Brandymore Castle

The man behind the Olympus Pen cameras, the OM-1 and the XA, Yoshihisa Maitani died yesterday at age seventy six. He lived to see his Pen camera system reborn as the Pen Digital through the work and enthusiasm of a new generation of engineers. The new E-P1 is not an exercise in nostalgia but a camera that acknowledges its ancestry while breaking new ground with its mirrorless design, compact lenses and in-camera digital image processing. This photograph of my OM-2n looks a bit like a shrine in light of today's news. My original XA-2 bought circa 1986. A classic camera and novel industrial design from Maitani's hand.

New generation of farmers. RT @FMCorg: 40 farmers under 40 http://tr.im/tnjB (via @civileater via @ediblechicago) about 22 hours ago from web Things are getting ugly on Twitter. This tweet I posted to @farmfood y is more citation than message. It is filled with gibberish, the "retweet" code and the via's, the cryptic tiny url. Something will have to give and eventually meta data will find its way back to where it belongs, hidden somewhere outside of the message text in the message envelope.

"Dear citizen, we recently discovered a problem with an ebook that you have purchased, the photograph showing the Dear Leader shaking the hand of the former enemy president has been corrected to show the Dear Leader shaking the hand of our new friends. We apologize for the inconvenience." -- Ministry of Information, 2012 How long will it be before our digital content is "corrected" for our convenience, not just pulling books from our electronic readers in the middle of the night? I bought a Kindle 2, but I returned it out of concerns my ebooks would not be my own books, in the way my paper books are my own books. I was concerned about what might happen to my hundreds of dollars of books stored on the Kindle if amazon went bankrupt. I worried that if the Kindle did not do well, they would shut down the DRM servers and my content would become inaccessible. So I sent it back (also it was a bit small screen and I wanted to loan it to my parents on occaison, who are eld...

An popular effect is the HDR, gritty, "chrome" look. After watching a video on the technique , I thought I'd give it a try in LightZone. This look is achieved without actual HDR, but by contrast, local contrast and saturation adjustments. The steps in LightZone involve dropping a number of tools on the stack and adjusting them, which is a different approach than Photoshop or Lightroom. Drop a Hue/Saturation tool. Set Vibrance to 100. Drop a Sharpen tool. Set Amount to 500 and Radius to 50, adjust until you get a "comic book" or "chrome" look (strong blacks, faded, three-dimensional pastel colors). Drop a Zone Mapper tool. Define points at 2 steps down from white, 5 steps down from white and 4 or 5 steps up from black. Push the white point up to where it divides the top step in two, leave the middle point alone, pull the black point all the way done to keep contrast. Later, you can adjust the middle tone contrast by adjusting the middle point. Drop anot...

I am reading On the Origin of Stories , a new book by Brian Boyd , which to make a long story short, draws conclusions from recent research into the mind and evolutionary psychology, that status is essentially attention (or at the very least attention is the currency of status). I can see how this applies to Twitter. The ability to 'favorite' another twitter's content is yet another way of bestowing attention. Twitter is an attention machine. When visiting a twitter's profile, being mentioned or retweeted in the stream of updates or being favorited are ways of gaining attention. A twitterer gains when a user with high attention favorites one of their tweets and more so, when they retweet.

I realize now the real problem I have been working on and off for ten years now is 'conversation' versus 'story', but particularly applicable to journalism. In a way, conversation and story are like oil and water, they do not like to mix. Yet, stories are filled with dialog, or conversations, so why is that journalistic stories cannot contain dialog? Well, when it is an interview, they do. So what we need is a network tool that seamlessly integrates conversation (interview, written dialog, transcript) with story (narrative, reportage, essay and analysis). It looks like Google Wave has the closest technology to achieving this flexible confluence of conversation and story, even the potential for our conversations and stories to be both mobile and distributed. If every smart phone adopted Google Wave, and given that it works similar to email, which mobile computing already provides and is a robust and well-known commodity service, it promises quick adoption avoiding any ce...

An interesting question about ownership and rights to data in public use has arisen, chronicled in Apple kills Routesy app, my iPhone gets less useful Routesy is an iphone application using data provided by the municipal transit authority, through an agreement with a data provider. The details are in the article, if you care to read them. I have to agree the company has a right to license predictive arrival times, since such information requires investment in research and development, formulating predictive algorithms and such information does not meet the requirement of being "obvious" and thus non-proprietary. However, the ultimate solution would be an application that took GPS data from every iphone riding the metro at any given moment, if it can be identified as to which bus it is, then do the same kind of approximate arrival time calculations NextBus does, only through peer-to-peer networked computation. Let all the iphones on the bus line find their own position, commun...