Geekery

Whatever I’m geeking out about at the time.

Pimp my A95

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One of the (few) downsides to my little Powershot A95 is that as a point-and-shoot style camera, it’s a touch limited as to what it can do — a standard 3x optical zoom, a fixed lens so no other lenses can be attached, no threads for filters…little things like that. Very normal for a point-and-shoot, of course, but at times, a wee bit limiting.

However, one of the nice things about the A95 is that it is possible to attach some accessories to it. Canon’s Powershot cameras include a detachable ring around the lens assembly that, when removed, reveals a mount point. Canon also supplies a few accessories that can attach to the mount: an adaptor tube, which can then have either a wide-angle or a telephoto lens attached to it. However, as the A95 is a couple years old, these items aren’t incredibly easy to come by anymore.

Last week sometime I stumbled across LensMate, a local company that makes aftermarket adapters for the A95’s mount in both 52mm and 37mm sizes. I went ahead and ordered the 37mm adapter (since I knew my work carried some 37mm filters and accessories), and it arrived in the mail yesterday.

I took the camera in to work so that I could make sure the adapter worked with the filters I wanted to pick up. It did (no surprise, but nice to have it confirmed), so I got three Quantaray filters: a UV Haze, a Neutral Density, and a Circular Polarizer.

Since 37mm is a standard size for camcorder lenses, our store carries a few accessory lenses originally designed for camcorders. Since they’re the same thread size as my new adaptor, I started experimenting with those, and as it turns out, we’ve got a set of a .5x Wide Angle Lens and a 2x Telephoto Lens that fit perfectly, so I started playing with those to see how well they worked. Verdict: not bad, and I may want to pick the set up after my next paycheck.

Then things started getting silly.

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(Another) iTunes Meme

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Ganked from spikesandstuds:

  • How many total songs?

    15,906 (72.3 GB; 86 days, 12 hours, one minute and nine seconds if played beginning-to-end with no breaks).

  • Sort by song title — first and last?

  • Sort by time — shortest and longest?
    • Shortest: 0:04 — An untitled ‘hidden track’ that consists of a girl yelling “Let’s hear it for Nine Inch Nails! Woo! They’re good!” off of NIN‘s Head Like A Hole single.
    • Longest: 1:18:18 — The full mix version of The Kleptones’ A Night at the Hip-Hopera.
  • Sort by Album — first and last?

    (This doesn’t include all the downloaded tracks that don’t have album names assigned.)

  • Sort by Artist — first and last?

  • Top five played songs?

    1. Break by The Kleptones, off of A Night at the Hip-Hopera
    2. Going, Going, Gone (Razed in Black mix) by Information Society, off of InSoc Recombinant
    3. Da Da Da by Out of the Ordinary, off of Welcome to the Future
    4. Take California and Party by the Propellerheads (featuring the Jungle Brothers), off of Take California
    5. Pleasant Smell (Rethought by Clint Mansell and Keith Hillebrandt for the Nothing Collective) by 12 Rounds, off of Pleasant Smell
  • Find the following words. How many songs show up?
    • Sex: 189
    • Death: 155
    • Love: 859
    • You: 1302
    • Home: 107
    • Boy: 533
    • Girl: 339

iTunes “2525” by Laibach from the album N.A.T.O. (1994, 3:48).

Beastie Boys are the new Bon Jovi

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The New York Times reports on a new concert film from The Beastie Boys:

They decided to lend hand-held video cameras to 50 fans, told them to shoot at will, and then presented the end result in movie theaters in all its primitive, kaleidoscopic glory.

[…] While perusing the message boards on the site one day in mid-2004, Mr. Yauch came across a concert photo snapped by a fan with his cellphone and found himself taken with the shakiness and rawness of the image. “The energy of it looked cool, and I thought it would look interesting to document a whole concert,” Mr. Yauch said.

Three days before the October 2004 concert at Madison Square Garden, the Beastie Boys decided to go ahead. The band posted a notice on its Web site seeking volunteers. The instructions were simple: ” ‘Start it when the Beastie Boys hit the stage and don’t stop till it’s over,’ ” recalled one cameraman, Fred Zilliox, a 35-year-old cook from Keansburg, N.J. “Other than that, it was up to us to do whatever we wanted.”

The camera-toting fans took those instructions to heart. They shot the band, they shot the fans, they shot their fellow camera operators. Four even took their cameras along on their bathroom breaks.

Heh. Me being a child of the ’80’s, this sounded very familiar. In fact, it sounded almost exactly like what Bon Jovi did for their video for “Bad Medicine“:

For their “Bad Medicine” video the band invited fans to the video shoot, handed out additional video cameras for fans to keep, and collected the resulting footage at the end of the night, which was cut into additional footage shot by video director Wayne Isham.

Okay, sure, so the B-Boys did a full-length concert film and not just a five-minute music video, but still…. Everything old is new again.

(via Boing Boing)

iTunes “Bad Medicine” by Bon Jovi from the album New Jersey (1999, 5:16).

iPhoto 6.0: Flickr Photocasts

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One of the questions I had while watching the Macworld ’06 keynote popped up when Steve was demoing the new ‘Photocasting‘ ability in iPhoto 6. He clicked on the Photocast RSS feed, iPhoto popped right up, and the photos appeared in the album.

“What would happen,” I wondered, “if you tried to subscribe to a Flickr RSS feed as if it were a Photocast?”

Copying my Flickr Atom feed

Subscribe to Photocast...

Entering the Flickr Atom address

iPhoto's Flickr Photocast

Admittedly, it’s not quite the same as an official (iPhoto-created) Photocast would be, as Photocasts can (optionally) include the full-resolution photos. As the Flickr feeds only include the small size photo, the resulting album is populated only with small (~240×180) photos, certainly not any resolution suitable for printing. Also, my understanding is that a Photocast would include however many photos were in the album selected for ‘casting; the Flickr feed only includes the last 10 photos.

Still, it does work; the only real differences are simply differences in how the RSS feeds are created (number of items and resolution of the included images).

Perhaps Flickr could include an option to enable Photocasting — if not for entire feeds, then perhaps for individual sets — and allow a choice of what size photo to embed into the Photocast feed, and/or how many photos to include (last X, entire sets, etc.). Then, clicking on a set’s ‘Photocast’ link or icon would allow iPhoto/Flickr users very nearly the same Photocast functionality as iPhoto/.mac users do.

It’s at least worth tossing the idea out there, I’d say.

Update: Found in this spirited discussion of the Photocast feeds on Brent Simmons’ weblog is an announcement from John Evans that he’s created a Flickr to Apple Photocast (Phlickr) feed converter.

It will take a feed from flickr and rework it a little so that it uses the large images and contains the comment of the photo as well. It is an Atom 1.0 feed that seems to validate on the feeds I have tested, it also includes most of the extra apple stuff debated here. If I can work out the date format I will add that too, and myabe the tags can be retrived and added so they appear as keywords.

To use just paste any feed from flickr into the box and hit the button, the feed should just open up in iPhoto, if not it will just be a regular atom feed with all the relevent enclosures so it will work in NetNewsWire or whatever your reader is.

I just tried it, and it worked fine for me.

iLife ’06: First Impressions

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My iLife ’06 package showed up today. I can’t stay up incredibly late to play, so this is just going to be a cursory overview to begin with, but it’s a start.

  • iLife '06First things first: the package has gotten much smaller. Where iLife ’05 used a more traditional box size, the box for iLife ’06 is barely bigger (width by height) than a CD. Still about an inch or so deep.

  • iLife '06Apple’s customary flair for design on even the smallest little things shows through again. As you open the box, there are small accordion folds on the flap, and rather than being just dropped inside, the software and materials are nestled inside a small cardboard tray that slides out.

  • What you get in the box:

    • The iLife ’06 install DVD.
    • A ‘quick start’ installation guide.
    • The ubiquitous software coupons (has anyone, anywhere, at any time ever used these for anything?).
    • A ‘Welcome’ pamphlet advertising iLife add-ons (iWork, .mac, GarageBand Jam Packs).
    • A trial version of iWork ’06.

One installation was done, I poked around briefly with iPhoto and iWeb.

As noted by John Gruber, iPhoto has gained “iTunes’ theme-without-a-name”. Looks pretty slick, actually. And, while I haven’t done any stress-testing yet, it’s definitely feeling snappier than the prior version (apparently I’m not the only one seeing this, either). I like the full-screen editing mode, too — for simple edits, that’ll actually cover me without heading into Photoshop. Nicely done.

iWeb is definitely looking to be worth poking around with. It’s not restricted to .mac (yay!), though without .mac you don’t have the one-click-publishing option — rather, you ‘publish’ to a local folder, and then you can either serve directly from there (if your Mac is a webserver), or you can upload the generated files to a remote server. The markup isn’t terribly pretty, but that’s not a big surprise. Feel free to check out the one sample page I’ve made so far to see what you think (though that is just a single page, and I haven’t delved into multi-page sites, blog publishing, or much of anything else). On the bright side, there was only one error preventing the page from validating…on the down side, that’s in part because the generated page is all images and link maps. Hmmm. Definitely reserving judgement on this one until I get a chance to play more.

That’s all I can do for tonight, though — it’s after midnight, and I’ve got class at 10am tomorrow morning. I’ll play more as soon as I can grab a few hours…

iTunes “Club 69 Future Mix Vol. 1 (full mix)” by Various Artists from the album Club 69 Future Mix Vol. 1 (full mix) (1998, 1:14:02).