Comments (0) I was at the Northern Star Council’s annual meeting today. The PR firm that produced the annual report constructed a Scout’s photo entirely of merit badges. They also produced a Facebook app that converts one’s own photo into a merit badge mosaic:
Continue reading 'Badgetization'»
Biscuit gave me a 64G iPad for Christmas – that was three months ago. Since then I’ve been on a mission to use up at least HALF of the iPad’s storage space. There’s no obvious way to fill the iPad up using Apple software: iTunes assumes that people select files and dump them into a tablet one at a time. If your average file is 1/4 MB long, you’ll have to drag and drop over 250,000 files onto iTunes to use up 32GB.
I poked around on the Internet for ideas, and came up empty. Then I contacted the folks at Tekzilla, a web video magazine on tech that streams onto our Tivo. They made some suggestions that helped a little – but not enough – and asked listeners for other ideas.
Last week, the listeners came through. The winning suggestion was to use the incredible capabilities of GoodReader to upload hierarchies of files. I’ve been using GoodReader for several weeks, but hadn’t dug deeply enough into it to appreciate these features. Thanks to GoodReader, I’ve finally filled up at least half of my iPad!
Continue reading 'Filling up iPad Storage'»
Friend and colleague John posted a comment on backlighting, noting that part of a stop can significantly improve exposure. I think there are two observations worth making here:
Although I learned a bit about photography years ago, I still blunder with camera settings. I didn’t mind the shutter speed while snapping pics of dancing. I find I have to literally exercise a special bit of my brain to look at the lighting of a scene. Otherwise I fail to assess backlighting or realize that the shadow will make a huge black slash through the image.
I find that I rely heavily on Photoshop-like software to redeem over- and under-exposed photos. It’s usually good for 1 or 2 stops on a digital camera, though the colors may suffer. Unfortunately there’s no related technology to un-blur a moving subject.
This was so cool I had to repost it!
I Love xkcd from NoamR on Vimeo.
Now, if only Randall Munroe would respond to my emails and let me use a few comics in my textbook…
[UPDATE!] He said YES, so I’m reprinting his Map of the Internet in Elementary Information Security, assuming things progress as expected.
A couple of weeks ago, I was phoned by the St. Paul Pioneer Press. They offered me six weeks of the paper for free. All I had to do at the end of 6 weeks was write “Cancel” on the invoice.
I assume this was a last-gasp attempt to boost circulation at the end of the big Back-To-School advertising season. I’ve received this sort of offer from them in years past.
This morning my wife fielded a call from the Pioneer Press disavowing the offer. I also received an invoice in the mail TODAY, instead of receiving it in six weeks. Thus, my free offer has been aborted about five weeks early.
Continue reading 'Pioneer Press Reneges'»
Here are my own thoughts about learning stick shift. Kelsey learned from me, though there’s no true teacher aside from experience. I think there are two essential tricks to learning a stick shift:
It’s muscle and reflex training, not head training. It takes time to get the feel of the clutch, especially from a dead stop. Take advantage of opportunities to practice stop-and-go with the clutch. Be sure to do it on hills, too.
The tachometer and speedometer tell you interesting things, but the sound of the engine really tells you when to shift gears. If it’s high-pitched, you need to shift. For improved gas mileage, you want to shift sooner rather than later.
[This has been revised since first posted 7/31/10]
Continue reading 'Learning Stick Shift'»
MNDOT has finally announced the design for the replacement bridge over the Mississippi in Hastings. It’s an arch-style bridge, repeating the past two river bridge designs.
The design cost came out about $100 MILLION lower than the MNDOT estimate. I suspect this is because the arch isn’t quite as huge as we might have expected. I think the proposed appearance looks fine.
Cousin Jon sent me this terrific video clip. Another lob in the war of Microsoft vs everyone else…
Continue reading 'A .net child seduced by …'»
I finally upgraded my Mac Pro to Snow Leopard. I give it a “thumbs up” because it was a smooth, trouble free process. It took about an hour, and required almost no input from me. [UPDATED 6/29, 6/30]
Aside from a stability improvement, I saw no immediate, significant changes either good or bad. That was great. Most things worked, including VMWare. I didn’t lose any functionality, either through omission, or through “GUI improvements” that emphasize more common activities at the expense of less common, but still critical, activities.
My biggest gripe is that the Apple “Pro” applications like Aperture were broken by the upgrade. I didn’t find this immediately, since I don’t use Aperture every day. But as soon as I ran Software Update, it fixed the problem. A lame arrangement, IMHO, but at least I didn’t have to go searching for the fix.
Continue reading 'Snow Leopard Upgrade – Thumbs Up (Mostly)'»
I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 3 and to whatever the latest version of Gallery 2 might be.
Both went “sort of” smoothly, though there was a bit of gear grinding to get the two to work together.
Oddly enough, once everything was properly set, I just had to be patient and various problems disappeared on their own. The linkage between WordPress and Gallery 2 works better than ever, though they seemed on the verge of divorce right after the upgrade.
Continue reading 'WordPress Upgrade'»
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