256

iPhone 3G_S

It can focus close, but I still had to rest it on Joey's nose to keep him still.

Toy cameras, who needs 'em?

New tree on Piedmont -- 1/4/2009

So, as far back as when I was in Art School, learning the Zone System, checking out the Hasselblad (for studio use only!) and blowing hundreds of dollars on paper learning to print perfect color prints I've been a bit of a perfectionist with the technical end of my photography.

Self Portrait

I've been playing with Flickup on the iPhone. It's highly recommended. Now that I've figured out how to successfully clean my iPhone outer lens, and remove the coating from it, I've lost the Cooke lens soft-focus effect. Still not the best camera, but it is with me all the time.

2008 SxSW Showcasing Artists Torrent

Well, there is no official 2008 SxSW Showcasing Artists Torrent this year. Not a problem, you can download all 739 mp3 files individually from their site! Easy right?

Well, actually it was easy. As Steve Lacy figured out, SxSW made a CSS class for their mp3 files and he was able to generate a script to list the files. Feed the list to wget (wget -i sxsw.txt) and a few hours later you've got most (there are some errors in his list, due to bad site coding by SXSW) of the files. The files total ~3.4G. If you've got a Mac, Fink is your best route to all kinds of excellent tools like wget.

I was thinking of setting up a .torrent of the files myself (and still might) but it looks like someone has beat me to the punch. You can get the .torrent here (PirateBay link).

Update: There's a better torrent here.

Photobooth: The second best parenting tool on the Mac

Joey and I did some Photoboothing today. It was the only thing that would cheer him up, and subsequently was the only thing that kept him from being sold to the Gypsies.

iPhone cases and such

Via Mark at BoingBoing, Bobby and I were drooling over this cork-covered iPhone case while waiting for an emergency Genius session today to replace my dead iPhone. The case is just as cool as it looks and sounds (and is $34.95 at the Apple Store, which is more than list). My iPhone doesn't live in a case during the week though, as I need it to be as thin as possible to slide into my suit pocket with my Moleskine notebook.
For workouts and weekends though, I bought a combination case from Marware, that will protect it from harder home/weekend use and has an armband for running. The fit and finish is a bit iffy, but most neoprene cases are like that. The worst features are the holes for the camera and headphones, which are never quite in the right place. On the same trip to the Apple Store (the first one) I also got a glare-reducing (and face-grease reducing) screen cover for the iPhone made by Power Support. The covers are nice (you get two), but Power Support wins the award for the most impossible to open packaging short of a blister pack. Their cardboard envelope was glued tight on both ends and I had to rip the hell out of it to get it open. A nice little perforation would have worked, but nooooo.

That's all for now. I'm off to shop for higher-power USB hubs, as I'm charging an iPhone, two iPods and powering an external drive, off of my current hub.

iBrick

Looks like my replacement phone didn't last too long. Crashes in Safari and in iPod point towards bad RAM or some other hardware issue.
I tried to restore it, and ended up with this.
Off to the Apple Store.

A Short One

Because I need to go to bed. I need to be on the road by 5:30AM tomorrow, and won't be home till 8 or 9PM.

Lookin' forward to tomorrow, yep. At least I'll be able to get some tweets about Macworld from those lucky enough to go.

OSX Firefox and Flash, friends at last

Okay, playing with Flash-based widgets for Twitter got me pissed (again) that Flash content won't display in Firefox unless it is touching the edge of the window. This time I hit the Google jackpot though and I've found a fix on this page.

It seems that AdBlock, the one Firefox plugin that I can't live without on the Mac messes with Flash display, and that it is a known bug in AdBlock. The fix is to turn off object framing in AdBlock's preferences, or for the hardcore Mozilla types, go to http://about:config and change adblock:frameobjects or extensions:adblock:frameobjects to false.

Whohoo! Now Soccernet works right.

ecto says I'm listening to Slate: The Iowa Gabfest from the album "Slate Magazine Daily Podcast" by Slate Magazine

PowerPoint is 20 years old

Via Presentation Zen:

PowerPoint is not the cause of bad business presentations, but laziness and poor writing skills may be. The point is not to place more text within tiny slides intended for images and visual displays of data. The point is to first (usually) create a well-written, detailed document. Do business people still know how to write?

Some days I wish more people I work with could write basic PowerPoint, much less "a well-written, detailed document."

ecto says I'm listening to Swap Meet from the album "Bleach" by Nirvana