personal

Eye-Fi Releases Wireless SD Memory Card

Eye-Fi Releases Digital Camera Wireless SD Memory Card | Laughing Squid: Eye-Fi has just announced the release of their new wireless SD memory card for digital cameras. The card, which they have been beta testing over the last year and a half, connects your local wi-fi network and automatically uploads photos stored on the card to your computer or to one of 17 online photo sharing services and social networks. The 2GB SD card is now available and is priced at $99.99.[Nice. I’ve been waiting over a year for this product to be released… now to see if they got the details right…]
Source:

The joy of refactoring

Sooo you might remember that I happily refactored a site to use Seth’s custom javascript events. (I believe they have since been wound into prototype core, if you’re going to implement them now.) Anyway, recently we had a number of changes that needed to tie into various user actions, and since they were already custom events from back in February, creating the new classes and having them listen to the events, or in one case adding a new event to a pre-existing class and it’s subclasses took almost no time. I love when that happens. Thanks Seth!

RSD and AtomPub — Together again for the first time…

It Pays To Advertise: Joe Cheng: Configuring an AtomPub blog needs to be equally easy. For some reason, people in the AtomPub community don’t seem to like RSD (only Six Apart puts Atom endpoints in RSD). We need another autodiscovery mechanism.

Hmmm.  When I looked at RSD nearly five years ago, it didn’t seem so bad.  In any case, here’s a ticket and a patch to get WordPress to support autodiscovery of AtomPub endpoints.

[Here, here! And the peasants rejoiced! And the reason one (influential) person in the Atom community didn’t like RSD wasn’t for technical reasons, but because Dave Winer is an acquaintance, and an early supporter of RSD… and he was reviled by some members of that community. Anyway, all these years later, RSD is quietly doing its job, and should be employed for this purpose. That was kinda the point, with no preference for one API over another. Thanks Sam!]
Source: Sam Ruby

An Easier Path to HDR Photos

An Easier Path to HDR Photos: In the example shown above (photos by Barney Streit); the top photo is the regular correct exposure for the building, which was shot in direct harsh mid-day sun. The bottom photo is the HDR image which displays a much broader dynamic range. That image was processed in Photomatix Pro, from nine separate photos (all shot on a tripod), each with a different exposure (bracketed in the camera) to capture the full range from the darkest possible shadows to the brightest highlights.

You can download a trial version from the Photomatix Pro Web site (click here), and here’s a link to Barney’s NAPP online portfolio, where you can see more of his HDR work. My thanks for Barney for the use of his images, and for turning me on to this very cool program.

[Hmmm.]
Source: Photoshop Insider

The plantation the TV networks have created for them

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: A boring rant: The producers of content don’t like the TV network system but can’t quite see the way across the divide into my digital world. Some musical artists, like Prince, are figuring it out, but they’re isolated examples. Trust me, however, when I tell you that TV and movie people will figure it out too. These are not stupid people. And they are not un-greedy. Which means their desire for more money and more control and more freedom will lead them to apply their energy into figuring out how to get out of the plantation the TV networks have created for them. They will break free. Mark my words. [Er umm I may be on the wrong side of this issue all things considered… bring change from within?]