Shoot Different

We were at the Brookfield Zoo the weekend before Halloween this year.  I happened to see this hilarious scene, and quickly snapped a pic.

Find out how I made $2,499.25 last month without doing anything.

My wife and I got inspired when we saw a photo of a bookshelf organized by color on flickr.

Our book collection didn’t turn out to be as big as hers, but here’s what we came up with:

I walked out my front door this morning, and down the street I see a big road closed sign. Apparently, the local soapbox derby races take place hear every month. (How did I miss that?)

Here’s a couple snaps:

You can see the rest of the gallery at my Flickr.

One thing that bugged me for a long time using Aperture was that my library quickly got enormous.  There originally wasn’t any way to do this, but Aperture 1.5 gave us the "Relocate Masters" function.

The problem is, you have to select which photos to relocate, and if you have thousands of photos, it’s hard to decide which to keep local, and which to put on an external drive.  So I came up with this technique. You don’t necessarily have to do it exactly like this, and you may use different criteria to pick your photos, but this was what worked for me.

First of all, you’ll need an external hard drive.  Storage is ridiculously cheap now.  I bought a LaCie 500 GB drive for $150.  Open up Aperture and create a new smart album.  We’re going to tell Aperture what photos we want to relocate to the external drive.  Whenever I take a batch of photos, I rate the keepers between 3 and 5 stars.  That way it’s easy to create smart albums for each event.  So I wanted to keep all rated files local and get rid of all the pictures that I didn’t necessarily want to delete, but wanted to store externally. I used these options:

• Set it to match "All" rules
• Rating is "Unrated"
• Date is not in the last 30 days (so I still have time to post-process things I’ve just shot"
• File status is online (so it’s not picking anything I’ve already relocated)
• iPhoto roll is empty (I just did this because I never went back and rated my old iPhoto library)

Now, before you plug in the external hard drive hit Command-A, or go to the Edit menu and hit "Select all"

Since we haven’t plugged in the external hard drive yet, any files we’ve already relocated there are still "offline" and won’t show up in the Smart Album.

Now just hit File > Relocate Masters, and pick a place to put them.  I store them in /Pictures on the drive, since there in my Pictures folder locally.

It’ll chug for a while, depending how many photos you’re moving.  Once it’s done, quit aperture, disconnect the drive, and enjoy tons more free space!

I’ve been using Aperture ever since I bought a DSLR about a year and a half ago. In terms of functionality, I can’t even imagine what post-processing would be like without it.

I can plug in a memory card from any one of dozens of different DSLR’s and Aperture knows exactly how to handle it.

I can save presets for any of the post-processing techniques I use, and apply them to any of the photos that need the same work done. (Note to Apple, being able to apply presets in batch to a set of images would be the best thing ever. If that functionality exists, and I just don’t know about it, someone please enlighten me).

With the Flickr plugin, I can publish my photos in just a few clicks. The built-in gallery publishing feature is also very intuitive and useful.

So I’m sold on the functionality, but there’s a downside. This program gives me more of the dreaded Spinning-beach-balls than I’ve ever seen. I have a 1G Macbook Pro 1.83 Core duo, with maxed out (2GB) RAM. Photoshop CS3 runs like a dream. So does everything else I throw at this machine. Unfortunately, if I open up Aperture and click "Import All" on a card with 50-400 images on it, I can kiss my system responsiveness goodbye for at least 10 minutes.

Granted, I shoot RAW, but I also shoot with a Nikon D2H, which is a mere 4MP, and filesize is about 5MB. If I’m having trouble, how are people using this program with D200’s, D2X’s, or D40X’s.& Not to mention what it’s going to be like when someone plugs in a Canon 1Ds Mk III (Canon’s new 21MP behemoth pro body).

Am I doing something wrong? Or is my barely-a-year-old top-of-the-line laptop already obsolete? If only I’d waited a month to get a Core-2 duo. Though not any faster, I could’ve ran 4GB of RAM.

In searching the web for "Speed up Aperture," I did find a couple tips. The most obvious was to reindex the database. I’ll give it a try, but I think this will really only speed up browsing photos. I just want to be able to start post-processing pictures as they’re being downloaded from the CF card. 

Any tips on speeding up Aperture would be greatly appreciated. I think it’s time Apple says "The functionality is there, lets start optimizing."

It all started last night.  George put his newly hacked iPhone on eBay.  It started at $540.  Keep in mind there are other ways to unlock an iPhone, but he did it the hard(ware) way. 

This morning the phone was up to $2,000.  I thought wow.  Good for that kid.

At 3PM it was up around $4,000.  Huh.

Then the NY Times covered the story.  Cnn followed.  The phone jumped to over $10,000.  This was about 4:30PM.

I went to dinner, came back.  Now 6:30.  This is what I saw:

WHAT?

What happened?  Is Apple bidding on it? Does some company want to reverse engineer what he did?  The instructions on how to do it are on his blog, which is linked in the auction.

So what’s going on?  What’s the scam? 

Last week, a guy known as geohot succeeded in unlocking the iPhone. This technique actually requires opening up the case, and shorting a circuit on the board.  Tiny little solder joints needs to be desoldered and resoldered.  All sorts of software hacks need to be applied.  Apple has really made this tough.

And of course, it still happened.  The iPhone was unlocked in a matter of weeks.  So what was the point of all this?  Geohot has unlocked a second phone, and it’s on eBay right now.  Look:

Update: It’s now up over $35,000,000. If this wasn’t a scam before, it is now.

The auction was posted a little over 12 hours ago and bidding is already over $2k.  I foresee this hitting $5-8k.  This is how desirable it is.  And this is a 4GB iPhone.  You can get a refurb 4GB for $399.  Unlocked it’s worth more than 5 times that, apparently.

I’m not going to start complaining about Mac fanboyism.  I’m just as bad as anybody.  I get excited when there’s a keynote.  I head over to one of the major Mac news sites doing live coverage and hit refresh like a fiend.  I’ve got Macs in my house from Color Classic to Bondi iMac, all the way up to Macbook Pro.

I wanted to like the iPhone.  I really did, but I need tactile feedback.  My cell phone is a simple Nokia flip phone, and I was itching to get rid of it in favor of the latest, greatest gadget from Apple.  But no buttons?  When my phone rings, I pull it out of my pocket and flip it open without looking at it.  I can send a text without looking at the screen, for the most part.  How do I do that with no buttons?

I do admit the interface is gorgeous, though, and that’s what Apple is great at, innovation in design and look and feel.  And everybody is chomping at the bit to use it with their current service providers. 

Hear that Apple?  WIth their current service providers.  People are out there who will pay thousands of dollars to get an unlocked iPhone.  They’ll just keep hacking at it until everybody’s done it.  Open up the interface a little and let people do what they want.  You’re already making a killing on the hardware, why not open it up to a larger audience and sell way more of them?

I got a Wii back in March, so it’s been 5 months now, and I’m still not tired of Wii Sports.  I don’t know why I still go to Gamestop and look at new games.  Every few weeks, I’ll come home excited about a new Wii game, and what happens?  I play it for about 20 minutes, get bored, and pop in Wii sports for a round of Bowling or Golf.

The great thing about the Wii is that it doesn’t matter.  Who needs 10 new FPS’s that all look the same? Nintendo realizes it’s about the experience.

Because you know what’s just as much fun as playing Wii?  Taking pictures of your drunk friends playing Wii.  I tried this on several occasions with interesting results.  I want to see what everyone else can come up with, and theres a little reward to sweeten the pot.  I’ll post the entries as they come in.

So send me your most hilarious photos of drunken Wii-tards.  I’ll pick the best one entered by 9/31/07, and the winner gets a 2000 WiiPoints card.

Upload pics here:

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Here’s a few to get the idea.

The creator of Livejournal, Brad Fitzpatrick published a rant/solution/manifesto for the Social Network problem.  The problem, succinctly put is:

People are getting sick of registering and re-declaring their friends on every site.

His idea was to develop an open-source, non-profit piece of software that aggregates the "Social-graph" into one place.  Social graph basically refers to a virtual map of who everyone is, and how they’re related.  This way, if a new social site pops up, and offers new or unique features compared to the current monopoly of social sites, a user could sign-up, and have access to all the same "friends." Fitzpatrick has begun work on these protocols, and has started development of API’s, as well as a Firefox extension to make the process even easier for users.

If this catches on, it opens up huge opportunities for startup social networking sites, who would’ve had no chance in the environment we have now, due to myspace/facebook dominance.  Who knows what will happen in the near future.  Especially with google hard at work on their own social networking site.

This presents a great opportunity for all the major sites involved as well.  If I’m on myspace, and have 100 friends, and I know 3 or 4 people who are on Facebook, I may just sign up for Facebook if I knew I could easily access all my friends on both sites. The best thing that could happen for everyone, would be for this protocol to significantly increase the user base on all the sites using it.  Sounds like win-win-win-win.

I went out to see The Simpsons movie the other day.  I’ve heard all sorts of reviews for it.  Die hard fans who love it, and die hard fans who hate it.

I think it’s a matter of putting the movie into context.  We all know the Simpsons’ humor in the past few years has evolved a lot since (what I would call) the hey-day from 1993-1999.  It’s a lot more tangential and absurdist than it used to be, without as much biting social commentary.

So the movie is an extension of what the Simpsons has become, not what it used to be.  And in that light, it was pretty funny.  I laughed out loud several times.  Luckily, there were actually funny one-liners that weren’t in the trailer.

Anyway, the website for the movie is pretty cool.  Several good interactive elements, games, and- my favorite- the ability to create your own Simpsons avatar.  You can see mine to the right.  This is how the creation tool in The Sims should have been.

Give it a try, and feel free to post your results here.