I hate how nearly every discussion that mentions Canon and Nikon in the same breath degenerates into a pissing contest. Yes, I’ve been guilty of this myself, but I like to think my rants are of a different quality than mindless cheering of “my team.â€
Having said that, I wanted to piss on another troll here in my blog, because of something I read in this Flickr thread. It is typical of many things I’ve seen spouted.Continue reading
Zeiss today announced the much rumored foray into Nikon SLR cameras with the ZF lens series for the Nikon F-mount. (Previously Zeiss only made interchangeable photo lenses for Contax.)
These lenses are manual-focus prime lenses. In particular a 50mm (Planar T* 1.4/50 ZF) and 85mm (Planar T* 1.4/85 ZF) lenses. Probably much better constructed than the 50mm f/1.8 Nikkor that is my most used lens. Of course, the $100 price point is hard to beat, even if I give up 2/3 of a stop.
It will be interesting to see if Zeiss will be able to carve out a niche in the prime lens market without the corporate advantages they had in the Contax line.
I hope so.Continue reading
On Martin Luther King Day, Gore delivered an extremely well-written bi-partisan speech indicting the Bush administration and attempting to deliver us from the precipice.
I’m certain that the Right Wing will not debate the merits of this speech but simply say, “Gore? Who dey?” or some such.
A pity.
Arn posts a roundup of the Macworld 2006 rumors. I have always loved the work he has done there, even though MacRumors is an aggregator of rumors, not a news site itself, he seems to have a “taste†for what is good Mac news and what isn’t living up to his tag-line: “news and rumors you care about.†Truely.
One thing interesting in the report is the implication of 13″ widescreen Intel iBooks (“MacBooksâ€) and Intel-based Mac Minis in the spring. Caitlin notes that if true, it would leave a single non-Intel hole in the line up: pro desktops and servers (PowerMac G5 and XServes).Continue reading
I was playing with the video features in Caitlin’s new iPod and found it very easy to use QuickTime Pro to make iPod videos. For fun, I exported my OSCON “Building Liquid Websites with PHP†talk to the iPod (download, 139MB).Continue reading
After I read that Microsoft quietly discontinued support for Windows Media on Mac OS X, I didn’t know what to make of it. Just another free app for the Mac that Microsoft is discontinuing—guess MSN Messenger is next on the chopping block.
As a consunmer, it reminded me that I needed to install a Windows Media Player solution on my computer again, as it begins its arduous recovery from a drive failure. At work, many people zip around video and given the platform predelictions here, many times that video is something in Windows Media. Well, I guess that leaves out Windows Media Player X 9.0.
Now normally I would download the latest MPlayer or VideoLAN Client to do this, but that always seemed a kludge. Oh, they have their uses, but I mostly I’m talking about a one-trick WMV playback-pony. Luckily, the article pointed out a solution I had bookmarked and forgotten about: Flip4Mac WMV.Continue reading
Mac OS X Tiger is full of features you never notice until someone is looking over your shoulder saying, “What’s that?â€
In this case, Joseph was looking over my shoulder and what he noticed was an accidental drop down sheet in Address Book that led me to realize that Address Book supports address book sharing through dotMac. I don’t think I ever saw it mentioned but is interesting given who I work for.
Blake sent me this URL to the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny. Man, I wish this was on iTunes Music Store—I’d actually get an Video iPod for this.
Watch it to see who will survive.
Someone asked on Flickr how you get waterblur in your photographs.
You can go into aperture priority stick and stop down to f/22 to get waterblur, but you are hitting the diffraction limits of the lens and losing sharpness. (Remember, if you have a polarizer hanging around, it doubles as an 2-stop ND filter. If you have a pocket digital camera, your sunglasses can be a filter in a pinch.)
ND filters and a tripod are your best bet. A neutral-density (ND) filter allows you to experiment with waterblur on a sunny day:
I think what Frey did was wrong and probably potentially harmful to real drug addicts out there, but it wasn’t that interesting until I read that Oprah put her stamp of approval on it—“essential emotional truths†my ass.
We live in a world of political double speak, where even the big O thinks she is entitled to it.Continue reading