Music for free (with strings)

Neil Young has introduced his new album on his website for free. The interesting thing is it forces you to listen to it in its entirety—the actual website consists of two interacting swf file and a GIF used to track stats.

Living With War

This way it won’t undercut sales of the CD or downloads when it is released on Tuesday. Pretty clever.

(The spin on this form of delivery is quite clever. From The New York Times review:

Mr. Young wants the album heard as a whole. The online streams play through from beginning to end; until the CD is ready, the downloadable copies will be available only as a bundle of the full album. “That first impression is so important,” he said. “Instead of just going to ‘Let’s Impeach the President,’ people will have to absorb the whole thing. To understand the songs, you need to understand where the whole album’s coming from. It protects my right as an artist to have the work presented the way I created it.”

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Posted on by tychay 1

DxO updated to 3.55a

DxO Optics Pro 3.5 announced.

DxO Optics Pro has been upgraded to 3.55a as a free update.

Most of the new changes are cosmetic/UI changes:

  • New configurable “docked palette” mode for easy access to all adjustment tools;
  • Improved configuration wizard;
  • The “Automatic” mode of DxO Optics Pro is now easily and fully configurable thanks to a “Default preset”;
  • Option to save or not .dxo sidecar files;
  • Option to set application level output setting preferences (can be locally overridden);

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Posted on by tychay 0

LX1 and Aperture

In order to get the Panasonic Lumix DMC-LX1 (or Leica DIGILUX-2) to work in Aperture you first have to convert it to DNG using Adobe DNG Converter. Then you follow these directions which a commenter provides the trick.

  1. Open “/System/Library/Frameworks/ApplicationServices.framework/
    Versions/A/Frameworks/ImageIO.framework/Versions/
    A/Resources/Raw.plist” as an administrator.
  2. Search “DMC-LC1” and copy the chunk of XML in there
  3. Replace the “DMC-LX1” with “DMC-LC1” and the “C-LUX 1” with “DIGILUX 2”
  4. Save file

Now you can import the DNGs into Aperture or iPhoto and the previews will now work.
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Posted on by tychay 1

17" MacBookPro is a good deal

The 17″ MacBook Pro was announced today at NAB for $2800.

17

It has the following differences from the high-end 15.4″ MacBook Pro ($2500 retail):

  1. 17″ 1680×1050 display vs. 15.4″ 1440×900 display (my current 1.5Ghz Powerbook G4 is a 17″ 1440×900 display).
  2. Firewire 800
  3. an extra USB port
  4. 8x dual layer SuperDrive instead of a 4x single layer SuperDrive
  5. 2.16 Ghz Intel Core Duo instead of 2.0Ghz
  6. 120GB 5400rpm HD instead of 100GB 5400rpm HD

Here is a strange quirk. If you build-to-order the latter with the last two additions (2.16Ghz processor for $300 and 120GB HD for $100), it ends up costing $100 more than the 17″ computer. So you can get a larger screen, firewire 800, dual layer higher speed burner, and an extra USB port for $100 less!

(I figure the Firewire 800 addition is because the better heat dissipation qualities of the larger notebook. If that is the case, I wonder if they stopped underclocking the video chip in this model. I’d have thought the dual layer burner in a 17″ would only be because it was thicker than the 15.4″, except that it isn’t—they’re both 1 inch thick. This specification may have a lot to do with the target market (video) and their penchant to be willing to pay for the top of the line.)

This means that the 17″ MacBook Pro is a good deal (or the 15.4″ MacBook Pro is a bad one).Continue reading →

Posted on by tychay 7

Taking your Aperture keywords with you

Here is a small Aperture tip I forgot to mention.

I work on Aperture on two machines, my Powerbook G4 and my girlfriend’s PowerMac G5 when I can sneak in some time. One problem I ran into was finding that the keywords (and also various export settings) I have set up in Aperture are not carried with the Aperture Library.

The trick is realizing that they are stored in your home directory in: “~/Library/Application Support/Aperture”
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Posted on by tychay 1