“Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.” — @Kurt_Vonnegut
Nifty. Export your items to a folder in your Dropbox location, and access everything from wherever you are via your iPhone or iPad.
Amazon know where I live: they’ve sent me books. And CDs. The odd vinyl LP. To my house. All the way over here in Australia. So why do they keep sending me spam for products they can’t deliver outside the US?
Today marks the 100th photograph captured as part of my 365.2010 project—one photo each day for the year.
I wasn’t sure I’d make it this far. I’ve never managed to keep a diary for more than three (nonconsecutive) days. And I’m working without a net—I still haven’t gotten around to replacing my SLR, so if my trusty iPhone breaks (or, more likely, gets dropped) I have no backup.
Having a partner in this process has helped, though. My sister, Fiona, is also collecting a photo every day. In her case, you can really see her progress. Compare this early photo (a fine snapshot) to this, or this, or this.
For myself, I’m not sure that I’ve learned as much as I thought I might. Where Fiona is using a Canon G11, and therefore has latitude to tinker with exposure, shutter speed, ISO—even focus!—the iPhone 3G has none of these.
It has been nice to focus solely on composition whilst shooting, but it’s time to start stretching a little further. For which I’ll need to bite the bullet and settle on a camera. So that’s my goal—sometime before the halfway mark (photo number 183 at the latest), to settle on a “real” camera and begin to work a little harder to tailor the image during capture.
Of course, you’ll have to pry Tilt Shift and Mill Colour out of my cold dead hands.
TiltShift Generator for iPad -
There are those that have accused me of being single minded, and particularly geek-like. So long as, when I die, they bury me with an iPad and a copy of the new TiltShift Generator for iPad, they can accuse me of anything they damn well please.
In case you need another reason to want one.
This is genius.
If you look back on these stories even one week later, the majority of them seem unimportant or redundant in retrospect. And if you stop consuming the firehose for a few days or more, you’re lost — there are very few publications that give a general overview of what has happened, especially when venturing outside of mainstream front-page news and into a subsection, such as technology news.
I want last week’s news, but only what I need to know, and only if it has proven to have relevance beyond the day it was published.
The smaller stories are a problem in volume: finding the important few amidst the noise is a challenge. And the bigger stories present their own difficulties: I’ve often gone looking for an article on a news site hoping to catch-up on something I overheard people talking about at work and found myself struggling to find a narrative thread to follow through beginning to end.
I think finance and business news is among the worst. Writers assume, perhaps rightly, that anyone turning to the financial pages has (forgive me) business being there; hand-holding a news-literate reader through a story would only frustrate them in their desire to get quickly up-to-date. We’re all busy people, after all, and there’s a lot of news to get up-to-date with, everyday.
But that style of writing does little for the layman, or for someone who wants to be more selective with their time.
So I want the CliffsNotes. Last week’s news without having to read last week’s news.
A virtual Orrery as a type of music box—hear the rhythm of the solar system (via Bobulate).
War in Afghanistan through the lens of an iPhone -
David Guttenfelder used, among an array of ‘normal’ digital camera gear (see image number 33 to see how well that fared), his iPhone to capture images of soldiers and fellow photographers during an offensive in Marjah, Afghanistan [via everyone].
I want one of these for my life. Perhaps as an iPad app?
Melbourne, 1 April 2010
