Homemade lenses

This is so cool: thigs guy makes his own lenses, and they give great results.

RAW support in iPhoto

Apple sent me a mail saying my iLife copy has been dispatched. In the mean time, California Fox reports that iPhoto's RAW support is, well, fake. It imports RAWs, but rather than use the RAW files as a source when modifying brightness, temperature, exposure, saturnation etc, it uses an intermediate JPG copy. And as we all know, this just isn't the same. This is not what we asked for when we wanted RAW support, and just not mentioning this and waiting for people's reactions seems just irresponsible on Apple's part.

iPhoto 5 - First Impressions

The TNT delivery guy was here and delivered my iLife '05 pack which I bought solely because of iPhoto. (Apple refused to give me a student discount for the software, even though I ordered via the net. I've heared people don't get student discounts in Apple's stores.) I use my Canon Ixus, Canon EOS 20D, HP Scanner and Nikon negativescanner much, so being very annoyed about the sluggish performance of iPhoto 2 but loving its way of interacting with my blog and organising pictures, and hearing good thing about performance on iPhoto 4 and that iPhoto 5 would be better performance wise, I decided to upgrade after they threw in RAW handling (which seems to be a total fake).

Toes

According to An Open Shutter, his most searched for word is toes. Funny thing. So far my top search word is 47th street photo. The more nerdy words score good as well. What search words bring in people with you? And how do you bring people to your site and keep them coming back? I stick with my photos and hope someone will bother with my ramblings as well.

End in sight

Cloudy moon

Yay, I've got my camera back. That is, my camera went in for service to get the 13 detected hot pixles (or whatever the correct term is), but the repair guys forgot to put in the battery when they gave it back. To make things harder, I live in Denmark, the repair shop is in Norway. But one month later, I've got it back, and they've done a good job changing the cmos.

Tekna looking for the stars

The Norwegian language has a problem: there is no such word as management. The word we use for management is leading, which as even a pre-first year management student knows is just a tiny fraction of it. In my experience, many Norwegian managers know nothing much about management. And since my experience is mainly from the IT sector, no wonder that the perhaps biggest organisation for technological and natural sciences professionals, Tekna arranges a course in Astrology and Management (ok, Astrology and Leading is the actual title, but from the text they obviously mean management)

Did Shakespeare have syphilis?

Everyone seems
to wonder if Shakespeare had syphilis. He may have been given bath treatments to kill the bacteria and have had to inhale quicksilver to "cure" him and may have died from the treatment, which caused him to loose hair, shiver and become asocial. Or, people may be exagerating. You read the evidence and figure it out.

Cheese-cake

The University of Oslo's cheese cake (Norwegian only)

Hot pixels on the Canon EOS 20D

Tomorrow I'll be at Canon's authorized repair-shop to have them look at my 20D. It's got what I think is hot pixels even at indoors shooting at 1 second shots. Not good. But, being nervous that my camera will be gone without replacement for a while, I am reading up on the subject. There are quite a number of programs and articles on reducing noise in digital images.