January 7, 2008 5:13 PM PST
Underexposed blog: Links of the day
- Helicon Focus software -- Combines multiple photos at different focus points into a single image with everything in focus. Somehow. More computational photography.
- A detailed review of Nikon D3 -- Very long review of the Nikon D3, favorable overall. Details include praise for GPS compatibility (UTC timestamps!), demerits for live view during macro shooting, and grumblings about long night exposures and weak infrared and ultraviolet performance.
- Creativepro.com -- Review: Canon PowerShot G9 -- A favorable review, but it says: "What I find frustrating is that there could be a G9-like camera with lower noise, if it didn't include such a high pixel count." Camera makers, are you listening? Last year, we wanted raw; now we want better high-ISO performance.
- Rumor: Nikon D60 to Replace D40x | Photography Bay -- Certainly the D40 and D40x are due for a replacement. (An earlier Canon digital SLR also was called the D60.)
- Thomas Hawk: Photophlow Rocks -- Some kind of communal photo search and discussion site to give a group interaction to Flickr. Intriguing.
- Zooomr moving to Japan, mobile version in the works -- Zooomr is trying to differentiate from Flickr, but Zipline wasn't enough, so a mobile version is under way so the company can get funding from Japanese investors; Zoho won't house the servers in 2008. Hard times for a photo-sharing start-up.
- Mozilla Labs: Weave project for sharing browser settings -- This looks potentially useful as an alternative to Firefox. Some folks have privacy concerns, but I don't think I'd put any passwords up there--just bookmarks and maybe browsing history.
- Inkscape's first two weeks with Launchpad | Infinite Knots -- Bug-hunting is easier now than at Sourceforge. "The change would have been easier if Launchpad was open source, but I feel confident that Canonical's commitment to opening it is genuine," according to Infinite Knots.
- Some open-source hardware, the Neuros OSD -- The New York Times -- A video recorder/translator designed to be extended. Maybe appealing to the serious hardware hackers, but you can't cut and paste with a soldering iron.
- Intel vs. OLPC blow-by-blow -- The New York Times -- Some juicy particulars of how Intel's alliance with One Laptop Per Child--never genial to begin with--fell apart.
- Intel PDF on SSE4 instruction set -- Some detail on what the SSE4 instructions do. SSE4 starts showing up in Penryn processors.
- Bad Astronomy blog -- My New Year's Resolution -- OK, I laughed. Nerd humor.
- What's In and Out for 2008 -- Washingtonpost.com -- I'm mostly out of the loop, but I was ahead of the times with Pastafarianism. I vote for Kakuro over Scrabulous, though, as a Sudoku successor.
- Lightroom color management PDF -- Some detailed articles on color management for Lightroom and Photoshop.
- D-SLR Systems catalog | PCPhoto magazine -- A snapshot of the camera and lens line-ups from all the SLR companies.
- Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Killer Tips -- Another Before/After Shortcut -- I didn't know about the backslash key shortcut. Sounds pretty useful.
- People paparazzi -- Guardian Unlimited -- A look at the paparazzi business. Fixation on celebrities is so depressing.
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. 
