January 3, 2008 4:30 AM PST
Underexposed blog: links of the day
- Best Seat in the House | The Seattle Times - I love Rod Mar's blog about shooting Seattle Seahawks football games. Interesting: lead photo printed with its crooked horizon. I also like to see when he uses his Canon 1D Mark IIN and when his 1D Mark III. He uses both, but with different lenses.
- Lies, Lies and Adobe Spies - Some carping about peculiarly masked IP address, actually owned by Omniture, that CS3 apps contact. See Adobe response here: http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2007/12/whats_with_adob.html
- Olympus raw codec for Windows Vista - Olympus joins Nikon, Canon, et al. with a codec that lets Vista use raw images.
- Money Magazine rates photo scanning services - ScanCafe ranks tops. Beats out BritePix, Digital Pickle, Digital Memories Online, DigMyPics (panned), and Larsen Digital (panned).
- 40-page PDF on Nikon D3 - It's a chunky download, but if you want to see the glossy brochure without the actual paper part...
- Canon 40D Guide - A good basic review of the Canon EOS 40D for those who want a nice primer to digital SLRs and aren't familiar with all the jargon. Upshot: a good camera. (Though you'd have to be a pretty wealthy beginner to buy a $1,500 SLR, in my opinion.)
- OLPC CTO Mary Lou Jepsen quits nonprofit effort - Management turnover at OLPC.
- Groklaw - Lancor v. OLPC - Lancor wants $20 million - Groklaw helpfully rounded up some legal documents from the patent infringment suit against One Laptop Per Child.
- Thomas Hawk's Digital Connection: Moving Files With Vista is Awesome - Finally somebody has something good to say about Vista. Frankly, the bash-Vista meme needs to die, even though it's got merit. But bashing Vista has become gratuitous and few are saying anything intelligent anymore about it.
- Understanding Histograms - A good histogram primer.
- Amazon.com: Amazon Kindle Source Code - Evidently there's some open-source code in the Kindle that must be made available for download.
- PowerShell plus free for noncommercial use - Just noticed that PowerShell Plus, a developer tool for Microsoft PowerShell (nee Monad) can be had for free as long as you're not using it at work.
- TENORI-ON Product Demo Performance - YouTube - A curious electronic musical instrument from Yamaha. See also http://www.global.yamaha.com/tenori-on/
- retrobrowsers are go - A site with various ancient browsers. See how well today's Web sites render. Hello Netscape 0.9 from October 1994, Mosaic 0.6 from 1994, IE 1.0. I never tried Cello or SlipKnot of WinWeb. Too bad no HotJava. I never even heard of LineMode.
- Great neologisms from the New York Times - I knew some of these, but this is a great survey of new terms from well beyond my little tech niche. "Left of boom," "gorno," "maternal profiling," "walkshed."
- Creative use of flash--car portrait - This was a Strobist five-best-of-2007 winner. I love it because it's low-tech--the guy left his camera aperture open and walked around his car with three flashes taped to a rod, firing the flashes at more-or-less regular intervals.
Stephen Shankland writes about a wide range of technology and products, but has a particular focus on browsers and digital photography. He joined CNET News in 1998 and since then also has covered Google, Yahoo, servers, supercomputing, Linux and open-source software, and science. E-mail Stephen, or follow him on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/stshank. 
ANYONE EVER THINK TO ASK WHAT THE OFFICAL READINGS FOR MARS ATMOSPHERE IS? OR ARE YOU ALL GOING TO SIT THERE AND THINK YOU KNOW THE ANSWER?