Month: January 2012

Kempt – The Phone Stack

Kempt – The Phone Stack:

It works like this: as you arrive, each person places their phone facedown in the center of the table. (If you’re feeling theatrical, you can go for a stack like this one, but it’s not required.) As the meal goes on, you’ll hear various texts and emails arriving… and you’ll do absolutely nothing. You’ll face temptation—maybe even a few involuntary reaches toward the middle of the table—but you’ll be bound by the single, all-important rule of the phone stack.

Whoever picks up their phone is footing the bill.

[A brilliant solution if you have highly interrupted meals. My friends, family etc. have no issue ignoring their phones…]

The “fractional horsepower” http server joins the Nikon D4 party.

[Emphasis is mine -Ed.]

Nikon D4 overview: Digital Photography Review:

WT-5 Wireless Transmitter with web-browser camera control interface 

With the D4 comes a new WiFi transmitter, the WT-5, which is a neat little unit that screws onto the side of the body and draws it’s power from the camera’s battery. Its real party trick, though, is a built-in web browser-based remote camera control interface that doesn’t require you to download or install a specialized app. Essentially, you can log into your camera (with a username and password) using your laptop, tablet or smartphone and its standard web browser, at which point you’re presented with a camera control panel with live view feed. You can adjust a wide range of parameters – exposure mode, shutter speed, aperture, exposure compensation, ISO, white balance and so on, and initiate remote shutter release or video recording.

The WT-5 connects to the socket on the lower left of this image. In the center you can see the microphone and headphone sockets. On the lower right is the Ethernet port.
The web interface also allows you to control multiple cameras simultaneously, including the ability to release their shutters simultaneously. You can even autofocus anywhere in the scene, simply by touching your iPhone or iPad’s screen. Because this is all web-based, you don’t have to physically close to the camera either – in principle you could operate it from a different continent. 

Nikon has clearly paid attention to professional photographers’ workflow requirements when shooting, and has tried to set the camera up so there’s no need to use a laptop alongside it any more. To this end the D4 allows photographers to add full IPTC data to all of their image files as they shoot, and can store 10 data presets each containing 14 fields. There’s a new network setup wizard to configure the camera for use over wired LAN, or WiFi in FTP and HTTP mode. The camera can even use the GP-1 GPS receiver to automatically set its internal clock, so multiple cameras can easily be synced and specific events from a shoot identified by the time at which they occurred.

[I’m so glad to see this begin to happen. And the number of ports on this thing is impressive. Allez!]

Gadgetbox – The Nikon D4

nikon D4

Gadgetbox – The Nikon D4: This DSLR camera makes the pros drool:

Inside the D4’s magnesium alloy body, there’s a 16.1MP FX format CMOS sensor, a 91,000 pixel 3D Matrix Metering system, support for an ISO range from 100-12,800 (expandable from 50-204,800), the ability to shoot 10 fps with full AF/AE (or 11 fps with AF locked), a place for CF or XQD memory cards, and everything it needs to spit out full 1080p video.

[Smokin’ Details here. Look here for some of the more significant “newness”.]

Did someone say latkes?

parsnip latkes with horseradish and dill:

parsnip latkes with horseradish, dill

I have this affliction or maybe you could call it a fixation with latkes. And I know you’re probably thinking, potato pancakes? With shredded onion? They’re good, but are they really worth obsessing over? But you’d be using the literal definition of latkes and to me, latkes are not so much a singular recipe with a finite ingredient list but an approach to pancakes; an approach that could include anything that can be shredded and fried. And oh, when you start from this vantage point, they most certainly will.

I’ve made potato latkes, sure. Many times, even. But then I made mixed vegetable latkes with Indian spices and curry-lime yogurt. I made apple latkes, replete with a caramel sauce made from the juice you wring from the shredded apples. (I waste nothing in the kitchen. My grandmother would be so proud!) This past summer, I made zucchini fritters to solve a dinner crisis. And now, there’s this: Parsnips. Potatoes. Dill. Horseradish. Lemon juice.

[We played around with the same idea—to try various root vegetables—and decided “to not to” for the sake of our expanded holiday waistlines, but we did salt away the concept. This post should act as a reminder. One critical note. Latkes are at their finest only moments from the pan, when they are just cool enough to eat without burning your mouth. because most if us can’t fry enough at once to serve them to a large group at a meal, they are best either on their own, served as a treat or hors d’oeuvre.]

Source: smitten kitchen

Transparency and Technology: Secrets of Small Farm Success

Transparency and Technology: Secrets of Small Farm Success:

But there are a number of advantages to being small. Chief among them may be the ability to connect with individual customers and achieve a level of transparency impossible (or at least undesirable) for larger, factory type farming operations.

“I think a lot of people are finding out – not just farmers, but also fish providers and other producers – that transparency in and of itself is a great marketing tool,” says Barry Estabrook, James Beard award-winning food journalist and author of Tomatoland. “That means encouraging your customers to visit your farm, to talk about how you produce food if you serve a market or CSA.” For its part, the government is at least aware of a growing desire among consumers to learn about where their food comes from. In 2009, the USDA launched the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food (KYF2) to help strengthen local and regional food systems by helping consumers “connect with their food and the people who grow and raise it.”

[It grow ever more obvious to me that in a world filled with “marketing” that lacks substance that the solution is purchase as much as possible from people. The environment benefits, your community benefits, you benefit. A triple play.]

Source: Blog: Slow Food USA

Resolve to design

Matt Chase as part of the To Resolve Project

clean up my language

TO RESOLVE PROJECT is something that came about last year when I started talking new years resolutions with my girlfriend Fiancé Amy Kirby. You create a list, stuff it away in a drawer and it never sees the light of day till the year has passed. I decided to ask as many talented designers I knew (or didn’t know) to create a resolution for the new year as an iPhone background.

Polka-dotted joy

Polka-dotted joy:

It’s a good thing on this blog when something like consensus emerges, and so many of you have sent this my way that it seems we all agree: This is joyful!

An interactive installation at the Queensland Gallery of Modern Art by the self-described “obsessive artist” Yayoi Kusama, The obliteration room offers a whitewashed home interior as a blank canvas for children visiting the museum to cover with colorful dots. It’s a joyful exercise in participatory art, in abundance, in layering and accretion. Visitors leave their traces on the space. Their experience of the exhibit becomes manifest in the exhibit. And through the innocent randomness of children’s choices, a pleasurable kind of order emerges. The impulses to cover and to cluster — to cover and conquer a new white space or to cluster around a social crowd of others — make the distribution playful and human.

[How incredibly awesome. I now declare 2012 the year of the dot.]

Source: aesthetics of joy

Tour de France Champion Greg LeMond to Attend Tour of the Battenkill

Tour de France Champion Greg LeMond to Attend Tour of the Battenkill:

Organizers of the Tour of the Battenkill announce that 3-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond will be the guest of honor at the 8th annual event on April 14-15 in Cambridge, NY.  The former champion of the largest professional race in the world, LeMond will attend the largest one-day road race in America –the Tour of the Battenkill – and will lead the 22 mile non-competitive ‘Bike Marathon-Battenkill’ ride on parts of the challenging course just prior to the UCI 1.2 Professional Men’s race on Sunday morning.

Be generous with your links

Warned: This post contains what some consider offensive language.

One minor point on the comment bullshit:

I’ll reference the article(s) in question in a reasonably clear way. I may even use the title, (In this case, it’s “Comments Still Off” on Siegler’s parislemon tumblr blog.) That way, I’m still attributing “correctly”, (for at least smallish values of “correctly”.) But even the minimal SEO value I generate, I’m not giving that away just because someone’s too fucking snotty to allow their precious genius to be “tainted” by comments. You want me to link to you? You want me to help boost your SEO? For Free?

Fuck You. Pay Me, as Mike Montiero is fond of saying.

[I disagree. I get it, but links make the web. No links, no web. Be generous.]

Source: bynkii.com