Posted via web from Zachary’s posterous

This non-hardware-accelerated display works fine as extra space for displaying bins.

1. the monitor was an ancient model that a friend was throwing out [↩]

Posted via web from Zachary’s posterous

Posted via web from Zachary’s posterous

Whereas, I like film festivals.

Now, therefore, I do hereby proclaim that I am duty bound to also like the just-announced “Zombie Short Film Festival” and I do hereby urge all filmmakers to take due note of its existence.

1. Well, I like short films that happen to be awesome. Such are unfortunately in the minority. [↩]

At the moment, Amazon’s page for the Creative Labs Vado HD 720p Pocket Video Camcorder doesn’t list a price, and you have to place it in your cart to find out that it’s $129.99 with free shipping. I expect this price will last Amazon’s sold out again and then subsequently their page will list the higher price of the item from one of the other vendors who sell the camera on Amazon.

I posted my impressions of the camera the last time it was on sale at this price. You can also read more about the deal on this camera at the Fatwallet Hot Deals forum, and that forum thread includes comparisons of the camera’s image quality to other solid-state camcorders as well as links to reviews.

Cowboy Hat by That Dog   (3621 KB)
Listen on posterous

Did You Ever by That Dog   (2933 KB)
Listen on posterous

Rock violin FTW.

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

Cubeland 2

Dylan’s Bar Mitzvah Party 2

Snowglobes at Archie McPhee’s

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

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.

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.

1. 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.

See the full gallery on posterous

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

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.

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

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.

1. Handspring Treo 300, Palm Treo 600, and Palm Treo 650 [↩]
2. 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 [↩]
3. 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.

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

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.

1. 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. [↩]

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

1. 67.165.94.243:443 AF293E70D1DB3AF126B3BD6F5DD2B4D904705BB0
2. 24.2.226.175:443 F4D078BDFDA345F2A1299B3FF55ECC921959F366
3. 66.30.41.122:34983 46EF32AACC7EFD3FCB7CED651BAFC190122DA8F4
4. 71.174.111.132:9000 28A2DC5E9853A5CE0A35F20EB345690200BB042A
5. 71.203.101.115:9001 3B45A28070BF7669C282030E85F475C91A222195
6. 75.84.153.203:9001 8BA6A76D36F5A9830F25B5D8315906434AEE50FF
7. 213.163.90.5:443 3BDBCFE76B74A3D117DB2967AA682A00C7A91D3A
8. 91.66.240.177:443 9F1B11827EFAF23CD18E60960E1C2A7EE95A7BF1

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.

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.

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.

I’ve uploaded a non-spectacular but representative sample clip to vimeo. You can watch it below as an embedded flash clip, or you can download the original full-resolution clip directly from vimeo⁵. if you’d like to examine it more closely. There are a number of other clips shot with the Vado HD also available for perusal on Vimeo.

If you’re looking for such a thing, you know who you are. Here’s another link to the product.

post-finish cool-down from ZachFine on Vimeo.

Runners stagger around in mylar blankets after finishing the 2009 San Diego Rock and Roll Marathon.

1. Perhaps the periodic discounts occur when Creative Labs needs to improve their quarterly sales figures? [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. Well, it fits in my pocket. It’s small enough that I can carry it through an entire marathon without complaint. [↩]
4. The Vado HD looks a lot like a cell phone. [↩]
5. look for the “Download AVI Version” at the lower-right corner of the Vimeo page. [↩]