In my mailbox this morning
"I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our
liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow
private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by
inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow
up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their
children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."
Thomas Jefferson 1802
Posted at 09:46AM Oct 02, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General | Comments[0]
Neat Air Traffic video
on Gizmodo. That density (which seems so troubling at first glance) is more than a little bit misleading, however. The map (as displayed on my browser, at least) is about 520 pixels wide. You can do the math yourself, but a single pixel at the equator is therefore about 48 miles on a side (but commensurately less as you go towards the poles). The largest variant of a 747 is a little less than 1/20th of a mile long. So the little yellow dots representing airplanes are as much as 1000 times longer than a 747.
Still, it's really mesmerizing to watch....
Posted at 08:54AM Sep 29, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General | Comments[0]
Meme(me)
From Bill:
- Take a picture of yourself right now.
- Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair…just take a picture.
- Post that picture with NO editing.
- Post these instructions with your picture.
Here's mine:
Posted at 04:01PM Sep 24, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General | Comments[1]
The Web's contribution to Healthcare?
So, here's a little story. My health is not the best, so I take more medicine than the average person. (When I last went to see my doctor, I brought a printout with the dosages of every pill I take, prescription or otherwise.) But as the child of a med school professor, I am perhaps a bit less trusting than most: I try never to take a pill that I can't positively ID.
A few months back, my pharmacy switched suppliers on one of my medications. I opened up the bottle, expecting my familiar pink oval pill, and found a round white one instead. After 15 minutes of web searching failed to find me an answer on what the pill was, I dumped out some more pills, thinking that perhaps the markings on my first sample had been damaged. To my shock, I had two different size pills in the bottle.
I promptly went to the pharmacy. They confirmed that the larger pill was the correct one (and the smaller one was the same medicine in a lower dose). Then the pharmacist made up a correct bottle of pills. I asked how this could have happened and she explained that most pharmacies no longer hand-count pills; they pop a pre-filled cartridge into a counting machine and punch in the number. The cartridge must have been mis-filled, and they were going to have to contact everyone who had been dispensed from that cartridge. (I later found out that this was only one other customer.)
So, tonight I had a new medicine and went through the same exercise. This time, however, instead of having to find the manufacturer's descriptions of their medicines, I discovered an easier way courtesy of the web. It took me less than a minute to verify that I had the correct medicine. So kudos to the people at drugs.com for designing a useful tool. Now we need to encourage more people to use it; there's a large demographic for which self-administered medication errors are a leading cause of accidental deaths. So look up those pills, people!
Posted at 09:30PM Sep 12, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General | Comments[0]
AT&T U-verse Part 2
After playing with it for awhile, I can say the following.
- The internet is fast and stable
- The TV and DVR work reliably (once they checked my connections and swapped out the initial DVR for a new unit).
- The software on the supplied DVR works well, as far as it goes. This didn't concern me initially, except that:
- The remote is nearly impossible to clone, making it nearly impossible to use my homebrew DVR (MythTV)
My complaints with the DVR are (a) the limited record capacity, (b) the rather primitive controls for what gets recorded and how it gets retained, and (c) no easy way to archive. My MythTV setup had none of these weaknesses.
Probably I will live with the DVR as it is for awhile, with an eye to resurrecting Myth if I'm not satisfied. That will require throwing money at some new hardware that is capable of controlling the set-top box. Maybe I can save my pennies for one that will record HD....
Posted at 10:00AM Sep 04, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General | Comments[0]
AT&T U-verse
With HD becoming cheaper and more ubiquitous, and wanting to move the TV locations in the house anyway, I decided it was time to try a new TV service. As it happened, I was considering AT&T U-verse when a salesman happened to come by. I liked the idea that even if the TV service didn't work well enough to keep, I'd still get a faster internet connection...so it seemed worth the hassle.
The installer was here yesterday.
Install took 6 hours. They give you a new home gateway which is a honkin' big box--a 2Wire device with AT&T branding. Does wireless and
provides several wired ethernet ports. Changing to my ESSID and WPA key was a snap. Unfortunately, they didn't want to put the gateway in the spot where I have my old one--a "crow's nest" about 10 feet up the wall in my family room--so I'll have to rearrange some wiring. I don't think they want their installers climbing the furniture....
The software running inside the set-top boxes is WinCE; I assume it's a version of MSFT's Media Center software. It doesn't look bad, but thaks to Google, its reputation preceded it so I knew to skip the HDMI cables. (There are lots of complaints about lockups, and the installer seemed to know about it. He gave me a set of component cables.)
They don't supply technical-level manuals, so I don't know what it means when the lights flash in various patterns. But it's day two and I'm on my second DVR box because the first one crashed repeatedly.
I signed up for the "Elite" package, up to 6MBits down/1 MBit up; since
I work-from-home most of the time it seemed worth it. speedmatters.org shows that
I'm currently getting a little more than that....with all 3 of my TVs
running (one of them showing Olympics in HD.) I think that the
gateway shows about 25MBits down/2 MBits up, so they're reserving the
lion's share for TV. Because of bandwidth limitations, you're currently limited to HD 1
stream, which should eventually be 2. You *can* watch the same HD show on several TVs at once, although I can't test that because I currently have only one HD set. I'm guessing they're waiting for better compression technology, rather than a bandwidth increase.
The DVR won't share recordings
with the other TVs, although again, that is supposed to change. Clearly the set-top boxes are networking amongst themselves, because they all show up as devices with DHCP addresses at the gateway. So I imagine that's also a software issue.
And, as you might suspect from a company who can't afford to alienate the content providers, there's a fast-forward but no commercial skip feature. MythTV has me spoiled.
I made them pull all new wires because I
didn't want my satellite system disturbed, in case the TV doesn't work well enough to keep. But they've been responsive about the issues, and right now things look good. Stay tuned and I'll update again after I've had a chance to test things a little harder.
Posted at 11:19AM Aug 21, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General |
The Joy of Macro
I'm headed out for a few days, and need something to carry my new camera in. My wife wants to make me something, so I didn't want to buy a new one. Temporarily repurposing the one that is holding my 35mm gear seems a better bet.
As I was handling it, though, I was seized with an impulse. I took my 200mm macro-focus lens, adapted it and carefully tried it on the digital camera. Then I went out into the yard, and although the light at 10:30 AM is not beautiful, the brightness helped, as I don't yet have a full-sized tripod. So, although the colors are slightly washed out by the intensity of the sunlight, it's still a reasonably nice picture:
Posted at 10:31AM Jul 19, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in Photography | Comments[1]
In praise of good glass
My adapter arrived from Hong Kong. After a minute's experimentation (some documentation--ANY documentation--would have been nice!) I attached it to my 70's vintage, 58mm f1.4 lens. Then, being careful about the aperture-control pin that sticks out the back of the lens, I affixed it to the camera, found a workable exposure in manual mode, and took this:
Then for comparison, I put the kit lens back on and shot essentially the same photo with it:
The extra light from the old lens makes a big difference for this shot, which was indoors, hand-held, in natural light (and not that much natural light because it's a scorcher and I have the drapes drawn). The lens was wide-open, which gave an f-stop of around 4.3.
That light-admitting ability comes at a price, though: it's a fixed-focus lens, for starters, and even so it weighs half again as much as the zoom. The new lens presumably has a small servo to perform the autofocus, as well as the zoom mechanism...but the housing is mostly plastic, and there's clearly some air in there. (For any number of reasons, digital SLR lenses have a form factor which is similar to 35mm lenses.) The extra weight of the old lens comes from an all-metal housing, and more glass: the optics in the lens for the 35mm camera are about 72% larger in diameter, as seen below.
(To those of you who will say "it looks like the difference is a lot larger: yes, it looks that way to me too. But I got out my calipers, held my breath, and very carefully measured: .725" for the digital lens vs 1.25" for the 35mm lens.)
More fun later.
Posted at 04:59PM Jul 10, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in Photography |
Welcome to AXIOM? Ugh.
Sun just switched to a new travel booking tool called "AXIOM," and as a result the operators of the tool have set it up to send us welcome messages.
Rather than feeling welcoming, however, the message creeps me out...and anyone who has seen WALL-E will know why. :-)
Posted at 03:20PM Jul 02, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General | Comments[1]
More and better pictures
So once I had some daylight to work with, I went out into the backyard. My first attempt at a picture was this orange, which was backlit:
Obviously not right. But a little RTFM later, and a few shots to try different metering and exposure compensation settings, and I got this one:
Wish it had occurred to me to try learning to use a fill flash; I might have been able to get an orange orange AND a blue sky. Oh, well...that's for another day.
While I was experimenting I also took these:
Hibiscus, I think...
Knowing as I do what the whole backyard looks like, I have to say that a key advantage of an SLR is that it gives you the option of a longer lens. That lets you take a picture that crops away all of the "un-beautiful" bits.
When the adapter for my Minolta lenses shows up I'll have some more experiments to share. It should allow me to take some pictures that I can't with the kit lenses. For example, in low-light situations, I'd turn to the fixed "normal" lens that came with my film SLR. It is a 58mm f1.4. My kit lens is f4.4 at that focal length--a very large difference in exposure--and on this camera 58mm is a moderate telephoto (like a portrait lens).
Posted at 04:32PM Jun 21, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in Photography | Comments[2]
New Camera
My wife and child headed out for a couple of days of "school's over and camp hasn't started" fun in the gold country. But before they did, they gave me my Father's Day present early, so I could amuse myself in my lonesomeness. I'm now the proud owner of an Olympus E-Volt 510.
I've been wanting a digital SLR for a long time. On my wife's desk is a candid portrait of our son that was taken about a year ago by a friend of ours. Without meaning to dismiss Bill's experience, his enviable eye for a picture, or the persistence it takes to get a good shot...this picture simply could not have been taken with a point-and-shoot camera, for purely technical reasons. Every time I see that picture, I miss the things that my 30-year-old film camera could do, even with my poor skills...like the depth-of-field technique (used to good advantage in my son's portrait) which allows you to frame your subject without having to worry obsessively about extraneous background objects:
So I'm happy to have that technique at my disposal again...and equally pleased that I was able to fetch the image simply by plugging a USB cable between the camera and my Solaris laptop. (My point-and-shoot requires me to pull the media out, and then insert it into a special-purpose card reader for which there is no Solaris driver. It's connected to a Macintosh that's nearly nine years old. Which reminds me, my data on that computer is overdue for a backup!)
My only real gripe at this point is that the camera didn't come with any storage media, but perhaps that's par for the course with SLRs. Oh, and I wish I'd been thinking ahead: the invisibleSHIELD for my LCD screen won't arrive for another few days.
Can't wait to take it outside and find some more interesting subjects...tomorrow.
Posted at 10:47PM Jun 13, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in Photography | Comments[1]
Monday Math Madness
Blinkdagger and Wild About Math take turns hosting a contest called Monday Math Madness. Try it out!
Posted at 06:21AM Apr 14, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General |
Official harbinger of Spring
Never mind that the thermometer says "60," It must be spring -- my dalmatian is basking in the sun in the yard.
Posted at 12:56PM Apr 03, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General |
Anatomy of Disenfranchisement
Over at MathMojo we learn about a way that bean counters are defunding a valuable after-school program with little or no protest.
I'm sure this is but one dirty trick of many. Still, it's illuminating...and chilling.
Posted at 09:11AM Apr 02, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General |
That's so bad it's not even worth cheese...
...which I suppose is a colorful statement I could work into my vocabulary. But in the context of my curernt day, it's my dog's attitude to ear drops. He sees his favorite treat--cheese--in one hand, and the bottle of ear flush in the other, and beats a (somewhat conflicted) retreat.
Posted at 11:38AM Mar 25, 2008 by AceOfSpuds in General | Comments[1]