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I’ve taken my whole site that existed at http://www.bagelturf.com and moved it to its current home at http://archive.bagelturf.com. There won’t be any more updates to the archive, and the main site will undergo a transformation soon. You may also want to check out my personal site at http://steveweller.com.

Two wheels, two payloads, and a bunch of struts. Can you evolve a bike that crosses the terrain?

Tags: Fun, Interesting Stuff, Flash, Evolution

Drew Strickland has a disastrous review of the Canon 5D MkII video capabilities. I think he was expecting magic to occur, but it didn’t, so he’s whining. Could it just be a ruse to get page hits? Plenty of people are upset at the spam he sends out, so it’s possible.

Tags: Canon, 5D, Video, Whiners

What is it? The people at Treasure Net would like to know.

Most of the guesses revolve around refrigerators, but I’m not sure they are right. Here are my thoughts:

It’s made of aluminum, so it can withstand corrosive environments. Whatever it was part of or connected to was made of something else and apparently has not survived, so it’s not being seen in context. Aluminum also suggests aerospace since it has a low weight.

The dial turns slightly less than 360 degrees. The number 15 has a stop, so this implies that the photo above is a view of the object upside-down. When 15 is at the stop, it has to be readable.

I think it’s an indicator, not an adjustor. The problem with it being any kind of adjustment mechanism is that the only place it can be moved easily is from the area on the right above. But since it’s just a wheel, how does it effect any change elsewhere? The center is just a rivet. The wheel is mounted very close to the plate, so there is not enough room to get a chain in there.

The bent tabs on the back plus the two tongues on the right imply that it was attached to something thin that had two strips, either in the form of wire, or something compliant like leather or wood that the tabs could bite into. It has stiffening ridges, so when it was mounted it was either not flat against a stiff object, or was not flat against anything. There are holes in odd places. Why? And what do the depressions do?

My idea is that there is a something that engages with the teeth on the right and moves vertically. The number on the right (really the left since it is upside-down) shows the vertical position of the thing. But I have no idea what. How about a fuel gauge? There could be a float that moved vertically. But if so, the numbers are backwards: empty would read 15 not 1. So maybe it’s a counter for how many things you don’t have, like bombs. It could count the number dropped. Why is it so big though? Maybe to make the numbers readable. Big numbers need a large diameter wheel and that would determine the size.

What’s your guess?

Half Moon Bay Kid: 1/2000s f/4.0 ISO200 200mm +1ev, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS

One post a month is a little sparse, don’t you think? I’ve been very busy, but did get a chance to break a lens and get some great beach photos at Half Moon Bay.

I broke my 50mm f/1.8, aka the Nifty Fifty. It’s a cheap, plastic lens, at $70, but it’s the fastest I have and it takes great picures, so that’s a loss. I left it on a table top with my camera, picked up my camera, and knocked it to the floor with the strap. It landed on the lens cap and pushed it in a way. No obvious damage done, but it’s wrecked. At apertures wider than about f/5.6 there is a noticeable halo, and at f/1.8 the images are a ghastly smear. Something inside has been jarred and is no longer aligned. I took it apart, but the construction is such that there really isn’t anything to fix. Worth sending to Canon?


Half Moon Bay Surfer 6: 1/4000s f/3.5 ISO200 200mm +0.7ev, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS

Half Moon Bay had surfers testing the waves. I really needed a longer lens (or a 1.4x teleconverter), but my 200 did pretty well. There was lots of light and I could take short exposures at low ISO. I particularly like the lack of aberrations taking photos with a lot of contrast, like the one below.


Half Moon Bay Surfer 1: 1/6400s f/4.0 ISO200 200mm +1ev, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f2.8L IS

I took almost all the photos with +1ev, and in many cases simply went manual in order to prevent the reflections from causing the metering to change the exposure as I tracked across the bright reflections.

The lens I think I want to replace the 50 is the 85mm f/1.8. I borrowed one for WWDC this year and liked it very much. Light, much smaller and lighter than the 70-200, and great at wide apertures. But I need the economy to get a little better (or at least my economy) before I buy any new toys.

Tags: Blogging, Lenses, Canon, Broken

Sheep Films brings you an interesting look at Light. There are any more odd movies from the same place.

Tags: Movies, Fun, Light

Apple’s Pages app, part of the iWork08 package is a strange fish. Pages06 was good. I created my book in Pages, hundreds of pages long and with hundreds of photos. Then 08 came out and oddly split the functionality into two modes: word processing and page layout. One of the reasons I liked 06 was that finally someone had melded the two.

But Pages06 was not a good word processor. Fortunately no-one expected it to be because it was sort of a feature of a layout app. Now 08 has a word processor mode and imports Word docs well, and everyone expects the world of it. Or even some simple numbering and lists and table of contents functionality; like I did recently when I tackled 120 pages of dense legal docs.

A challenge was getting the table of contents (TOC) to look right. I needed to have the section numbers appear in the TOC as well as the page numbers. I wasn’t about to number everything by hand (that’s the workaround I found on-line), so I did what any self-respecting hacker type would do: I cheated.

Here is some text for cheating:

It uses tiered (legal) numbering. Getting that right is a task in itself, actually, but I did it. My final TOC looks like this:

See, it has tiered numbers just like in the document! A real boon when you want to direct someone to section 23.5.1.2.

My cheat was as follows. I created a TOC as normal with Insert > Table of Contents and checked that things were set up correctly in the Inspector:

That gave me this:

No numbers. Then I clicked on the lines in the TOC, opened the Text panel of the Inspector and added list formatting to the TOC styles: tiered for both the Heading and Sub-heading TOC styles (called TOC Heading 2 and TOC Heading 3 by default in my case). After jiggling the indents with the Inspector I got it to look the way I wanted:

It works because when the TOC is regenerated, it gets renumbered. However there is a hitch, the second and lower numbering levels of the TOC keep getting reset to 1 each time the regeneration takes place. When this happens, if I click on the second level in the TOC I get this:

And have to press TAB to get the second level numbers back.

There is still no way to get rid of the last period in the numbers though. That is a fix I would like to see.

Tags: iWork, Pages, Apple, Writing

I’m doing some work for a small Silicon Valley start-up that’s in a very atypical Silicon Valley kind of business: franchising. Part of the work involves writing a company blog called “Hard Focus”.

The company is SightMind and they sell institutional networked video surveillance camera installation franchises. That’s a bit of a mouthful, but describes it well. If you buy a SightMind franchise, you get the right to use the name and business systems in your own business. Think of Jiffy Lube, or MacDonald’s. Those are both national franchises with independently run and operated locations, each using the name and systems of the franchisor. That’s mainly why you go there: you know the name and you know you’ll get what you expect for the price you expect.

IP video cameras are everywhere now -- you can add them to your home and hook them up to your PC at low cost -- but there is no national company installing them. Who you gonna call? Joe-Bob’s Alarm and Fire down the street? While there are plenty of small, local installers, there are none with a national brand, none that focus exclusively on digital networked cameras, and none that are selling solely to educational, industrial, and government customers. These customers have very specific needs, and as the world switches from analog CCTV to IP networked cameras, they are looking for a known, reliable company to understand them, do the installation, and maintain the system for many years. Hence the business.

The fist blog entry is “Six Sure Signs That The IP Video Surveillance Industry Is Still In Its Infancy”.

Tags: Video, Surveillance, SightMind, Blogging, Franchising, Security

There’s nothing like the glossy/matte screen argument to rile everyone up.

The new MacBooks and MacBook pros have glossy screens only and this makes them useless for photo work, so the argument goes. The reflections are horrid and you can’t work with that. There are people huffing and puffing and threatening to stomp off to Windows land.

Garbage.

If you’re relying on laptops to do precision color work you’re already in a world of hurt. They don’t display colors well because they have six bits per color, not eight, and rely on temporal dithering to get the extra two bits. Plus they have narrow viewing angles and you can’t control the brightness enough. And that screen is tiny.

I can and do edit photos on my MacBook (early 2008, glossy). It’s mobile and I can angle the screen any way I like to get rid of reflections. It does fine for what I want it to do. But I’m not doing precision anything. And if I were I’d be looking at the curves, correcting with gray cards, watching RGB values and other numbers and not worrying a hoot about what I see on the screen except for the composition of the image and what is happening on people’s faces.

If you expect perfect color you can actually see, then you’re living in fairy land. If your environment is well-controlled and you have an expensive, calibrated monitor, you can get somewhere close. And you can do that with a MacBook or any other Mac. Just plug the monitor in. You’ve always been able to do this, and you can still do this with the new MacBooks. You can even convert a glossy screen to a matte one by adding a film. If your environment is suitable for working with color then there will be no reflections and it won’t matter anyway.

But anyone else who views your images will see something different anyway. They are not using calibrated monitors, all the software is set up for different gammas, and/or ignores the embedded profiles. Even the people who look at prints won’t view them under the right light unless you control that as well. Shockingly, since many images will be views on laptops, they’ll be seen on small, imperfect, glossy screens!

The real complaint goes like this: I have to impress people who don’t understand color with screen images or else they won’t buy from me. With a matte screen I was able to get away with not controlling my viewing environment, but now it looks like I’ll have to deal with that. Curse you Apple for ignoring my cheapness even though I’m a tiny fraction of your customer base.

I do all my serious editing on my 24” iMac (Intel, matte screen) because the screen is large, bright, and really nice, and the computer fast. But it wouldn’t matter if it were glossy. I do all of that editing after sun-down with the room lights off. It’s not calibrated except by eye, and it works for me. If I change what I do and want to meet a fixed set of standards then I expect to have to change things accordingly.

Tags: Screens, Glossy, Matte, Apple, MacBook Pro, MacBook, Whiners

It was Fleet Week in San Francisco, so I went and took some quick photos. Very crowded and impossible to see much of anything except what was in the air. My 70-200 was really too short to capture the action well from where I was standing, so I filled the frame with their trails. Time to buy that 1.4x TC.

Tags: Airplanes, San Francisco

Swing using the rope onto the moving belt, grab two barrels, stack them, stand on them, jump to another swinging rope, and land on an inflated island. Harder than it sounds. But probably no harder than it looks.

Tags: Movies, Fun, Games, Impossible

A while ago my daughter’s Canon A60 would not turn on: the dreaded E18 error struck and the barrel was not extending. So with nothing to lose, I took it apart, carefully labelled each of the 33 tiny screws I removed, and killed it. I wasn’t trying to kill it, but I managed to break one of the thin, flat cables in trying to get to the mechanical problem of the jamming barrel.

The root cause, I figured out, was a lack of lubrication between two plastic parts. As the barrel retracted the parts slid over each other and operated a spring-loaded mechanism that kept the shutters apart that cover the lens. Too much friction and the motor couldn’t make it work before the CPU recognized there was a problem and stopped trying. So far so good with all the other Canon equipment in the house.

The photo above isn’t from that particular incident. That’s Sam taking apart a Canon 17-85 that stopped working. I also found some interesting photos of the IS unit of a 70-200 that Ken Phillips took apart to fix.

Flickr has a whole pile of people taking cameras of all sorts apart: here, here, here, here, here, and here.

Tags: Photography, Lenses, Cameras, Canon, Bugs

I’m spending more and more time with my MacBook and less and less with my iMac these days. Since RapidWeaver lives on my iMac, that means less blogging (it’s been almost a month!). I have a lot of data external to RapidWeaver in my blog and that makes it tricky to move to the laptop without breaking things.

Another reason for the lack of blogging is that I have been using Twitter more and more, as, it seems, many of the people who have blogs that I follow. Lost your favorite blogger? Look on Twitter. They are all there. Some, like Wil Shipley, take it to extremes. And do check out the many fake people, such as Fake Sarah Palin.

And suddenly my MacBook has developed a crack:

It started on the right and went leftwards until the sliver of plastic stuck up in the air and I had to remove it. A couple of calls to Apple, and they agree that it is covered by warranty, so I’ll get that fixed soon.

Tags: MacBook, Twitter, Apple, Blogging, iMac, Bugs

Good grief. I thought I understood floating point math and its implementation on CPUs. The 32,800 words on this one web page say that I don’t. There’s more too, if you care to read Sun’s complete Numerical Computation Guide.

I Make Projects.com has some unusual and interesting projects. I particularly like the Halloween Monstrosities. The labels are a work of art: “SHRINKING POTION TEST SUBJECT #13, MALE AGED 23 YEARS, SURVIVED 8 MIN 9 SEC”.

Tags: Halloween, Jars, Fun, Interesting Stuff, Octopuses, Skeletons