Browsers and Apps in 2012 · It’s like this: The browser’s doomed, because apps are the future. Wait! Apps are doomed because HTML5 is the future. I see something almost every day saying one or the other. Only it’s mostly wrong ...
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[10 comments]
Red · Particularly intense botanical red; it remains the Achilles’ heel of the sensor in many (all?) digicams. I often see things in my garden that I just can’t get close to with the combination of camera and screen; hm, perhaps the problem is computer screens not camera sensors? Here we have some Japanese maple leaves against blue sky ...
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[1 comment]
CL XVII: Faraways · It’s May so Cottage Life is recurring. On the island, many of the things one sees and wishes to photograph are far away thus must be captured through fairly specialized lenses which tend to impose their perceptions, particularly when the lenses are elderly and actually not that elite. Here are three of those ...
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[4 comments]
Sensplore · I’ve been working on some ideas for clean-screen apps; instead of controlling them with the touch screen, you wave your device around or tap it or shake it. To do this, I’ve been learning about the output of the sensors you find on Android devices. I’ve found that the documentation, while complete, contains some scary-looking math and assumes you know more about quaternions and rotation vectors than the average developer. Well, more than I do ...
Sensor Kinetics Pictures · Recently I’ve become interested in the sensors that live inside Android devices, and how to use them. It turns out that interacting with them is a little on the non-obvious side, as is interpreting the read-outs. So I drew some graphs. [Update: The graphs were wrong. So I deleted them. But I’m about to post a better version.]
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[3 comments]
Ghost Fluff · Actually, the title is The Ghost Writer; I first noticed it in a movie my neighbor on a plane was watching and thought the visuals were pretty good. Which is relevant because the book turns out to be more or less perfect airline fluff: High velocity, a powerful hook into the real world, and very competent writing ...
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[4 comments]
A Million Lives Saved · Well, not really. But my LifeSaver 2 app has now uploaded over a million calls and messages for a temporary stay in the cloud and (in theory) transfer to other devices. This is not as impressive as it sounds since the number of unique users is still just a few hundred; but it pleases me nonetheless. I observe that the number of downloads is quite a bit smaller; it seems that people upload, and then it takes them longer than they thought to get their new device brought up and LifeSaver installed; long enough for the cloud scrubber to have erased their upload, so they have to do it again ...
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[4 comments]
Same Old Sex Organs · Of plants, I mean, of course. Which is to say, around this time every year I get all deranged about the flowers and inflict loads of pictures of them on you. If this sort of photographic cliché offends or (worse) bores you, stop right now and move on to the next blog ...
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[2 comments]
More On That Pipeline · I’ve written before about the BC pipeline controversy. Like many Canadians, I’m unconvinced that it makes sense to bet heavily on filthy carbon-laden bitumen, unconvinced that we should rip the hell out of Northern Alberta’s people and landscape to extract it, unconvinced that we should ship it out of the country so we can buy the refined product back, unconvinced that we should pipe it through our wilderness to the sea, and really unconvinced that it makes sense to run 250 supertankers a year into the narrow stormy fjords of northern BC ...
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[4 comments]
Tab Trick · A person watching over my shoulder asked “How are you switching around so fast?” and I realized that while most readers here know this trick, some may not, and it’s awfully useful ...
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[11 comments]
Books Both Ancient and Modern · I don’t read lots of books; too busy with work and being a Dad/husband/homeowner/citizen. But there’s always one on the go, and so they add up. Some are airplane-ride fluff, but not all. As a consequence I think about what it means for a novel to be “modern”; in particular because some recent highly-touted works have irritated me on account of their overly-self-conscious modernity. Among other things, it’s obvious that the term “modern” is strongly unrelated to the year of publication ...
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[3 comments]
Hating iMovie · I took a movie of my son reading a story he’d written, as part of a multimedia presentation for school. I shot it with my Pentax K-5 and the 50-135 F2.8, by candlelight (you can do things with modern SLRs that Kubrick had to have lenses custom-built for at huge expense). Well, and “by candlelight” I mean twenty or so tea-lights. When I pulled the AVIs into iMovie, the quality was ravishing, the firelight flickering on his creamy 12-year-old skin. When I exported the finished product, no matter how many times I twiddled the QuickTime and other export settings, it looked rather pretty, but omitted all the subtlety of tone and thus most of the beauty in what the camera had captured. So I went searching around the Net and yep, everyone agrees that iMovie export quality is the shitz. I guess it’s Final Cut Express and its thousand-page manual (you think I jest?) for any future video projects.
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[4 comments]
Stevens Creek · When I’m down here visiting the Plex I often stay at Hotel Zico; it’s comfy and attractive and inexpensive and central. It offers more or less nothing by way of food but I have breakfast at Google and don’t eat at hotels otherwise anyhow. It’s right at the intersection of 85 and 82 and thereby hangs a tale ...
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[8 comments]
Opening Day · I’ve written before about our Little League’s opening day, but this is probably the last time; my 12-year-old son is graduating and my daughter shows no interest ...
