I wish I’d discovered the band “That Dog” before they broke up (in 1997), as they would undoubtedly have been great to see and hear perform live. Here are a couple of tracks. Enjoy.
I’ve been having way too much fun making panoramic images with the AutoStitch iPhone application. The following is a collection of panoramas I shot and stitched on my phone while visiting Seattle this past week. Some of these panoramas were stitched from more than 20 photos. These images and a few more can be viewed at full resolution on my flickr page.
Flying Coach on Alaska Airlines from Long Beach to Seattle
Waiting for a ride at Sea-Tac International Airport
At my parents’ house
There’s a bar in Santa Monica named after this place
Two generations of Fines
A Nice Place to Eat Lunch
Cubeland
Cubeland 2
Breakfast with relatives at the Marriott
The Fine Vineyard
Dylan’s Bar Mitzvah Party
Dylan’s Bar Mitzvah Party 2
Last night of the new Star Trek at the Cinerama
Removing the Star Trek (2009) decorations from Seattle’s Cinerama
Interior of the Star Trek decorated Seattle Cinerama on its last day at the theater
It’s always a good sign when the drill bits and burrs decide to join in on the fun. You can tell the dentist is cool when she’s willing to pose for such a photo.
EKG and crash cart standing by just in case. Also note that I remove my shoes before ascending the dental chair, ’cause someone at UCLA’s gotta represent for the mainland yo.
I had a dental appointment yesterday, and it was a blast! Cleaning, scraping, poking, injecting, numbing, all the old standards were in play.
There was one unique moment. Dental phobias are prevalent out there and I don’t want to contribute to mass panic –but (stop reading now), as it turns out, it’s possible for effects of the anesthetic to take a little trip to places other than the injection site. In my case, my right eyelid and some of the muscles controlling that eye’s movement vanished, and for about an hour there appeared to be not one but two identically lovely and skilled dentists working on me. The double-vision didn’t last for more than an hour. That means less than an hour. The dentist had never seen such a thing. According to other dentists at the facility, stuff happens1.
I support the pharmaceutical industry’s cooption of the urban colloquialism "phat", as seen in the name of this phat tube of super-fluoride ointment. It beats excessive use of the letters ‘x’ and ‘z’ to connote power and effectiveness.
As it turns out, I had a couple of cavities. They’re now filled up with some awesome white plastic to better match my iPhone. The rest of my teeth are now clean, and have been duly buffed and fluorided. All calculus was scraped off and either went down the suction tube or went down my esophagus to supplement my diet. I got to see my x-rays, and a look at them made it clear that my teeth are actually monochrome, kind of a dark gray really.
If you haven’t been to the dentist lately, I’d highly recommend a trip. Life’s too short to rob yourself of its more intense and interesting experiences.
They didn’t use the word “stuff”. The word they used ended in “it” followed by a laugh. It also started with “it”. Ha. What they meant was that they’d seen it before. [↩]
My last post should have included 3 photos, but one was missing. I’d cut the first photo, of a light fixture, and pasted it to the end of the email I’d sent to posterous (a service that makes it simple to create blog posts via email). I checked the copy of the email in my sent mail folder, and it too was missing the photo.
I’m going to try replicating that action in this post. If the photo of the light fixture, which went missing from the last post, is also missing from this one, I’ll report the bug to apple.
If you know Seattle at all, you may be able to guess the locations at which I shot the other two photos.
I thought this clock at Seattle’s Harborview Hospital was pretty nice.
Once past the clock and some ornate moulding, the halls continue in that clinical and blank squared-off style that screams “hospital”. I bet architects have a term for it. “medicoindustrial futurist”?
I suspect the light fixture above the clock is a later addition (I might guess that it’s Art Deco and the moulding is Art Noveau, but I’m a bit too ignorant on the subject to really say so with any confidence –should I reference “There’s Something About Mary?”). it seemed worthy of a quick pic.
I frequently hear people who don’t have or use iPhones complaining that the iPhone’s onscreen keyboard is one of the device’s serious shortcomings and wishing aloud that it had a tiny hardware keyboard instead.
I have years of experience using the tiny hardware keyboards on my smartphones1, and from my perspective these criticisms are far off-base. I’m faster at typing on the iPhone, with about the same level of accuracy. I think most iPhone keyboard complainants would recant if they spent a week poking at one.
My opinion of the keyboard is very positive. The iPhone’s text input method is extremely well designed and usable, with both fantastic visual feedback and intelligent auto-correction. Other companies who consider including an onscreen keyboard on their mobile devices2 would do well to copy its strong points.
Here’s a little clip of some random iPhone typing. The clip looks a bit odd because to make it I balanced my Creative Vado HD camera on one of those “helping hands” devices to use its magnifying glass, resulting in a sharp but amusingly distorted image. I don’t think the typing speed on display here is exceptional, and I’m usually more accurate. Speed and accuracy were impaired due to a recording setup which imposed physical constraints –I had to move my finger around at a strange angle in the small space between the magnifier and iPhone and could not see the letters pop or words form without leaning my head at a strange angle3, normally I hold the iPhone in one hand and type with the other. But forgetting these issues, the clip does show, to my mind, that the iPhone keyboard can be used to type with reasonable speed and accuracy. And it’s fun.
I’m looking at you Google Android (I was very disappointed when I tried an Android onscreen keyboard the other day, it was so non-responsive it didn’t even register most of my keypresses [↩]
I basically typed this blind, only checking periodically to check for error. This is actually a good way to go when typing on the iphone, as if you let go and just use the force more often than not you end up with the exact words you were trying to type in much less time than it would take to be super-careful about your keypresses. [↩]
edit: I’m wrong about the resolution issue — see correction and link to a full-resolution 2729×733 180º panorama at the end of this post.
I just shot and stitched a panorama while waiting for a ride. Though the Autostitch iPhone app does a great job, I can’t help but wish it would save the resulting panoramas to the photo library at full resolution.
The screenshot of the app displaying a section of the finished panorama is at least twice the resolution inside the app as is the version it saves. If the iPhone APIs limit the resolution at which apps can export to the photo library, perhaps autostitch could save to its own db and offer some other method of export (email, built-in webserver a la ‘Brushes’, flickr export?).
Regardless this one limitation, ‘AutoStitch’ is a lot of fun, and is well worth its $1.99 price.
– Edit 2009-06-19 12:32am –
It appears that AutoStitch does save its panoramas at full resolution to the iPhone’s photo library, but the photo library doesn’t display the images at full resolution. Nor does the iPhone’s mail client send the photos at the original resolution, instead it scales them to be much smaller.
I used the ‘Multi-Photo’ email application, which can send multiple photos via email without resizing, to send this panorama to myself.1 Click the thumbnail below if you’d like to view the panorama at its full 2729×733 resolution.
Click this thumbnail to see the full-res pano.
Were I home and not out traveling, I’m sure the full-res photo would have easily synced to my home computer’s iPhoto library over USB, but that’s not an option in the field. [↩]
Yesterday I posted a link to my Tor bridge and links to information on how to set up such a bridge.
Several visitors went to the effort of setting up Tor bridges on their computers and then posted their Tor bridge links as comments to that earlier post. Very cool. Unfortunately, in my blog’s current design, comments are only visible when viewing that blog entry directly and don’t show up on the main page. In order to better expose those Tor bridge links in case anyone needs them, I’m re-posting them below:
If you happen to be in Iran and need uncensored access to the internet, you can hopefully use these Tor bridges to bypass the Iranian government’s block of gmail, facebook, twitter, etc. Here are links to the Tor software in English and in Farsi.
If more Tor bridges are added as comments to this or to the previous post, I’ll edit this post to include them.
Several people who have seen me grab the occasional bit of video footage using this tiny and relatively cheap solid-state video camera asked me to let them know the next time a good deal popped up. It seems that every couple of months Amazon sells the “Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder discounted to $129.99 (down from $229.99)1. Now is one of those times.
If the price is not listed as $129.99, that means either that Amazon is out of stock and they’re listing the item from another vendor (in which case the price will likely be higher and the shipping not free) or the deal is simply over.
The camera captures 2 hours of video to its 8Gb of internal storage as 1280×720 AVI files. Image quality is surprisingly good for the price, and this model distinguishes itself from similar cameras with its wide-angle lens2 (and its price when on sale).
It’s small, fits in a pocket3, and doesn’t draw a lot of attention to itself when in use4.
The camera shows up as a drive when its built-in USB connector is connected to a computer and files can be easily copied off of the camera. It also charges its internal battery over USB. I’ve also used my Vado HD as a USB flash drive to ferry large non-video files between computers. It’s a very convenient device, and at $129.99 is about $40 more than Amazon charges for the older, 2Gb, standard-definition (640×484) version of the device.
Runners stagger around in mylar blankets after finishing the 2009 San Diego Rock and Roll Marathon.
Perhaps the periodic discounts occur when Creative Labs needs to improve their quarterly sales figures? [↩]
Its wide-angle lens makes it easier to fit friends into a shot when in a small room, or to hold the camera at arm’s length to shoot myself. As an aside, I’d recommend against bothering to “zoom”. This and other cameras in the category have fixed lenses and do a useless “digital zoom” which just blows the captured pixels up larger. [↩]
Well, it fits in my pocket. It’s small enough that I can carry it through an entire marathon without complaint. [↩]
