Archive for December, 2005

Why I don’t delete my NEFs

Thursday, December 22nd, 2005

Someone asked on Flickr if they should delete their camera raw files after converting to Adobe DNGs. Certainly you can see a strong pressure from Adobe to do so in order to save some hard drive space.
I don’t.

Aperture 1.0.1 update

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

Drew mentioned that Apple released an update to Aperture. This is probably the first of many though don’t expect anything major:

White balance adjustment accuracy and performance
Image export quality
Book and print ordering reliability
Auto-stacking performance
Custom paper size handling

Aperture depends on the ImageIO Framework to do the file handling and Core Image to do the majority of the [...]

Another war lost

Wednesday, December 21st, 2005

It is sad that I have to resort to foreign outlets to be able to read a writeup of Iraq’s elections that is free of pundit sound-bites. That sadness is a different and deeper sort when I read the Independent’s analysis of the Iraqi election.
The neo-con justification for the Iraq War has always been to [...]

Setting opacity in CSS

Friday, December 16th, 2005

Last week, I wanted to create a translucent layer to grey out functionality on the site. To do this, create a div that covers the window and set the background color to black.
But how to make it translucent? This webpage on CSS opacity covers how to do this and many other useful things:

.grey_background {
background: black;
filter:alpha(opacity=25);
-moz-opacity:.25;
opacity:.25;
}

The [...]

D70 Manual

Friday, December 16th, 2005

I was looking for the English Nikon D70 manual (all I can seem to find is the Spanish version) and found that this FAQ pointed me to a PDF of the manual downloadable from Nikon Singapore.

HP under new management

Wednesday, December 14th, 2005

The business section of the Merc today has two articles on the front page about HP’s nascent recovery under interim CEO Mark Hurd.
So many people base their measure of a person on what they heard about them than the evidence staring them in the face of incompetence of their actions—people’s high opinion of ex-CEO Carly [...]

Adam Tow: Mac, mobile and photography

Tuesday, December 13th, 2005

I met Adam Tow only once, briefly at the Apple Store Palo Alto opening in 2001. He was on the roof next door taking photos of it.
From what little I know about him, he has three obsessions: Macs, mobile devices and photography. That gives him a special star in my book. So it should come [...]

sub rosa

Thursday, December 8th, 2005

In a NYT editorial concerning America’s use of not-so-clever redefining the word “torture” to deny that America uses “extraordinary rendition” and similar tactics to cause de-facto torture:
But that doesn’t make it any less disturbing that the United States government seems to have lost its ability to distinguish between acts that may occur sub rosa in [...]

Pringles white balance

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

“ExpoDisc White Balance Filter” by ExpoImaging

Carl Weese has an article today about using the ExpoDisc for digital white balance with some interesting history: it was used in 35mm film photography, before it found new life in digital.
ExpoDiscs are basically neutral translucent white filters or caps that allow you to take a white balance or exposure [...]

Saturn sets…

Friday, December 2nd, 2005

What an amazing article in the Times today about the closing of part of a signature Saturn plant.
Anyone in the U.S. in the 90’s remembers the quirky Saturn commercials featuring this Spring Hill plant; how Covey’s book had a ringing endorsement from Skip LeFauve, President of Saturn; how Saturn was representative of the new team-based [...]