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Showing posts from August, 2011

Running... Again?

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  If you know me you know there was a time about 10 years ago or so where I was running. A lot. At least 5 days a week and at least 5 miles a run. I wasn’t training, I wasn’t preparing for a race or a marathon. I just found myself enjoying the time spent running. I wasn’t obsessed with numbers, but I kept track of them all and liked seeing improvements in time and distances. It was good physical health and mental health. Then I tweaked my knee. Not bad enough that I couldn’t walk on it, just a tweak that told me I needed to back off of running for a little bit. So I decided on 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks I aborted a run very early as the pain was still there. 2 weeks became 3, became a month, became 5 years. 
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Roses (Photocentric) (Updated)

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Over the last weekend my mom seemingly found her camera. My mom often does this, letting her camera sit and gather dust for months at a time, then "finding" it and plays with it as it it's brand new again. It's a little Canon A570is and it still takes some pretty good pictures given how old it is (some 3 or 4 years old) and it's infrequent use. And more importantly it continually impresses my mom, though the fact that it gets forgotten for such long periods of time probably plays into that also. Her latest subject were of some roses she had recently planted. I think over the course of a day I received some 20 (supposedly) different emailed photos of one white rose in blossom. (Thanks iPhoto for making that so easy to do.) So I thought I'd give it a go. Though the shots I did were HDR shots, and taken with a different camera. White roses, outside, while still on the bush were actually quite difficult to photograph. My camera had a hard time focusing on it and ...
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TouchPad Update

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So in case you missed it HP has, for some reason or another, decided to discontinue making phones and tablets with webOS on them (along with some other big news about computers and such that doesn't affect me). This is, of course, right after I had posted how awesome my TouchPad is. I had originally bought the TouchPad as a device to use as a sometimes substitute for my Mac, a developer tool, and in an eco-system that would include a new phone also with webOS on it. It would also do duty as a media playing device and take the job over from my aging iPod Touch. At $500 or so this was seen more as an investment for future webOS work, and I was counting on updates, applications to be added, and new hardware. Of course with HP's recent decision I felt $500 was a bit much for a device with a vague future, at best. So I returned the device to Costco (I love how easy it is to return things there), and happily went my marry way.
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HP: A Bunch of Quitters

An open letter to HP regarding the announcements of Aug. 18, 2011 Dear HP, I have to say I'm really quite surprised with all the news you gave us yesterday; from axing webOS device development, to trying to get rid of your PC business group, and lastly acquiring some little known company for what many see as a whole lot of money for little real value. People are calling this your "IBM moment", basically saying no more catering to consumers and just targeting the enterprise workspace. Oh, except we consumers can still buy your crappy printers, which are still too difficult to setup, then pay exorbitant amounts of money on ink every other week. Thanks for that, by the way.
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Using the TouchPad: webOS

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I’ve been struggling with how to write this part, there are just so many areas to go into that my original post was better suited as a mini-book. So I’m going to break it down into three subjects, the operating system webOS, Creating Content, and Consuming Content. I’ve made no secret about how much I enjoy webOS. At CES in 2009 it was a fresh concept bringing in all the information from your multiple sites and merging them together, multi-tasking like it wasn’t a thing, and looking polished. webOS is more than just an operating system, it’s an app also because of how well all the different parts work together.
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Half Moon Bay Revisited (Photocentric)

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I'm still enjoying playing around with Silver Efex Pro 2, so this weeks image is one that's already been shown on the blog, just black and white-ified. I originally shot the image of a piece of the Half Moon Bay coast to be an HDR shot, and is one of my favorites still, but I thought I'd see what putting it in black & white would do. One of the really powerful and fun features of SEP is their Control Points which really let you fine tune an image. One of the options in them is to bring the original color back out. So I decided to bring out the orange color in the ground cover that really surprised me in the HDR version of the shot, as it didn't really show up that well in the regular version of it.
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Location: 199 University Ave, Half Moon Bay, CA 94019, USA
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Silver Efex (Photocentric)

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I probably shouldn't be writing this post right now, but I just finished a webinar on my new favorite photo plug-in, Silver Efex Pro2. First, let me just say I find it kind of funny that after all the advances made in photography, from black and white to colorful 3D images, that a well done black & white photo can speak to me more. And, apparently, flipping the toggle button in the image editor to black & white just doesn't cut it. I had no idea that there are as many, if not more, slider, toggles, and options in turning a color photo into a black & white one. Honestly, the sheer power of Silver Efex Pro (SEP2) overwhelms me, and a 45 minute webinar leaves me with just enough info to be dangerous.
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The Physical Side of the TouchPad

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Day 3 with the HP TouchPad and I thought I'd share some pictures and thoughts on the physical features of it. A lot of reviewers and sites panned it because, well, it looked like the original iPad, or like most other tablet devices. Now maybe I'm just not imaginative enough but I'm not sure how to make a tablet, a flat screen with camera(s), speakers, and some buttons, look much different than the others that came before it. With that being said, the TouchPad resembles an iPad (the first one, not it's anorexic cousin), and most other tablets out there.
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Popular posts from this blog

Running... Again?

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  If you know me you know there was a time about 10 years ago or so where I was running. A lot. At least 5 days a week and at least 5 miles a run. I wasn’t training, I wasn’t preparing for a race or a marathon. I just found myself enjoying the time spent running. I wasn’t obsessed with numbers, but I kept track of them all and liked seeing improvements in time and distances. It was good physical health and mental health. Then I tweaked my knee. Not bad enough that I couldn’t walk on it, just a tweak that told me I needed to back off of running for a little bit. So I decided on 2 weeks. At the end of 2 weeks I aborted a run very early as the pain was still there. 2 weeks became 3, became a month, became 5 years. 
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The Pros and (Mostly) Cons of Upgrading to a 4K Monitor

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I'm in the process of getting back into photography which will mean a new camera, more on that in a later post. But the first step for me was a new computer, one with the horsepower to handle a modern day camera and its RAW files. Along with the computer comes a new 4K monitor. 4K is great for media consumption, right? Your characters on your favorite show or movie really look detailed and realistic. Scenery looks wonderful. Everything looks great, right? Wrong. You know what doesn't look great? That photo I took in 2012 that I thought was sharp but is very much not. I transferred over my past catalogs of photos over to Lightroom Classic and eagerly began opening up some of my favorite photos. At first I was happy with how the colors looked and how the scene was composed. Then I noticed it was a little soft. Well I had just gotten a new contacts prescription so that must be it. Changed to my glasses and the photos were even blurrier! I went through photo after photo and most ca...
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