PSA: All you WordPress folks remember to change your timezone offset. Took me until now to remember. Someday this will be automated.
P2: The New Prologue
I was a fan of the original Prologue, and this new iteration of it looks even better.
I’m struck by how easy it would be to setup a private Twitter-like service for just the people you want to hang with. That could be fun, particularly as Twitter becomes less and less interesting and more and more overcrowded.
Mother of All Funk Chords
I rarely send out YouTube video links, but this remix is pretty darn cool. Nice.
iTunes Needs iTunes Syncing
Apple just released iTunes 8.1 with a bevy of new features, but there is a critical need for iTunes that I think would be a huge help for anyone that regularly uses more than one computer. In addition to being able to sync to dozens of iPods, the iPhones and Apple TV we need the ability to sync to iTunes itself. All of the pieces are in place to do this, it seems like it would be relatively easy to implement. Here is what I would imagine the iTunes sidebar looking like.
You’ve got an iPod, three Apple TV’s and then your laptop. The idea is that I should be able to setup iTunes on a laptop or any other computer that is just a sync partner with another computers iTunes library. iTunes can already sync over the network to an AppleTV, so the hooks are all in place and should be easily extended to another iTunes installation.
Right now the only option that iTunes users have to put music on more than one computer is to copy the files over. This is horrible in so many ways. First, you have to do the work of managing the files which is a huge pain. Additionally, the iTunes Library is not sync’d at all. Play counts, ratings and other metadata is completely separate which really messes up some more sophisticated work you can do with Smart Playlists.
If we were just able to sync to additional iTunes installs I could have all of my Mac’s with the same music library, and syncing metadata back and forth. It would make things so much simpler.
Would it help if I said please?
Pretty please?
iPod Shuffle Isn't First to Talk
The new iPod Shuffle released today has made some waves for using voice prompts. It’s a great solution for the Shuffle which lacks a screen. In fact, that lack of interface has been the thing that has made me shy away from a shuffle since it seemed a little too limited to me. The new VoiceOver feature that Apple has rolled out sounds like a great solution to this problem.
However, this interface doesn’t sound at all new to me since I’ve had a PhatBox in my Audi since 2005 that does what the new Shuffle does!
The PhatBox (no link, it’s been discontinued) is a Linux-based hard drive MP3 player that mounds in your car in place of the multi-CD changer. It interfaces with the cars head unit as if it were a CD changer, so you don’t have to replace the head unit. The problem though is there is no display to show what is playing and with 20G of music to navigate you need something. So, PhatBox figured out to generate short audio files using the AT&T; text-to-speech voices just like the new Shuffle does.
How does it work? Really great! Particularly in a car, taking your eye of the road to read something is dangerous and with audio prompts you just listen. I can see that the new Shuffle audio prompts would be equally as nice for jogging. You wouldn’t ever need to take your eye of the trail.
The Shuffle does have a nice affect with VoiceOver by having it play while the song is playing, and the song volume ducks in the background. The PhatBox simply plays the recorded audio for the title and then plays the song. Stylistically improved, but not some completely new concept.
RAGBRAI 2009 Full Route Announced
The full RAGBRAI route for 2009 was published this week. We are going to be going along the southern half of Iowa.
One of the things my friend Jim, who did RAGBRAI once in his teenage years (and, in his own words, “will not be doing it again”), keeps highlighting for me is that RAGBRAI was in part created to prove that Iowa was not flat. There is a strong desire on the part of states to prove to cyclists they are not flat it seems. Texas Hellweek has a similar motto. There is certainly no lack of climbing in the 2009 RAGBRAI route. This graph shows the mileage and climbing feet for each day.
Looking back on my posts from Texas Hellweek 2001 those routes had about 5,000 feet of climbing every day. It looks like Monday and Tuesday will be some good challenges.
Feet of climbing though has to be gauged with the distance of the leg. A better way to look at it is feet of climbing per mile.
I’d say the route planners were pretty kind. The ride gets more gentle (on average) over the course of the week. Good stuff! Check out the complete route map on the Des Moines Register site for the details.
Firing up Big Green Egg to smoke two racks of ribs.
Scheduling Help: When Is Good
Like all of you reading this, I have some things that I just hate to do. It’s not that they are particularly difficult, I just find them irrationally frustrating. Probably at the top of my list is scheduling things. Here is how I typically end up scheduling something with some buddies.
Me: How about Monday or Thursday night? Them: Oh, man, those don’t work. What about Tuesday? Me: No can do, busy then. What about Friday? Them: No, that won’t work either. Me: Forget it. This sucks. Later.
The extension of this are all the emails about times that are open that swirl and get no conclusion. Add more than two people to this and you reach a point of frustration even faster. I’ve long wished that there was a drop-dead simple tool on the web allowing people to collaborate on times to get together. And now there is!
When is Good?
When is Good is just such a tool. It is painfully easy. It doesn’t even require you to register to use it. You can zone out times that work to get a group together and then everyone else can filter those zones down using a 1-click web interface and at the end you’ve found the times that work for everyone. Brilliant!
I think that they are building this service the absolute right way. They are adding more features incrementally but just focusing on making the first thing work really well. You can get absolutely killed in complexity in calendaring dealing with iCal files and syncing. Nothing like that here, just find the time that works for people.
Hopefully When is Good will let me get things scheduled with people and keep my blood pressure down at the same time.
First Try at Studio Photography
Yesterday I took my first attempt at doing studio photography. I’ve done a variety of different shooting, but I hadn’t yet attempted to set up lighting and do studio style portrait work. I’ve accumulated the bare essentials to do this over the last few months. I’ve got a Manfrotto Background Support system, one continuous light and the wireless system for my two Canon flashes. I learned quickly that is barely enough lighting to shoot with.
I got everything set up and did photos of Mazie and her cousin Nora, followed by shots of our neighbors three kids. Free photos of your kids is a pretty easy way to practice studio portrait shooting. 🙂
Lessons Learned
- The lighting setup I had was barely adequate. I had to take every picture up 2 stops in Lightroom after importing. The room I was shooting in had plenty of ambient light, and I still was barely up to par.
- Focus is beyond critical. I was really frustrated that many of the pictures I had didn’t have crystal clear focus. I was focusing manually of course, but right away I noticed that if the subjects eyes aren’t absolutely locked on focus the picture really suffers. They looked fine, and completely in focus, in the viewfinder. With older kids that will sit still I learned the power of the live preview mode on my camera to get perfect focus. This made a huge difference.
- You need a big room. I was shooting with about 7-10 feet from the subject. That wasn’t really enough room to get the framing I wanted.
- Lack of strong light forced me to keep my f-stop really low, and as a result my depth of field really small. This amplified the focus problem. Additionally, I had to keep my shutter speed pretty slow which made it hard to shoot the really little kids.
- I’m not sure why, but I shot the entire time with my Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L. It is by far the best glass I have, but at 70mm on the short end it’s still long. I should have tried a couple of other lenses, and will next time.
I did a little bit of searching and found a few studios that you can rent for a half-day. I think I might try that to see how it goes with a real lighting setup.
Registered for RAGBRAI!
I first heard of RAGBRAI several years ago when I was riding like a crazy man doing centuries nearly every weekend. RAGBRAI (pronounced rag-br-eye) is the Register’s Annual Great Bike Ride Across Iowa. RAGBRAI is a 7-day ride, starting on a Sunday and ending on Saturday from the western edge of Iowa to the eastern edge. The route changes every year, but this year starts in Council Bluffs, IA and ends 442.3 miles later in Burlington, IA. Tammy and I are signed up to take part in RAGBRAI 37!
RAGBRAI is an event unlike no other. It is the largest organized bike ride in the United States. You camp each night in small towns in Iowa. It’s too big to be defined by one thing. Some call it a party on wheels, others like to hammer the miles away. I’m looking forward to finally riding it.
We will have a lot of training to do before July 19th. It is suggested you get 1,000 miles on your bike before you show up. Additionally, I’m going to work harder than I have at dropping weight faster so that I’m carrying less heft across Iowa. I’m sure there will be much to say about this adventure in the future. More to come, and wish us luck! :-)
See also: RAGBRAI Wikipedia Page.
Chase's Mug Shot
Chase was being a very good dog as my model for some test shots while I was getting my camera setup to do some shooting. I just love this one. It’s really hard to photograph black dogs. The white muslin background really helps to allow the exposure to come up enough.
It needs a caption. Ideas?
I’m late to the game getting into The Wire, but I’m just finishing up season 1 and am really enjoying it.
Baked Ziti from April 2009 Cooks Illustrated. Looks great!
Photos from Overnight Website Challenge
Last weekend I made three trips to the Sierra Bravo Overnight Website Challenge to get some photos of the start, middle and end. I lugged a decent bit of gear and tried my first attempt at event photography.
The event wasn’t simple to capture. The room wasn’t very interesting so it was hard to get a decent backdrop on people. The podium where people presented had natural light behind it which made it nearly impossible to photograph. I tried some long exposure stuff and it was a little interesting. All in all, a tough room. I think my favorite shot is the one I took of the Ruby.MN 2.2 Team right before the event started.
I thought there would be more opportunities for pictures of people sleeping but there were surprising few that actually caught any sleep. I tried, unsuccessfully, to get one of the teams to do a human pyramid.
Nice night for a fire.
Graffletopia ← Using OmniGraffle? Need stencils? Stop your search, here they are. Wow.
Elizabeth Kreutz ← Really good professional photographer that is covering Lance Armstrong’s return to cycling.
OmniGraffle Scripts
OmniGraffle Scripts ← Several scripts by Peter McMaster that help do some nice things, like drawing arcs, in OmniGraffle.
IndieBound
IndieBound ← Saw a poster for this while we were at Wild Rumpus in Linden Hills. It’s a cool resource to find independent bookstores and help express the value that those places bring to communities.
Vicky Cristina Barcelona — Okay movie. Interesting. Perhaps a little slow. No big revelation in the plot.
