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Lenovo teases IdeaCentre Q100 / Q110 nettops, D400 home server
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via Engadget by Ross Miller on 8/17/09
[Via ThinkPad; thanks, Mark]
Read - Q100 / Q110 nettops
Read - D400 home server
Read - More details on the D400
Continue reading Lenovo teases IdeaCentre Q100 / Q110 nettops, D400 home server
Filed under: Desktops, Storage
Lenovo teases IdeaCentre Q100 / Q110 nettops, D400 home server originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Aug 2009 22:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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| norrafi has shared a video with you on YouTube: Nice video. A year's worth of pictures of Lex. Song: We're Going to Be Friends by The White Stripes (used without permission - no hard feelings, Jack and Meg?) Colored diapers: BumGenius | |
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Purported Mac OS X Snow Leopard Retail Packaging Pics Surface [Snow]
The clock ticking... tik...tok
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via Gizmodo by Jack Loftus on 8/16/09
As one might expect, the packaging features a snow leopard, staring out at the user with the same white hot intensity of, say, Steve Jobs in his Apple lair as he examines the latest prototype build of an Apple Tablet that may or may not exist.
You know what else would be perfect? If, in the inevitable "I'm a Mac" ad that comes out to market this OS, Hodgman wrestles a real snow leopard. That scene, sadly, is not represented on the Portuguese Mac OS X Snow Leopard packaging. There's still hope for the U.S. release. [MacRumors]
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Joe’s Version of “Children of the Corn”
Joe’s Version of “Children of the Corn”: "
The creepy hand in the cornfield! OMG! It’s getting closer to her! Get off the beam! Harvest the corn! Plant soybeans!
This has been rattling around on photoshopdisasters.com for quite a while. Had a blog teed up last year about it, and never finished it, and then a reader sent me a link last week that jogged my memory. I am a disaster. I admit it. I guess the nuns were right.
But what’s way cool about this flub is that it opens an interesting window into being a magazine shooter, real time, circa now.
Let’s start at the beginning. SI called and wanted me to go to Iowa and shoot the state’s favorite youngster, Shawn Johnson. (As well she should be. What a lovely, accomplished kid.) Idea was to put her on a balance beam out there in the corn, something Iowa is famous for. Makes sense. (This type of thing has precedent. If you can, check out Neil Leifer’s 84 Olympic portfolio for TIME, which has athletes from all over the world in front of their national symbols. Best frames are of two gymnasts, one from China on the Great Wall and the other in Japan, on the rings, dangling from a crane in front of Mt. Fuji. Good ideas, good shooting.)
First words out of every editor’s mouth at every magazine out there nowadays is, “Do it cheap.” SI is no exception. So first things first. Find a free balance beam and a free corn field. In Iowa, not hard to do. Folks are willing to pitch in. Try that in NY or LA.
Balance beams are about 16′ long, 4′ high, 4″ wide—and somewhere between 300 and 400 pounds. Suffice it to say, we mashed down a lot of corn getting this beam into the field. The injured stalks were put upright and A-clamped to light stands. (We are in seat of the pants, on location, do what we gotta do mode.)
The beam is in the field, and the wind and weather are picking up in ominous fashion. Also, the corn is about 9′ high. So the beam’s gotta go up. We accomplish this with about 20 or so apple boxes, which gets it to the right height for a picture, but it’s nowhere near stable. Enter, maybe, 400 to 500 pounds of sandbags, which stabilizes the beam…a little. Time for the assistant sandbag!
Both of my assistants go under the beam and essentially hang on small ropes, letting their full weight apply to the beam. Better, but still not great. Shawn gets up there, brave soul, and starts to pose just a bit, in gingerly fashion. Can’t blame her. We are in a cornfield, not a gym. And I’ve got the top gymnast in the world on a shaky beam, that’s nine foot high, no safety mats, with storm winds swirling. The farmer helping us, and I believe, her dad, go under the beam, basically to play catch. It’ one of these multiple folks’ hands you see in the corn. Don’t remember who, exactly. What I do remember is desperately not wanting to this photo session to make the next day’s newspaper. “America’s Leading Gymnast Injured on Sports Illustrated Photo Shoot!” If anything had happened to Shawn, I never woulda gotten out of Iowa alive.
Lighting is right outta the KISS playbook. One big Octa, with two Ranger heads in it, to pick up some power. It’s a good distance from her, camera left. Height of the light is an issue, as you can see from the select that ran as a double truck in the magazine’s year end issue.
Not, by my lights, the best pick, but, hey it’s not my magazine, they can do what they want.The corn near the light is hot, cause, obviously the light is right there. Tough getting the big Octa clear of the shrubbery. It is high but not high enough. Got it sandbagged to be sure, and also have ropes to two tether points on the soft box that run back to the front bumper of the rental van, but it is still bouncing in the wind like an amusement park ride.
I woulda gone with the frame below, which is one of my favorites over the last couple years. In this look, got the light pitched a touch higher and feathered it off the corn, then burned down the lower left corn in PS a touch. Like the composition of this one, with the rows of corn lining up. And those dark clouds! Fantastic. Until they did what clouds do. It poured, turning our 500 pounds of sandbags into, say, 1000 pounds of sandbags. The farmer who loaned us the field was amazing. Probably in his 60’s, forearms like Popeye. If it weren’t for his help, that balance beam would still be out there, and they’d just be plowing around it. But I like the frame, particularly the farmhouse/barn in the distance. Gives it that “Little Beam on the Prairie” feel.
Historically, magazines would hire a photog because they thought that photog’s vision and energy would apply well to the job at hand. To that end, they rarely expected to see the whole take. They expected, and accepted, the photographer’s edit of the events in the field. (Unless of course, there was a disaster, then the whole take was called in.) On a job for SI, for instance, I would routinely shoot 10, 20, 30 rolls of film, and send in 10-30 selects. The mag would pick from that edit. If I really, really liked a take, I would edit even tighter, doing my best to script the story as I had seen and experienced it. This was not prima donna behavior, it was routine, expected. It was a practice virtually every magazine photog engaged in.
But over the last few years, there has been a sea change in the way photo departments relate to the rest of the mag. The SI department, run by the formidable Steve Fine and Jimmy Colton, does an amazing job year after year, even though they are in the position so many of us are, which is (to borrow my bud Kevin Dobler’s phrase) needing to do “less with less.” They still produce great work, but are under constant budgetary assault. They also try to alternately please, educate, and understand the managing editor, who, in the grand tradition of Time Warner managing editors, has no sympathy for the picture gathering process and less understanding of it. Most ME’s come from the word side, and kinda do a quizzical head tilt when looking at photo budgets. “Why does just shooting some pictures cost so much money?” They ponder this and other cosmic questions at their table at Elaine’s.
Hence the notion of a photog controlling their edit is to a degree, a thing of the past. (Every photog always has their own relationship, protocol and work flow with every client they have. For instance, at Nat Geo, from the very first story I shot in the 80’s to the one I am currently shooting, I have sent every frame to the editor. Every frame, good, bad, indifferent. But with many other magazines, I would edit, sometimes extremely tightly. On a LIFE portfolio at one point, I had 8 subjects and I sent in 16 selects. Two per portrait scenario. Done deal.) With a future feature like the one under discussion, one would think you could dawdle a bit and tinker with an edit. Not so. The pressure on the photo editors at a shop like SI is so high, they generally want the take in the house like, now. I can understand. When voices get raised at the picture showings, along the lines of “Jesus Christ, why doesn’t he have the sun on the right and the ball on the left!” the photo editor doesn’t want to have to call the shooter to see if such a frame exists. They wanna go back to their machine, spin the dial and see right then and there if his guy’s got the sun on the right and the ball on the left. So when I shoot, I am dumping the whole take onto an FTP site that night. Truth be told, I often don’t even look at them that closely, especially if American Chopper’s on:-) Not completely true, but at the end of the day, they’re getting every frame. I will see their thinking when I buy the mag on the newsstand. Or call. Which I never do on deadline, in the heat of things. I wait.
Sometimes, working for a excellent editor and gentleman like Porter Binks (former SI editor), I wouldn’t have to wait. He would always call with an appropriate Tennessee-ism, such as, “Joe, ya did great. They liked it. You be in tall cotton, and that’s better’n bein’ a lost ball in the weeds.” In other situations, no call would come. I’d walk around for a couple weeks even, with kind of a low grade headache rummaging through my moods and thoughts. “They hate it, that’s why they’re not calling. They hate it so bad they reassigned it. It’s over. You’re toast.” That whispering voice of despair, anxiety and insecurity all shooters have in their head. Our own personal Gollum.
Finally, I call. And sometimes, really, I’d have to jog the memory of the beleaguered picture editor, who, understandably, two weeks downstream from assigning the job, having edited about 10,000 frames for other breaking stories, would have to reboot the memory stick for a second. “Oh, oh, yeah. The beam in the cornfield thing (or any job). It was fine, uh, they liked it.” “They” of course are the group, indeterminate in number, who constitute the gateway through which the pictures must pass. “They” are not in the photo world. But “they” judge your pictures. I’ve been blessed with managing editors like Dick Stolley and Dan Okrent, who had a beautiful touch for photos, and knew a good picture when they saw one. With some editors over the years, I woulda had better luck showing my stuff to Stevie Wonder. No matter the extremes, when I would get the word “they” liked it, and my emotional desperation would dial backwards from 105 on the reactor to its customary levels of ambient angst.
When a block of pictures hits the buzzsaw of a weekly magazine on deadline, stuff happens. Quickly. Especially on the web side. I have no idea of the specifics of the work flow when the the mag is going to bed, but I do know it’s hectic, and the SI website, desperately competing for presence out in that crowded cyberspace, is getting put together faster than shit through a goose.
And with the wind blowing, and the corn moving, and the rain coming, and the beam shaking, and all the files from a boatload of prolific shooters on different stories peppering the home server like it’s Jimmy Caan in The Godfather, well, it’s always amazing to me that all the pages come out right side up. This gives rise to the hand in the corn. It was clean in the mag, but not on the web. I kind of like it. The howling wind….the stormy sky….the rustle of the stalks….the hand in the corn. Reminds me of a story I made up to tell my girls when they were small that was an amalgam of scary stories I had heard when I was a kid. I called it “The Dusty Lane.” It would scare the bejeesus out of both them but they would routinely beg me to tell it, as opposed to reading a story from a book. Caity always liked it when I made up stories and didn’t read them verbatim. She would sit on the edge of the bed and say, “Daddy, tell me a story from your mouth.”
So, I’m a Photoshop disaster. Way cool. That’s not to say I don’t use Photoshop, and play around with it, albeit badly. And truth be told….I have manipulated pictures……a tawdry tale of a photog gone bad….stay tuned…the truth is….tk…..
"
Indian farmers check and control water pumps remotely using their mobiles
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via IntoMobile - Cell Phone News, Information, and Analysis by Dusan Belic on 8/15/09
Again and again, I find myself amazed with cool and useful uses of mobile technology. On that note, we bring you this story which involves India's mobile operator Tata Teleservices and agri-tech company Ossian Agro, and how they help farmers monitor and switch on irrigation pumps remotely.
The problem is that farmers in the country routinely walk several kilometres to water their crops, and sometimes they find out that there's no electricity available to power their irrigation pumps. Enter Nano Ganesh, the system which enables farmers to dial a code from any phone to a mobile modem attached to the pump's starter, and which informs them [farmers] whether electricity is available. Moreover, it also allows farmers to remotely switch the pump on or off.
As you're probably figured out, Ossian Agro developed the system, which at the moment is being trialled in two villages in the state of Gujarat. The price of the wireless device connected to the pump's starter is INR 2700 ($56), and there's also the phone cost… More information is available from a dedicated website.
Related News from IntoMobile:
- UK: Orange Blog finds GSM remote control
- Cellphone blamed for Ghana man's death
- Air France testing mobile phone calls on international flights; Frequent fliers rejoice!
- Phone Guardian for S60 3rd Edition devices released
- Nokia enables residents in Tampere, Finland to use their mobile phones for public transportation
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Sticked: Windows 7 review
I've been using Win7 RC on my lovely HP Mini 2140. Quick responsive & better battery life.
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via Engadget by Paul Miller on 8/12/09
Windows 7 arrives on the scene three short years after Vista, shoring up its predecessor's inadequacies and perhaps offering a little bit more to chew on. We've been playing with the OS ever since the beta, along through the release candidate, and now at last have the final, "release to manufacturing" (RTM) edition in our grubby paws. Does it live up to its understandable hype and the implicit expectations of a major Microsoft release? Let's proceed on a magical journey to discover the truth for ourselves.
Continue reading Windows 7 review
Filed under: Software
Windows 7 review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 12 Aug 2009 14:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Texting makes kids dumb -- science fact!
Agree?? Not agree??
P/S: I always recommend people around me to use proper/full words when SMSes
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via Engadget by Vladislav Savov on 8/13/09
[Via Switched]
Filed under: Cellphones
Texting makes kids dumb -- science fact! originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 13 Aug 2009 02:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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19 New iGoogle Social Gadgets
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via Google Tutor by Christine Buske on 8/12/09
Ever since Google first launched iGoogle in 2007, the homepage of choice for millions of people has been a central hub from which to check email, news, and stocks. Now, iGoogle gets social…very social.
Today Google announced 19 social gadgets for iGoogle for iGoogle. They let you share and collaborate with friends, stay posted on friend updates, and challenge your Google contacts to a few games.
A complete list of iGoogle games
We all like to take a break, or two, and what better way to take five at work than to challenge your friend in the next cubicle to a game! Your iGoogle page can now include games you can play with friends, and although this is the list for now, I'm sure it will grow soon as more gadgets are developed!
- Who has the biggest brain?
- Chess
- Scrabble
- Social crossword
- Trivia
- Flood it
- Tile Game
Media Sharing Gadgets for iGoogle
Stay posted on the latest news and buzz on the Internet with the following iGoogle gadgets:
Other entertainment gadgets include:
The one productivity gadget to go social:
- To-Do list gadget lets you share your to-do list, and hopefully also share in the tasks. You can use it as a shopping list as well, and coordinate with family or friends what needs to be purchased at your next trip to the grocery store. Whether for your weekly shopping, or when you are planning a party. The social to-do list is probably the most useful and productive gadget in this line-up.
iGoogle stepping into social networking
iGoogle now also has a news feed called "Updates", which is somewhat similar to the news feed on, for example, Facebook. The updates include any new activities on shared gadgets such as photo albums. You can control what you get updated on by adjusting your social settings for each gadget on your iGoogle.
I wonder though how much of the market Google can conquer now, after Facebook and Twitter are established as popular social networking tools.
How many true Google fans will make the switch entirely to your iGoogle homepage? Or will you use these gadgets on iGoogle, but still use your other social networking accounts? Let us know in the comments!
Need help with Adsense, Adwords or SEO? I'll help you in the forums: http://www.googletutor.com/forums/
Similar Posts:- Google Gadgets and your webpage
- My Top 4 iGoogle Gadgets
- Picasa Tip: Staying Posted on New Pics in a Snap!
- Update Your Twitter Posts in iGoogle!
- The New Google Desktop: Desktop Gadgets on iGoogle
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