibited very intelligent and aware behavior.

"On Spec"

"On Spec" is one of the paper-mag conterted-to-digital I am trying a subscription with. The ods of being blown away by the fiction are small, statistically, but I really like this cover, if nothing else.

---

[Dang, today and yesterday it takes aaaages to upload a simple picture to Blogger, wonder whaz hap.]

More quotes, thought-provoking

It is a fine thing to establish one's own religion in one's heart, not to be dependent on tradition and second-hand ideals. Life will seem to you, later, not a lesser, but a greater thing.
           -- D. H. Lawrence

The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance.
           -- Socrates

What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?
           -- Dr. Robert Schuller

A preoccupation with the future not only prevents us from seeing the present as it is but often prompts us to rearrange the past.
           -- Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind, 1954

Think twice before you speak, and then you may be able to say something more insulting than if you spoke right out at once.
           -- Evan Esar, Esar's Comic Dictionary

I hope that when I die, people say about me, 'Boy, that guy sure owed me a lot of money.'
           -- Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts

Magazine subs and "Zinio"

It seems fortunately that unlike with books, digital editions of magazines are priced very reasonably. I just found out that one of my old faves, Britain's biggest photography weekly magazine, Amateur Photographer, is sold via Zinio. One issue is a bit over 2 Pounds Sterling like the paper version, not very impressive. But then fifty issues, a full year, is only 25 pounds. That's more like it!

Zinio seems like a good service. Buying was quick and simple, like the best online shops I have tried. Second time I bought I didn't have to type in card data and such, only my password.
And delightfully, the digital magazines are not scans, not even very good scans, they are full PDF files (or PDF-like), meaning when you zoom in on the text, it's dead sharp. That's lovely for readability.

And it gets better, you can even click a little "text" button to see only the text in one wide column, a choice of two text sizes, so you don't have to scoot the page around on the iPad to follow the meanderings of the columns between the pictures and ads. This goes above and beyond the call of duty, I give them an A for this. 

... All right, perhaps A-minus. Sometimes it's tricky to coordinate where you are on the text pages compared to the graphic pages (the "text" button sometimes isn't there). And it would be nice with more choices for text size and fonts. And if they were to really perfect it, they might put in the pictures on lines by themselves in the text view, like Instapaper does it. Best of both worlds. 

Same page, different mode:

The first divorce

[Thanks to Ron and Ray]

Good fun. But touches on one of those things I don't get. A friend of a friend fell in love with a Russian girl. The second she was in England and they got married, she got her boyfriend out of Russia, divorced him, and got half his money.
Say wha...? They'd been married for two days! How can she possibly have earned half of everything, in any way, shape, or form? How do the courts justify this kind of thing?

Ray strikes again

Awesome shot, dude.