April 2006 – Page 6 – a crank's progress

what he said

I think there should always be a place for film photography.

Both digital and physical have their points: they both offer a kind of immediacy (come to that, so does Polaroid, but it doesn’t offer convenient replication). With film, you can see give someone a picture in as little as an hour. With digital, you can send an image to someone in considerably less than that.

But which will be handed down to future generations in a battered cardboard box to be marveled at, pondered over, and otherwise enjoyed?

new toys

Stopped by the King of all Makers today to pick up some disused film processing stuff and was gifted with a Polaroid EE100 Special.

Once I figure out how it works — the 9 Year Old has a Polaroid i-zone so it’s not totally foreign — and can find some film, it will be interesting to see what can be done with this.

I also got some super brass shim stock from the same benevolent source: think freezer-weight aluminum foil for pinhole-making, but gold in color. Gotta find some reasons to use that.

Finished off a roll of 120 RVP today in the pinhole FrankenCamera and dropped it off for processing. Should be able to get it back tomorrow and post the results if there are any 😉 Should be 5 Tulip Festival images, 2 P-Patch shots and a train image.
The final frame on the roll was at Carkeek Park by the railroad tracks: a 2 minute, or close to it, exposure of a passing train framed by a pedestrian bridge. Turns out the watch I borrowed didn’t have a second hand, so I’m not optimistic that one will turn out.

maybe we should deport anyone who ever was an illegal

Stupidest Man Alive: The Winner:

Stupidest Man Alive: The Winner
I regret to say that Donald Luskin of National Review is not the stupidest man alive.

The stupidest man alive is Jon Derbyshire of National Review.

Yes, that’s Jon “I Got Mine, Jack! Pull up the Ladder!” Derbyshire:

The Corner on National Review Online: REFORMED [Jon Derbyshire] A couple of readers to this effect: “Aren’t you a bit embarrassed to be laying in to illegal immigrants, having confessed that you yourself were once an illegal immigrant?” No. I look on it as being sort of like the reformed drunk at a temperance meeting.

Besides, there’s INSIDE and OUTSIDE. I can recall thinking, as an i-i, that Americans were kind of naive about immigration. Since the naivety was to my personal advantage, I didn’t complain. AS AN AMERICAN, and having jumped through all the darn immigration hoops at last (seven years to Green Card, nine more to citizenship), I’m entitled to another point of view…

This is of course the same guy who claims that only adolescent girls are attractive. This is conservatism, I guess.

The key word there is entitled: that sense of entitlement undergirds the current conservative mindset.

What a difference quadrupling the RAM in a Mac mini makes

Wow. If you’re finding your mini to be pokey and it’s not maxed out, by all means max it out. And stand back. I bought a 1 Gb stick from OtherWorld Computing: shipped, it was less than $100 and I had it in hand in 2 days.

I won’t say it’s as fast as a dual G5 but it does make it noticeably more snappy. GarageBand is (more) usable and I am running some photo scans right now to see how that goes.

Results: scans that used to take 10 minutes now take about 4.

Item 6 scan started 4/12/06 4:29:52 PM
Item 1 scan started 4/12/06 4:34:07 PM
Item 2 scan started 4/12/06 4:38:34 PM
Item 3 scan started 4/12/06 4:43:07 PM
Item 4 scan started 4/12/06 4:47:20 PM
Item 5 scan started 4/12/06 4:51:33 PM
Batch scan completed 4/12/06 4:56 PM

That includes the scanning and some post-processing (that’s where I suspect the additional RAM is making itself felt).

Continue reading “What a difference quadrupling the RAM in a Mac mini makes”

automation

As I scan all these old negatives, I am doing it so I never have to do it again (I hope): I am scanning them fullsize (4000 dpi) as TIFF files. Huge. A single 36mm x 24mm image takes up 44 Mb.

But it seemed there must be some way to take those and re-use/re-purpose them: change them to jpeg files, resize them.

Buy that app a drink:

Remember Automator? The app that got the big shrug at the launch of OS X Tiger? Yeah, quite, I ignored it too.

Me three. Seems there sure is.

Then I realized I wasn’t leveraging this Burn Folder idea, where any folder can be magically turned into a shiny CD/DVD. Turns out Automater can do that too. I need to have it monitor the size of a folder to see when it gets to 700Mb. But what to do when it gets there? Hmm. Need to investigate. This looks promising. Might require me to change my workflow slightly, but who cares?

As noted here, you can make any folder a Burn Folder on the fly.

When I get something that

checks for the size of a directory (seems there could be some math involved to determine when one more file, assuming files of similar size, won’t fit)
creates a Burn Folder
populates it
burns it to disk

I’ll post the results.

new photo project

I have commissioned a new photo project for myself this summer. I live overlooking the Picardo Farm P-Patch, the first of Seattle’s popular community gardens, and every spring, I watch the freshly tilled soil become a mosaic of small plots of flowers, beans, peas, tomatoes, with structures ranging from raised beds to ersatz greenhouses. Bear in mind, all this stuff needs to removed by October when the field is tilled over and seeded with a cover crop.

It occured to me I should take a series of photos of this transformation <cue “Circle of Life” theme>. Got the idea this weekend, found a good vantage point (accessible and immovable). Went down there tonight to take a picture and there is already one greenhouse up. So I missed showing the bare field by a day or two.

These will be color pinhole shots, so kind of impressionist but still reasonably useful as documentary material. I have two vantage points, at each end of the field. Looks like about 30 weeks, give or take.

CafePress goods due any minute now

Math equation for a perfect ass:

Xeni Jardin: (S+C) x (B+F)/T = V is the formula that describes the “ideal female ass” in shape, bounce, firmness and symmetry, according to psychology lecturer David Holmes of Manchester Metropolitan University in England:

S is the overall shape or droopiness of the bottom, C represents how spherical the buttocks are, B measures muscular wobble or bounce, while F records the firmness. V is the hip to waist ratio, or symmetry of the bottom, and T measures the skin texture and presence of cellulite.

What, you can’t see those stretchy pants with (S+C) x (B+F)/T = V across the seat?

And here I thought this was all subjective.

digitizing

Slow going this. Takes about 10-12 minutes per image, once you get the settings right. And that has to be done each time you either insert a slide or run a new strip of negatives.

Item 1 scan started 4/10/06 7:46:44 PM
Item 2 scan started 4/10/06 7:58:18 PM
Item 3 scan started 4/10/06 8:09:29 PM
Item 4 scan started 4/10/06 8:22:41 PM
Item 5 scan started 4/10/06 8:34:55 PM
Batch scan completed 4/10/06 8:48 PM

I am working through a set of B&W images I took in 1992/93. I found out about a Habitat for Humanity house being built by a coalition of women’s groups, and decided to document it, if possible. Since the work was done on Saturdays, I showed up camera in hand for most of the project and took lots of pictures. At 36 negs in a page, I have 10-15 pages to work through. I’ve completed 35 scans, filling 1.5 Gb of disk.

I will likely post them up in my gallery here, but I am thinking of using iPhoto’s bookmaking feature and seeing if I can make something interesting there. If so, I’ll send copies to the groups I can find from the original coalition.

Continue reading “digitizing”

this is so worth trying

Save $200 in 2 minutes and have the worlds best writing pen:

transform a $3 pen into a $200 pen in just seconds. Mont Blanc pens are the worlds finest writing pens but they make specialized refills so you must buy their $200+ pens to use their amazing ink…until now. This is the easiest hack/adaptation to give anyone the king’s writing ink.

I find these DIY sites — Make, Instructables — irresistible. I love the idea of taking ownership of your toys/tools and making them work for you, the way you want.

Continue reading “this is so worth trying”

44

April 8 – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

April 8 is the 98th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (99th in leap years). There are 267 days remaining.

My natal anniversary today.

Looking at the worthies I share the day with, I have to think the Buddha offsets Tom Delay. And I get Sonja Henie, Jacques Brel, Julian Lennon, and Robin Wright Penn. The NY Times says that Tony Perez, Jack Bruce, and David Byrne will also cut the cake today.

The BBC has a headline claiming Kurt Cobain killed himself on April 8, but the story makes clear it was the 6th. The NYT notes the the first smallpox vaccination was administered on this date in 1796 and that Lewis and Clark left St Louis with the Corps of Discovery 202 years ago today.