Microsoft Surface
Out of Steve Bathiche and Andy Wilson’s work on Surface Computing comes an elegant 30-inch diagonal display table that reacts to touch — and will hit the market in Winter 2007. It’ll be on display at Siggraph in August.
Check out the demo (done in Flash (!) ).
More on the Microsoft Research work into surface computing (and a cool video) from the MSR TechFest event this year.
Please, can I have one in my living room?
I am not spam
I’ve had a couple of people tell me that messages from my new email address, sent from the domain robburke.net, have been caught as spam by their company spam filters. I suspect this is an unexpected consequence of using the otherwise very handy Windows Live Custom Domains to host my mail.
Does anyone know any techniques for encouraging a large number of spam filters to treat my new address with a little more respek?
Continue ReadingNikon’s Raw (NEF) Vista Codec Updated
Nikon has released an updated version of their Raw (NEF) Codec for Vista that resolves an issue that caused it to suddenly stop working last week. Apparently the problem had something to do with an expired certificate.
The new codec is still labeled version 1.01. However, if you uninstall the old 1.00 or 1.01 codec, and install this new one, you’ll be back in business.
I mentioned back in January that I have stopped shooting JPG images, in favour of only shooting RAW (NEF) images. I am still using the following photography pipeline:
- View, sort, and triage NEF images: from Vista’s File Explorer and Windows Photo Gallery.
- Load into Nikon Capture NX: for post-processing. This program has earned my respect with its ability to store my edit history in the RAW file, and also one ingenious feature (yes, I think ingenious is exactly the word for it) called Color Control Points. However, I have nothing positive to say about Capture NX’s user interface: it desperately needs keyboard shortcuts, and lacks basic navigational functionality like mouse-wheel zoom. I found a great resource for Nikon Capture NX tips and tricks here at Nikonians.org.
- Batch export to JPG: using Nikon Capture NX’s batch processing
- Upload: to Flickr.
There are two challenges with this pipeline:
- First, the Vista codec still isn’t particularly quick, even on a relatively beefy laptop (Vista Overall Experience Index: 3.0; Processor: 4.6, Memory: 4.7, Graphics: 3.6). You can flip through photos quickly enough, but if you want to delete a photo, Vista spins its wheels while the codec renders the high-res image. To work around this, I use the keyboard shortcuts (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) to quickly “rate” all my photos, and then delete all the bad ones in one go.
- Second, although you can associate metadata (“tags”) with NEFs in Photo Gallery, using the above-mentioned codec, the tags don’t show up anywhere I can find them in Capture NX. Therefore I am not tagging my images on Vista (defeating a lot of its organizational potential) and instead am just tagging the JPGs on Flickr, which, by that point, have become disassociated from the original NEF images. Some day, if I want to sync them, it may be an intractable task (or at least an image processing challenge).
So my Vista-Flickr NEF pipeline experience is good but not great. I am still going to keep shooting RAW (NEF) only, as I am learning how to make subtle and powerful changes to my photos using Capture NX, which I find very valuable. After all, if it’s worth shooting, it’s worth trying to shoot it right!
[February 2009 Update]
I posted some updated thoughts on NEF Codecs for Vista and Windows 7 for 32- and 64-bit installations. Thank you for all the thoughts and discussion here and I hope this continues to be helpful.
Continue ReadingAlbino Moose
The north of Norway is so cool that they have albino moose (with pic).
On an unrelated note, as a windsurfer and a wanna-be kite-surfer, does this kite-surfer dude from Brighton not have the coolest commute to work ever?
Georgian Bay, north of Toronto, has some of the best kite surfing conditions imaginable in the summer: Stretching beaches with trees set back from the fresh water, and long windy afternoons. Perhaps I can figure out a kite-surfing commute as well.
p.s. “Moose” is my wildcard category for musings and links to things I find intriguing. These often but not always involve moose.
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