The Economist asks what would the outcome of the November presidential election in the USA be, if all those likely to be affected by the outcome could vote. They extend the electoral-college system to include every country in the world. Roll up and register your vote here!
One hassle with using a digital camera is that you have to transfer the photos to your computer to process them. There are two ways, usually, that this is done:
So its nice to see that manufacturers are starting to offer SD memory cards which can communicate from within the camera to the computer using Wireless LAN. For example, Lexar, who have just announced a 2GB WLAN SD card for exactly that purpose. I haven’t seen a WLAN SD card for sale in Germany yet, but I hope it won’t be long before they are available here.
On a similar note, its nice to see that a similar approach of making life more convenient is starting to appear in other areas. For example, Mark/Space have just announced that their latest software can automatically synchronize data between your PDA and computer wirelessly each time they are within 10 meters of each other.
The Guardian reports that the mafia has started selling cheap bread in Naples, attracting lots of customers, but the local authorities warn that the bread could cause cancer and that it is not so easy to identify. Originally, it was sold from car boots, but now they are also supplying shops, making it difficult to know if you are buying contaminated bread or not:
...Open 24 hours a day, the street sellers are drawing shoppers with cheap, crusty bread fresh from wood-burning ovens, the way Neapolitans like it. But police say Naples’ new breed of bakers are slowly poisoning their customers by burning old varnished wood, nut shells covered in pesticides and even planks pulled from exhumed coffins. ‘Whoever buys this bread is eating dioxins and carcinogenic substances and putting their health at serious risk,’ said Francesco Borrelli, assessor for agriculture for the province of Naples.Borrelli’s investigation into the underground bakeries prompted raids by Carabinieri police who found dough being mixed by illegal immigrant labour in filthy, humid and mould-streaked cellars, some perilously close to burning piles of toxic waste dumped in fields around Naples by the Camorra, which was linked earlier this year to suspected tainting of local mozzarella…
I bought an i-Blue 747 GPS track logger recently. You can pick one up, new, on eBay for around 40 – 50 Euro. The idea is to use it to tag photos with their position – our cameras don’t have GPS receivers built in, and often when we get back from holiday, its difficult to remember where exactly we took which pictures. If you set the clock in the (digital) camera before you set off, the time-stamp from the GPS log, together with the position data allow you add the exact position of each photo to the EXIF data that the camera stores when each picture is taken.
The problem is, few GPS loggers come with any software for downloading and processing the track data on a Mac. I’m not aware of any that supports OS X “out of the box”. However, there is lots of third party software around which can be used to read out the scans and process them on the Mac. It takes time to track them down, however. So here’s what works for me:
Read the rest of this entry »A few days ago Microsoft and Nikon announced a patent sharing deal. At the time a Microsoft employee was quoted as saying:
This agreement is another great example of how industry leaders are coming together to collaborate through intellectual property licensing, and by doing so enabling innovation which that will ultimately benefit the consumer.However all is not sunshine in Nikon-land. The latest camera announcement (the Coolpix P6000) contains a statement that the RAW format used is not compatible with Nikon’s existing format and is tied to Microsoft’s Window Imaging Component, which only runs under Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista. Moreover, Nikon has no plans to support non-Windows operating systems. Not surprisingly, Nikon camera users do not like being tied into using only Microsoft software:
The Coolpix P6000 looks like a very sweet camera. The advanced controls, the built in GPS and the ethernet port, and compatibility with i-TTL flash, are just the features I’m looking for in an advanced compact. But if Nikon is arrogant enough to not let me access my own camera RAW data except through a system that makes me a hostage of both Nikon (bad) and Microsoft (worse), I think I’ll pass on this one.Even if I hadn’t just bought an new Olympus camera last week, a Nikon camera with the new RAW format wouldn’t make it onto my short list either – who wants to be tied into a completely proprietary format on anything as permanent as digital photographs? (Yes, I know RAW is anyway non-standard, and differs from manufacturer to manufacturer, but this is the first time that I am aware of, where it has been restricted to one platform).