Keys Corner

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:

• use a memory-card reader (often attached by a propriety USB cable which the camera manufacturer sells at a high price, if you ever need to replace it)
or
• by connecting the camera by cable directly to your Mac or PC

Both methods involve fiddling around: with either a cable or with the memory card from the camera.

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).

Apple is using the Olympics to market it’s Macs and professional image processing software, Aperture, to the press photographers attending. They’ve set up 50 workstations with 30” Cinema Displays and all the necessary software (Photoshop, Aperture, and more) for the pros to use in the Kodak Photographer’s Center. The set-up is being managed by Joe Schorr, Senior Product Manager of Photo Applications, who is also learning a lot about how the Apple applications can be improved by watching the pros working under very tight deadlines.

Sounds like a great idea – gets the best possible quality feedback on their photographic applications and the photographers get excellent support using the Apple set-up from the Apple experts.

Incidently, Kodak are publishing the Olympic Picture of the Day on thier web site – their take on the best photograph processed in thier center on each day of the Olympics.

We have just installed Aperture and switched to shooting our serious pictures in RAW format with the goal of using Aperture to organize the 1000’s of images we have on the Macs and to optimize the pictures when we upload them to the Macs. I’m currently working my way through Apple’s “Aperture 2 – Professionally Manage Digital Photographs“, which is a learning by doing course which involves you managing and manipulating several hundred digital images on the accompanying DVD ROM. I’m finding it an excellent way to get familiar with Aperture, depite the book containing a number of typos (mostly wrong command short-cuts).

The answer is far too few.

For a population of 60 million, it’s sad to see that only 602 people chose to study German at university in 2008 – down from 2288 ten years ago.

It’s not only at the higher levels that an interest in foreign languages has declined in the UK - the number taking French at GCSE has halved in the last 8 years.

Andrew Wheeler posted the following list on his blog Very Good Taste a couple of days ago, with these instructions (I don’t usually do these questionnaires, but this one took my fancy. If you think the list of what I’ve eaten and what I wouldn’t eat looks strange, I stopped eating meat about 15 years ago, in particular beef and other factory-farmed meat. Despite that slight handicap, I have eaten 36 of the foods below):

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

How long is a piece of string? ... or are Macs more expensive than Windows PCs?`

The answer is: it depends.

• About the same price for a similar specification
• About double for a basic machine

So it depends what your priorities are. But if you are considering buying a new Mac, remember that the rumour mill says that new models (scroll to near the end of the article) are probably going to be announced within the next two months.

OK - the Burj Dubai is not completed yet. That’s scheduled for September 2009, at a cost building of three Millau Viaducts. But it has already set a number of records:

• Tallest structure: over 636 m
• Building with most floors: 164
• Highest vertical concrete pumping: 601 m

It actually looks most impressive photographed from above. More photos here. There’s a short animation showing the speed of construction (which started on 2005-02-01) here.

Inditex, based in A Coruña (N. Spain), has overtaken Gap to become the world’s number one fashion retailer. You probably know at least one of their brand names, although I admit I hadn’t realised that all the following stores are part of the Inditex Group:

• Zara
• Bershka
• Pull and Bear
• Massimo Dutti
• Stradivarius

Not that that is all the brands- there’s also Zara Home, and a couple of brands I have never heard of before: Oysho and Uterqüe. Inditex’ success factor is the incredibly fast manufacturing and logistics chain, which allows them to get new fashions into their stores faster than the competition, and which has been the subject of intense analysis of management consultants and even the Harvard Business Review.