Recently, we have been experiencing a bit of appliance stupidity in our house.
Replacement parts for our refrigerator seem to be a major profit center for GE and our microwave was clearly designed by jackasses.
Read on for many too many details.
A couple of days ago as Ben and I were biking into work, we stopped at an intersection and chatted with one of the folk who maintains the stoplights in the Cupertino / San Jose / Sunnyvale area.
He was in the process of changing out some of the lamps in the cross walk signs, eliminating at least one incandescent lamp and replacing an LED element with a newer model.
I took a moment to examine the LED element that he had removed and he gave it to me. SWEET!
It is somewhere around 60+ reddish-orange LEDs arranged on a printed circuit board in the form of the standard “don’t walk” hand. It is backed by a power supply such that it can be plugged into a standard 120v outlet.
And it is bright. Seriously, blindingly, bright.
I figured it would also make a neat light source for photography and decided to use it as the sole source of illumination for a self portrait. I put the camera on a tripod, used a remote switch to control the shutter, and aimed the LEDs at my head from a slightly down and off-to-the-left position.
Interesting shot. I dig it.
That is pretty much the natural color of the image. I did very little post-processing beyond cropping the image.
The one processing parameters that I did tweak that had a major impact on the resulting image, was to use Aperture’s RAW 1.0 processor instead of the 2.0 processor.
Much to my surprise, the difference between the two is huge!
Normally, I use the 2.0 processor and don’t think much about it. It does a great job, to these unprofessional eyes.
However, it appears that photos in the extremes of range are not necessarily best processed by the 2.0 pipeline.
Specifically: the only difference between the image on the right and the image above is the use of the 2.0 (right) vs. 1.0 (above) RAW processing pipeline. All other adjustments are the same.
That is a significant difference!
Certainly an eye opener and I will be re-evaulating certain images in light of this.
A bug? Hardly. Converting a RAW image to something that can be rendered on screen requires a relatively complex bit of math that is specifically designed to yield reasonable results given a wide range of reasonable inputs.
This is not a very reasonable image. It is lit by an intense light source comprised of relatively narrow bands of color; mostly orangish red.
I wonder what other RAW pipelines might do with this image? I dropped the original RAQ (w/sidecar) in a zip file on a server, if curious.
I played with the image a bit with both the 2.0 and the 1.0 pipeline. I couldn’t post-process the 2.0 image to bring out the level of detail/features found in the 1.0 image. Caveat: I barely know what I’m doing.
Honestly, I’m not sure which image is “less correct”. I like the 1.0 image a lot better in that I like the range of oranges that seem to be utterly missing in the 2.0 image.
My general impression of RAW pipelines is that there is a tremendous amount of math behind the RAW conversion process, but there is also a whole bunch of tuning for aesthetics. Camera sensors simply do not have the dynamic range of the human eye and, thus, RAW conversion is partially about compensating for the limitations of the sensors.
Prior to prohibition in the United States, gathering together in a party atmosphere, collecting fine quality ingredients, and precisely mixing/serving cocktails was a popular pastime.
Much like microbrewing, much of the lore of fine cocktailing was lost during prohibition. After prohibition ended, the large liquor and beer companies lobbied like hell to pass laws to prevent the resurrection of the craft alcohol and microbrew markets.
In the past 15 or so years, we have enjoyed a huge resurgence of craft brewing. Similarly, about the last decade has seen a growing interest in the art of fine cocktail mixology.
While this has included the rise of some very fine drinking establishments focused on classic cocktails, the hobbyist mixology market is growing rapidly, too.
If you are going to get into Mixology, you need a good recipe guide. Many paper guides exist, the best (that I know of) being Cunningham’s Bartender’s Black Book.
However, you can’t easily search a book by ingredient or flavor. You can’t be standing in a liquor store and think “I have bourbon, what do I need to make a couple of fine cocktails”. Nor can you experience a minor quake while in the liquor store and immediately look up quake related cocktails.
For that, you need an electronic guide and, with the advent of the iPhone application store, wouldn’t it be nice if such a guide were to be available in a device that you are likely already carrying anyway?
Enter Skorpiostech’s Cocktails.
With over 1,400 cocktail recipes, Cocktails contains a fairly comprehensive list of classic and modern cocktails.
Drinks are indexed by ingredients, flavors, base ingredient, and several other categories.
It is easy to search for a particular ingredient, making it possible to get an idea of the set of drinks you might be able to make given what you have on hand.
As well, you can easily share drinks via email or twitterrific.
All in all, the app is a very solid offering for 1.0. There are some obvious areas for refinement or expansion and I’m looking forward to watching this app evolve.
However, that isn’t the reason why I’m reviewing this otherwise very useful application.
Specifically, I’m calling it out because of the design value.
Cocktails is simply a beautiful app to look at and use. While the list of cocktails is relatively normal looking, the glass icon being the graphical element standout, it is really the recipe page — seen to the right — that shows an incredible attention to detail.
The typography is precise and crisp, with appropriate bits of unicode characters used when necessary.
Also, the background changes color depending on the age of the drink. For example, the Manhattan cocktail dates back to 1888, yet there are many modern versions, too. If you were to flick that recipe to the left, the backgrounds of the recipe would become lighter as the age of the recipe lessens.
A minor detail, sure, but it actually contributes considerably to the usability when simply browsing for a recipe!
This morning, my software update queue was full of goodies.
Notably: iTunes 7.7, iPhone 2.0, and an Apple TV software update! And the App Store is live!
After the updates, the first App I downloaded was the Apple Remote.
Flat out brilliance.
Much like pairing the Apple TV with iTunes, you enter a 4 digit pin number displayed on your iPhone (or iPod touch) on the Apple TV.
Once paired, the user interface is very similar to the iPod UI. Playlists, artists, songs, etc… select what you want to play… displays art work, yada yada.
And in well fell swoop, every other remote (there are 5, if you include two Apple IR Remotes) was obsoleted.
Having bi-directional, fully stateful, communication between the remote and the media playback device is a gigantic game changer. It means that the remote can actually meaningfully tell you what is going on and and can provide UI pertinent to the context implied therein.
That is, you can touch your music, scrub a track with your finger, flick through a playlist and otherwise get your fingers right into your media playback.
You can even update ratings. For me, being able to update ratings is a huge feature. I have smart playlists that put together random selections of tracks over a certain rating, in a certain genre, that I haven’t heard in a while. It creates a set of personalized radio stations out of my music collection. And now it’ll be even more effective because I’ll be rating many more tracks much more quickly!
This changes the game in my living room. Completely. My media center’s remote is now more powerful than any computer I bought in the 1990s. And every one of my friends who has a similar device can now be a DJ.
It isn’t perfect. At the moment, it doesn’t appear that you can play rental material from the remote interface and you can’t create on-the-go playlists. Nor can you set ratings when controlling an Apple TV (but that is an Apple TV limitation).
Sure, as one commenter pointed out, there are other products that offer this style of remote control.
But I don’t want an expensive, dedicated, limited capability, complex remote with a shoddy user interface. I want the power of a computer to control my media playback. In my hand. Only I don’t want to know it is a computer — I want it to just work. With a high quality user experience and seamless network integration.
You people have dirty minds! The !Adult smart playlist merely filters out all songs for which the word adult appears in the comments. For example, Nine Inch Nail’s Closer has adult in the comments and will never play when that playlist is selected.
As my sister so eloquently documented, our Apricot tree has gone completely bonkers this year. The last time I saw an apricot tree produce in this volume was Andrew Stone’s tree during the summer I was living & coding at Stone Design.
The fruit is just now starting to ripen and today was the first day that I could pick any quantity of apricots.
And Pick I did.
And pick again — three days later, I just picked an equal number.
I basically culled the tree for apricots that were ready to pick, while also removing any nearly-ready ‘cots that were weighing down branches to the point of potentially breaking them.
Even so, you can’t tell that a single apricot was removed from the tree! It looks like I have at least 3 to 4 more weeks of fruit to harvest!
Of course, the question is, what to do with all those apricots?
Eat ‘em!
Freeze ‘em!
Make: Jam! Pie! Pancakes! Ice Cream! Cheese! Poached Salmon!
The possibilities are endless. In this case, I quartered the apricots into vacuum bags and froze them for the non-apricot season.
However, not all… some were set aside for eating and a couple were turned into a muddled apricot margarita with a blueberry juice float (which can be seen next to that gigantic bowl of ‘cot quarters).
Our neighbor, Ron, gave us a couple of these ball cactus that had sprouted off of a cactus he has had for year. Ron said it had really pretty flowers, but it had only bloomed a few times in the decade plus that he has had it and it probably wouldn’t bloom for a while.
Apparently, this particular cactus has other ideas. Or maybe it just didn’t like Ron (just kidding, Ron!). It bloomed once last year, impressive tall pink bloom.
This year, it set two buds prior to WWDC and, of course, bloomed during WWDC when I was in San Francisco. Bummer. I figured i had missed the blooms for the year.
Not so!
In the spring, the cactus covers itself in about a dozen little hairy potential blossoms. Most of these will fall off and, typically, all of the remaining ones will fall off after the cactus blooms once in the season.
Not so this year!
The week after WWDC, two of the remaining hairy buds turned into bloom stalks and, sure enough, the cactus bloomed again!
The bloom stalks shoot up to that height over the course of just a few days, literally growing an inch or two per day.
Then they pause for a moment with a bit of pink showing at the end before bursting into the flowers seen at left that only last for 2, maybe 3, days.
Awesome flowers, too. Beautiful pastel pink, with a deep deep throat. These blooms evolved to be pollinated by very large moths (hummingbird sized moths) or bats, apparently.
Our neighbor has an epiphyllum — a night blooming dessert plant (not a cactus) that is pollinated similarly.
When it bloomed a year or two ago, I took a handful of photos.
While taking some long exposure photos, I was buzzed by something that sounded an awful lot like a hummingbird. Of course, it wasn’t.
It was actually one of the moths coming in to consume whatever the plant had to offer. It doesn’t appear to eat the pollen, but douses itself in pollen as it climbs all the way into these deep blooms.
I even managed to capture some photos! I can affirm that it is, in fact, very difficult to take a picture of a rather large, very fast moving, insect in the pitch of night.
Just like the cactus.
I keep hoping that such a pollinator shows up for the cactus blooms, but so far it hasn’t happened. The blooms have faded since the above photo was taken and I suspect this will be it until next year.
Duncan posted a bit of a write up on changing your point of view when taking photos. Specifically, take a typical scene and shoot a picture from something other than the typical sight line.
So true.
This was shot while lying on my belly with the camera on the deck in front of me. I had to cock my head at a painful angle to actually get an eye on the viewfinder.
When moving from my Sony F-505 to the Canon Digital Rebel, I find that I really miss the 505’s ability to pivot lens from the viewfinder (505 used an LCD, later models also had a digital viewfinder).
It was genius. You could pivot the LCD upwards of 90 degrees off axis from the lens and shoot the scene in front of you from your hip or shoot way over your head while actually seeing what you were shooting!
It was a shining example of Sony’s potential to achieve brilliant hardware design and software implementation in a single package.
I honestly believe that my experience with the 505 contributed greatly to my success while stumbling through the newbie stage of dealing with a proper– if relatively entry level– digital SLR.
To get this rather dramatic shot, I was balanced on the loading deck of the back of a truck sandwiched between the truck and a chain link fence, putting the camera an extra 6 feet off the ground.
That is, I’m not afraid to lie in the dirt to get a shot from an interesting angle and I have been known to balance precariously on top of a stack of unstable objects to grab a scene from a unique angle.
This is also likely why I really dig the Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro lens. It is just so terribly sharp while offering a focal length that both provides a bit of zoomery while still being short enough to allow one to easily walk back/forth a few feet as necessary to frame a subject appropriately.
This is a seemingly simple shot. But think about how it would have looked if I shot from a comfortable standing position — the flowers would have been just below my eye level and would have completely blocked Roger. This angle gives a much better perspective of just how bloody big these iris were while also framing Roger’s face nicely in a ring of purple.
The Bug? That was a lie in the dirt and sharp rocks such that the sun hit the bug at just the right angle shot. Sucks when the bug flies away before you take the picture.
All of the shots in this post are examples therein. Every one of them required either kneeling, flat out lying on the ground (or muck), or occasionally climbing into some rather precarious position.
And sometimes, it is all about taking a shot halfway between upright and lying down.
This disembodied roger head was taken somewhere between kneeling and standing. Fortunately, it was sunny enough that I could use a really darned fast shutter speed because my legs were shaking in their halfway-down/halfway-up position.
For each, imagine if the same shot were taken from the default sight line. Boring.
Apparently, George Carlin will rise from the dead on 7/23/08 at 7:30pm to entertain audiences one last time.
At least, according to TicketMaster (at this time).
(Somehow, Carlin would probably find this funny. Hell, he’d turn it into a 15 minute rant of brilliance and profanity that would leave me laughing my ass off while illuminating some vastly screwed up bit of our world. I’ll miss you terribly, Mr. Carlin.)
When I posted What is good tequila? I had no idea that it would generate anywhere near the number of comments that it has.
Great stuff. Thank you for taking the time to respond (mostly– one or two jackasses out there, no surprise).
I wanted to respond inline, but there were so many comments so fast, that I couldn’t keep up. So, I have selected the ones that I wanted to respond to, pulled out quotes, and responded in this post.
The next post will be my personal list of favorite tequilas. It will be long. And opinionated. And highly centric to the current state of the market in the San Francisco bay area.
I cancelled our Netflix subscription today.
In answering their “why terminate service?” survey, it really came down to several reasons.
The Apple TV has spoiled us. Even with its currently limited (though growing) selection, we can make a decision about what we want to watch less than 5 minutes before we want to start watching it.
Too often, we would look at the three Netflix envelopes and say “No… Nah… Uh uh…” and then either watch some stupid TV (back when we still had Direct TV) or grab something via Apple TV.
Given the 50,000 movies delivered per day to Apple TV and iTunes users, it is clear that we aren’t the only ones seeking immediate gratification.
Sadly, the once nimble Netflix doesn’t seem to really get it.
Their “primary reasons for canceling” selections do not include Apple TV, Amazon’s Unboxed, or any other “the market has evolved beyond physical media” selections. And their “what will be your new primary source?” question has “I will download movies over the internet” as the only appropriate answer. Hopefully, Netflix won’t dump that list on the MPAA as I’m sure they would interpret it as evidence of further supposed infringement!
I was really hoping that Netflix’s online delivery play with Roku would be compelling.
Not to be. The diskless set-top box does not have the space to fully download any given piece of content. Thus, the box requires that the internet connection provide a stable, consistently high bandwidth, connection. In the face of lower bandwidth connections, it compensates by dropping back to fairly low quality bit rates.
My experience with all of the broadband internet connections I have ever had is that they tend to get very bursty in the evening hours as the whole neighborhood takes to their internet connections.
The last thing I want is to deal with an angry family when the quality of some movie drops to crap or drops out completely in the middle of playback.
With the Apple TV, we frequently had playback of an HD movie catch up to the download because available bandwidth dropped off during playback. Of course, the Apple TV has built in storage capable of storing the full movie and, thus, fixing this is as simple as starting the download of the movie before taking the ten minutes to make a bowl of popcorn!
None of this is to say that Netflix is a failure. It isn’t. If you are really into movies are like to watch lots of TV Shows, Netflix’s selection is unparalleled and the price can’t be beat.
I’ll revisit their service if they release a device that offers reliable playback compatible with realities of US broadband service. We do watch enough movies that Netflix’s monthly rates combined with such a device would be fiscally attractive.
In any case, farewell for now, Netflix, it was sometimes fun, but mostly disappointing.