Underexposed

• 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.

The OLPC XO laptop

(Credit: OLPC)

Monday isn't the last day after all for the One Laptop Per Child's "Give One Get One" offer.

The offer began two weeks ago and had been scheduled to run through November 26, but the organization extended it until December 31, according to its Web site. With the offer, customers who spend $399 get one laptop, and a child in a developing nation gets another.

"Thanks to a growing interest in the program, we are extending Give One Get One until the end of the year," the organization said.

Customers also get a $200 tax deduction and a year of wireless network access through T-Mobile access points. The laptop uses Linux and a variety of higher-level open-source software packages.