Monthly Archive for August, 2006
From the Mercury News:
On Sept. 13, 1956, an IBM lab at 99 Notre Dame Road in San Jose began shipping a product that changed history.
It is Silicon Valley’s unsung hero, though it taught us bits and the mega, giga, tera, peta and exa bytes. Dubbed RAMAC, or Random Access Method of Accounting and Control, it was the original hard drive, a funny-looking giant machine with 50 spinning, 24-inch-wide disks covered with red paint.
It cost about $50,000 a year to lease in 1956 dollars — equivalent to nearly $350,000 today — and had 5 megabytes of information, about enough space to store one song on an iPod.
From InfoWorld:
Dell and Sony knew about and discussed manufacturing problems with Sony-made Lithium-Ion batteries as long as ten months ago, but held off on issuing a recall until those flaws were clearly linked to catastrophic failures causing those batteries to catch fire, a Sony Electronics spokesman said Friday.
Spokesman Rick Clancy said the companies had conversations in October 2005 and again in February 2006. Discussions were about the problem of small metal particles that had contaminated Lithium-Ion battery cells manufactured by Sony, causing batteries to fail and, in some cases, overheat.
As a result of those conversations, Sony made changes to its manufacturing process to minimize the presence and size of the particles in its batteries. However, the company did not recall batteries that it thought might contain the particles because it wasn’t clear that they were dangerous, Clancy said.
I don’t usually pass along “good deals”. There are lots of other sites that do that. But this one is really quite exceptional. Crucial Technology has a promotion (it ends September 1) where you can get a 512MB Compact Flash card for only $1.99 after rebate. The card is $26.99 with a $25 mail-in rebate. There is free shipping when you spend $40. So you could buy 2 cards for $53.98, get free shipping, then get $50 in rebates, and end up paying only $3.98 for 1 GB of cards. Not Bad.

You can learn more about the deal on the Crucial web site. If your camera, pda, or other digital media device uses these cards, it’s a great deal. If only they had this deal on SD cards!
UPDATE: Apparently it is only 1 rebate per customer. So in order to get free shipping, you’ll have to order something else as well to get your order total to $40. Domestic shipping is very reasonable. It is only $3, so if you still went ahead with it, you’d end up with a 512 MB CompactFlash card for $4.98. Still quite a good deal…

A little over a month ago I posted about how to get an invitation to Google Writely. It turns out now you don’t need to do that. The official Google Writely Blog posted about this yesterday:
This week, we have finished inviting everyone who’s been patiently on the waiting list, and have reopened registration to the public. If you haven’t already, now is the time to sign up for the Writely beta!
So if you’re interested, head on over to Writely and sign up!
Goggles is a Google Maps flight simulater you play in your browser. There are a bunch of predefined locations or you can use your own location (through a bit of work).
Here is a link to fly over Niagara Falls. Hint: Head east until you reach the river then turn south.
http://www.isoma.net/games/goggles.html?loc=tqsqttsrsssttqssq
Last week I began my discussion of black and white digital photography. This week I will further that discussion by talking about the first two methods of converting your digital photographs to black and white, or more specifically, monochrome. For the sake of simplicity, I will use black and white in my text, but even traditional wet darkroom methods had ways of introducing a color tint or tone into an image, so monochrome is a better descriptor for the final images.
The two methods of black and white conversion I will discuss this week are desaturating the image and converting to grayscale.
Saturation refers to the intensity of the colour in your photograph. An image with bright colors have high saturation while image with pastel colors have low saturation. If you remove all the colour saturation in the image, you end up with a photo that looks like a black and white image.
To desaturate an image in Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 , from the menu choose Enhance => Adjust Color => Adjust Hue/Saturation (CTRL-U). Then, simply drag the saturation slider all the way to the left. The same shortcut works in Adobe Photoshop CS2 , but the menu location is different. In CS2, use Image => Adjustments => Hue/Saturation. However, in order to preserve image data, I prefer to create an adjustment layer using Layer => New Adjustment Layer => Hue Saturation. Again, simply slide the Saturation slider to the left. Using desaturation to remove the colour from a photograph affects the red, green and blue channels equally.
Converting to grayscale is a very simple process, but it changes the data in your image. If you are converting to grayscale, you probably don’t need the color data anyway. When converting to grayscale, Photoshop places more emphasis on some channels than others, in the proportions of 30% Red, 59% Green and 11% Blue. This provides a more natural conversion of your photograph and more closely resembles what we expect to see.

The example above shows four colors in the first row, red, green, blue and yellow. All four have the same brightness (or luminance). The second row is the same four colors, only this time they have been desaturated. Because they are of the same brightness, once desaturated, they look the same. Finally, the third row is the same colors but this time they have been converted to grayscale. As you can see, There is an obvious difference.How do you know when to use which method. Using the desaturate creates a very flat image that is rarely, if ever, very impressive. Converting to grayscale is the obvious better choice. It should yield acceptable results, most of the time. Is the best choice? If you are using Adobe Photoshop Elements , it is. If you are using another program, such as Microsoft Digital Image Suite or Adobe Photoshop CS2 , there are still better ways.
Next week I will talk about using Channel Mixer to convert you colour photographs to black and white masterpieces.
The digital photography tip of the week is written by the PCIN Assistant Editor, Chris Empey. Chris is a long time photographer and is currently the President of the Niagara Falls Camera Club. You can see more of his photography at his Photo of the Day website. If you have a tip to send Chris, or a question about digital photography he can address in the newsletter, send it to chris@pcin.net.
King Nutter is a British site (I’m not sure what the name means) that tracks unusual eBay auctions. You can read about auctions that include buying a town, a 1993 school bus, Brokeback Mountain Pez dispensers, and a guy selling everything he owns. If you’ve got a few minutes to sell, then check it out.
Note that there are other areas to the site that I didn’t visit so I don’t know what they are like or what they contain.
From Time Magazine:
How do we select our finalists? We evaluate hundreds of candidates—some suggested by readers, colleagues and friends, others discovered during countless hours of surfing. Many of this year’s choices are shining examples of Web 2.0: next-generation sites offering dynamic new ways to inform and entertain, sites with cutting-edge tools to create, consume, share or discuss all manners of media, from blog posts to video clips. Think we missed one? Send us your thoughts and we’ll post a selection of your comments online. There’s always next year.
From TechRepublic:
If there’s a storage fanatic in your family, a perfect gift could be coming for her or him toward the end of the year: 1-terabyte hard drives. Desktop hard drives holding 1 terabyte, or 1,000 gigabytes, of storage will likely debut in 2006, according to Bill Healy, senior vice president of product strategy and marketing at Hitachi Global Storage Technologies. These drives, which will have a 3.5-inch diameter, are expected to be incorporated into PCs and home servers.
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