BaySquared

Travel Tips for Mendocino

2011-06-09T22:41:00.000-07:00

My wife and I just got back from a few days getaway in Mendocino, about 3 hours drive north from the San Francisco Bay area. This is our third time staying in that area, each one at a different bed and breakfast.

Driving

From the Bay area, the typical drive to Mendocino involves a long stretch of fast highway (Hwy 101 North) followed by a long stretch of twisty smaller roads. The last part of the drive can be nerve-wracking, with sharp switchbacks, redwood stands full of flickering shadows, and opposite-way traffic zooming past in narrow lanes. Total time (starting from Berkeley): about 3 hours.

The drive back was a breeze by comparison, even though there were just as many twists, turns, and tailgating vacationers in a hurry to get home. It must be more comfortable to do the twisty/turny parts first, then the boring and possibly congested highway part, rather than the other way around.

Two solutions suggest themselves:

Drive up Highway 1 along the coast the whole way to Mendocino, cutting out as much Highway 101 as possible. It's just as twisty and turny, but the coastal drive is arguably the most scenic in the whole US.

Schedule a break not too far from the turnoff from Highway 101, ideally at one of the wineries with a tasting room. (Bring a designated driver.)

Going up, to avoid heavy traffic on 101 North in Sonoma county, try to pass through the highway section around 1-2 PM. Coming back, if you can arrange to be going south on 101 around 2-3 PM, you'll find heavy traffic going the other way but smooth sailing heading back to the Bay area. (Your mileage may vary; that's our experience travelling back and forth on weekdays to avoid the weekend crowds.)

Lodging

Accomodations are generally very nice in the area, with a premium on high-quality included breakfasts. We've had good luck both at Griffin House several miles south of Mendocino in Elk, and at the Stanford Inn right outside of Mendocino. We had some not-so-good experience at a place that wasn't adept at dealing with health-related special requests. Distinguishing factors you might consider when evaluating lodging:

How close is it to the beach, park, or town where you want to do the bulk of your activities? For example, from Elk to Mendocino was a long drive back and forth each day when we stayed there. Yet the town of Mendocino is small enough to explore pretty well in an afternoon, leaving other days for the surrounding area -- Boonville on the way, Ukiah a little ways inland, Fort Bragg a little north.
How well-ventilated is it? This might seem like an unusual factor, but many places have wood fireplaces in each cabin or room, and you can find yourself getting fumigated depending on the wind and the layout of the grounds.

How good is the breakfast? We choose the Stanford Inn this last time because of the associated vegan restaurant The Raven's, which provided a top-notch breakfast for those who aren't big meat eaters. The breakfast dishes didn't suffer for lacking eggs, bacon, etc. -- this was the first time I've ever encountered vegan hollandaise sauce! And how pleasant to get a daily delivery of cookies or a truffle at happy hour and not encounter any eggs or dairy.

When to Go

Anytime starting in June is plenty warm, and the coastal breeze can keep you from overheating while strolling near the sea. Go mid-week to avoid the crowds, or schedule your stay around one of the festivals, farmer's markets, or other special events in the area.

Remember that the Northern California weather actually heats up in September and October. The vacation season extends longer than out-of-staters might expect.

Dining

Mendocino dining has trended towards high-end French style over the years. There seemed to be less vegetarian-friendly choices at old haunts like Cafe Beaujolais this time around. Similar high-end joints include the Moose Cafe and (ideally for us) The Raven's featuring a vegan menu. Less upscale options include Mendo Burger and Mendocino Cafe. Even those places are still more pricey than you'd find in the big city.

Still, Mendocino is so small that you can wander the whole thing in an afternoon, compare and contrast the menus as you go, and make a game-time decision for the best dinner option. Other nearby communities are the same way. Boonville has its main drag that you can stroll. Many of Fort Bragg's good restaurants, for example Eggheads, Nit's Cafe, and Living Light Raw Foods, are all situated along the same short block.

There is a cornucopia of local produce, with not a whole lot of spice or strong flavor. You can probably handle the Thai or Mexican dishes even if you find such things too hot elsewhere.

Rediscovering Old Music

2009-08-29T17:58:00.000-07:00

My old schoolmate and "Reach for the Top" team captain John Gushue published a blog entry, Flight of the old chords: Migrating your music, with some thoughts about the pleasure of rediscovering old music.

I've gone through this process a couple of times, what with moving from one computer to another, and from one music player to another. Every now and then I'll find some MP3s that I ripped in the pre-Mac days, from CDs that are now packed away and forgotten.

I use a couple of techniques to go back and savour old music that otherwise might fall out of use, even within my current iTunes library.

Forgotten Favourites

A smart playlist named "Forgotten Favourites" holds the 4- and 5-star songs that have the oldest "last played" dates. Depending on the size of your library, you could set this up in different ways. It could be all your 4- and 5-star songs, with "limit of N items selected by least recently played". Or it could be all your 4- and 5-star songs with a last-played date farther back than some cutoff, such as "last played is not in the last 12 months", then perhaps with a limit and the songs selected randomly.

No matter how you arrange it, you'll hear some songs that you like, that you haven't heard in a while. And after you hear a song, it will drop off the playlist and be replaced by another.

Album Appreciation

When I get a new album, I put it on a playlist "Album Appreciation" that I listen to when I have a few free seconds to rate each song. But after a while, it can seem unfair to devote time to new music where there might only be a couple of 3-star songs per album, when there's all this great older music that I'm missing. So every now and then, I'll erase all the ratings from one of my classic albums, put all the songs in the "Album Appreciation" playlist, and go through it again just to remember how the songs work together in order. (Sometimes listening like this, I'll give certain songs a higher rating than if they just came up by themselves on shuffle play.)

PS: Although I refer to "Album Appreciation" as a single playlist, actually it's 2. "Album Appreciation - Raw" is a regular playlist where I can drop a whole album. "Album Appreciation" is a smart playlist that picks songs from the first playlist, but only the songs with no star rating. That way, as I rate the songs, they fall off the playlist that I actually listen to. And when I've rated several albums this way, I'll go back and take them out of the "Raw" playlist.

My True North

2009-07-02T22:34:00.000-07:00

Today on the New York Times op-ed page, there's a piece "Our True North" with nostalgia from some Canadian expatriates. Let me just add to their list of things to miss about Canada.

Of course, as mentioned in the NYT piece, there's the health care. "Let me see, what doctor do I want to go to? How about, whichever one is closest to me... whoever was recommended by a friend... or whoever has the first listing in the Yellow Pages."

I'm gonna disagree about Coffee Crisp being the sine qua non of Canadian chocolate bars. It has its place, granted, but nothing measures up to Crispy Crunch. For us west-coasters, they sell 'em by the case in the big supermarkets in Vancouver.

As a vegetarian, I have to say that health food restaurants in the US could learn from the ones in Canada. In Toronto, every neighbourhood health food store has some kind of veggie burger, ethnic snack, etc. that you would only ever find in that store. Here in the States, it's all the same brands everywhere you look, and it's all too small and overpriced. Granted, much of the fake meat is Yves, which I'm under the impression was Canadian, although now apparently bought out by a US company.

Shopping is another area where the US could take some pointers. This is a big country, with a lot of diversity, yet most of what you can buy in stores is overpriced junk on the coasts, and the same junk for cheaper in the heartland. In Toronto, you can walk into any store downtown and find something decent and unique. And you'll find different kinds of things if you walk down Bloor Street, Queen, King, Dundas, Spadina, Eglinton, Yonge... or in Vancouver, 4th, Broadway, Robson, and so on.

I'm not going to waste a wish on snow. I've had enough of tennis matches in June interrupted by falling flakes.

Don't know if it's unique to California, but they just don't know how to do bread. Every loaf is too small, nothing big enough to make a sandwich out of. (Even considering the too-small veggie burgers.) And again, everything is either super chi-chi or plain white Wonder Bread. Nobody's competing on price; in our local market, every loaf is $4.99. What was that about outrageous subsidies to the wheat farmers?

iPhone and iPod - Stop the Music!

2009-05-09T22:06:00.000-07:00

The iPhone and iPod Touch are great for playing music while you gaze at the screen. They're also great for playing music while the screen is off: save power! extend battery life! The catch is that the typical way of stopping the music is so cumbersome. If the screen is off, that means the device is locked. So you turn it on, do the "slide to unlock" thing, and then hit the Pause button.

When the (non-iPhone) phone rings, or someone walks into your office to talk to you, or your speakers start blaring some inappropriate song, or you need to dash out of your car... that's just not fast enough.

Here's the shortcut: Unplug the audio cord from the iPhone or iPod. Even though the internal speaker could keep playing a tinny version of the same song, the device detects the unplugging and pauses the music automatically.

How to Interpret "Lost"

2009-01-28T22:53:00.000-08:00

[Spoiler warning: I'm not going to give away specifics about the Lost plots from earlier seasons, but I will go into the themes a little bit, which may take away some of the surprise factor if you start from the very beginning.]

With the new season of "Lost" just starting, you may be a bit confused depending on where exactly you are in time (just like the characters). Maybe you've been away for long enough that you're having trouble remembering all the plot threads. Maybe you've caught up on your own timeline with the season DVDs. Or maybe, like me, you watched from the beginning in blocks of 3-4 hours per week, when the Sci-Fi and G4TV channels recently ran all the episodes to lead up to the latest season premiere.

I think this last way, in big multi-episode sessions, is the most effective. I remember hearing about some of the plot mysteries during the first season. Mysterious hatches! Polar bears! Seemed like the questions around those things dragged on for weeks and months. Viewing the episodes back-to-back gave the same feelings of wonder and suspense, but resolved the mysteries reasonably quickly.

Now is a significant time for Lost to resume, not least because we recently lost both Ricardo Montalban and Patrick McGoohan. Some say that Lost is like Fantasy Island. (Whatever you can imagine, can happen. Your fate may depend on whether you choose good or evil.) Others say it's like The Prisoner. (You'll never get away. Everything goes topsy-turvy. You can never tell whose side anyone is on.) The emphasis shifts each season. Sometimes things seem like magic, other times there are malevolent plots afoot.

I say the right way to think of Lost, is as a real-world, present-day version of Zork. (By the way, you can now download all of Zork I, II, and III.) You start with this giant unexplored area, that you map a little at a time. You find puzzles, locked doors and such, that take a long time to get past. The Dharma Initiative is like the Great Underground Empire, a Macguffin that is a convenient excuse whenever the creator wants a certain object or map location to exist. Once you know how to get past the obstacles and get from place to place, later puzzles involve going back and forth on long journeys through well-trodden territory. Landmarks that once were mysterious and intimidating, are now mundane and familiar. And when you try to solve the final riddles, you realize that actions and choices from the past have to go together in specific ways so that everything lines up perfectly in the present.

Here are the riddles I'm still waiting to find the answers to... I'll be peeved if these things don't get resolved by the end of the series! [OK, these might be a little spoiler-worthy if you haven't seen the first season or two.]

1) What is the origin of Hurley's nickname?
2) Who is the "him" who is supposed to be the replacement for the guardian of the hatch? Will anyone ever answer the riddle correctly?
3) How did Inman get to the island?
4) Why does it seem like the Dharma Initiative is still active in the background (think Inman, and the plane drops), when by all rights it should be defunct?

Don't Feed the Time Machine

2009-01-23T20:19:00.000-08:00

Most technology issues are very simple. It's all about the grinding noises. If you hear grinding noises because your hard drive is busy all the time, that's bad. SSDs = less grinding noises. Client/server = the grinding noises happen mostly in a server room, not your office. Cloud computing = the server room with all the grinding noises is even farther away, probably near a river with a waterfall to mask the noise even more.

OS X Leopard's Time Machine feature is great... with the exception of the frequent grinding noises. Wake up from a long sleep -- Time Machine does a backup, might as well go for a coffee break. Right around the time you want to check mail, listen to music, work on that critical document -- the hour between backups expires, more grinding noises that slow down the machine and kill your concentration. Something like Time Capsule, doing the backup to a wireless network drive, is really just a way to transfer the grinding noises to another room.

But if you just have a regular computer + hard drive setup with Time Machine, don't despair.

The first way to lessen the noise is to set Time Machine preferences to exclude folders with frequent activity, big files or lots of files, and unimportant data. Open System Preferences and go into the Time Machine pane, or pick "Open Time Machine Preferences" from the icon in the status bar at the top-right part of the screen. This preference pane has a little + icon where you can select folders. Making a selection means that folder, and everything underneath it, is left out of the Time Machine backups.

For example, I leave out my iTunes Music folder because I back up changes there on my own schedule. No point in spending time every hour backing up songs where I fixed a typo in the album name. I'll do a big backup once a month to take care of that. Similarly, I have a central download directory, but what I want to back up are the applications that I actually install, so I'll leave out the download directory with its original .dmg and .zip files. And if you do programming, you might want to exclude certain directories based on your style of work. If you keep everything up-to-date using CVS, you might exclude your source directories and just make sure the CVS repository is included in Time Machine. If you generate all kinds of binary files, PDF documents, or what have you over and over again, stash them all in destination directories that are excluded from Time Machine backups.

Another technique that achieves the same result is to put certain folders on another drive, and refer to them using symbolic links. (Just make sure that external drive is excluded from Time Machine backups, using the preferences pane as above.) In Terminal, you'll use a command like "ln -s /volumes/Other_Drive/Some_Folder /users/Me/Some_Folder". (Like with the 'cp' command, the first argument is the item that already exists, and the second is the new one you're creating.) You'll be able to do all the normal operations with the folder like it existed in your home directory, but Time Machine will know that it's really on the other hard drive, and will include/exclude it based on the preference settings for that drive. For example, I recently used this technique with a big "Podcasts" directory; I freed up the space on my internal drive, and took those files out of the Time Machine backups all in one step.

If after going through these exercises you still hear a lot of grinding every hour, you'll need to track down folders that applications are updating without your knowledge. Those files might not be worth backing up. The command (again, from Terminal) to run is:


find ~ -mmin -60

That will display a list of files that were updated within the last 60 minutes. On my system, this technique pointed out folders such as ~/Library/Caches, ~/Library/Cookies, and ~/Library/Safari that were being updated constantly based on normal web browsing activity. The information there is the kind of stuff I clear out periodically anyway to keep the browser running fast, and if I had a system crash it wouldn't be high on my list of things to recover, so it's back to Time Machine preferences for a few new items to exclude.

Looking Ahead to OS X Snow Leopard

2009-01-06T00:06:00.000-08:00

Here is a piece looking at what's known about the next release of OS X, 10.6 aka Snow Leopard:

Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6 - the story so far | News | TechRadar UK

The focus is largely on performance -- graphics, multi-core, etc. Which raises one question with me. What's up with OS X grinding to a halt whenever there's any I/O?

By which I mean... when copying files from one disk to another, or pictures off a compact flash card, or Time Machine starts doing a backup... everything seems to come to a stop. I might expect that some other I/O-bound process could become twice as slow, or even 5x as slow if there was contention on the same disk for writing things like browser cache files, causing seeking back and forth.

But my perception is that it's worse than that. Browser windows freeze completely until Time Machine is finished. Operations slow to a crawl when I'm pretty sure they're not touching the disk that's being copied to or from. Pictures take forever to come off a compact flash card when nothing else is tying up the processor. You would think it would be an obvious optimization to make Time Machine run at a low priority when the foreground app was doing I/O, or to speed up copies between compact flash cards and Firewire external drives, where the internal drive shouldn't be involved at all. Yet in this one area, I find Windows beating OS X in speed.

I don't know if it's something deep within BSD, like you periodically hear some bugaboo in Linux internals that makes certain operations really slow. I've seen these slowdowns when copying or moving files both from the Finder and the Terminal.

Puts the World in Perspective - Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Lens

2008-12-09T20:32:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking about writing a little post about macro photography, and I wanted to write a review of the Canon EF 100mm f/28. USM macro lens, so to kill 2 birds with one stone I thought I'd write the review on epinions and link to it from the blog:

Puts the World in Perspective - Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 USM Lens - Epinions.com

Buy the lens from Amazon

Link of the Day - Fashion Your Firefox

2008-12-02T22:06:00.000-08:00

One of the problems with Firefox is the need to sort through dozens of add-ons to see if they help with the things you like to do. The Fashion Your Firefox page groups together related add-ons to save some time. (Requires Firefox 3.)

Personally, I find that Firefox is the #1 memory hog on my system, so I'm tempted to install several different instances, each with just a few add-ons, and switch between them.

Link of the Day: Tag That Image - Visual Bookmarking Sites Worth Browsing - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

2008-11-29T15:34:00.000-08:00

It's good to see community-based tagging evolving to include images too. As a photographer, I enjoy browsing gallery sites with a wide variety of images, to get new ideas and explore new perspectives. The sites mentioned in this blog post (WeHeartIt, Fffffound, and Visualize.us) stream pictures that have been tagged by users, so you can explore by serendipity, or drill down by tag.

Tag That Image: Visual Bookmarking Sites Worth Browsing - Bits Blog - NYTimes.com

There are other sites (like ImgFave) mentioned in the comments too, so they're worth reading.

Loupe the Loupe

2008-11-08T17:52:00.000-08:00

One of Photoshop's relatively new tools is the "loupe". This handy previewing tool lets you make judgment calls about one or more photos from the Bridge, without actually opening the pictures in the editor. The loupe technique is faster, and can avoid a lot of hassle with juggling windows and changing zoom levels.

You access the Loupe by clicking on an image in the Preview pane in the Bridge. A rectangular window appears showing a 100% zoom of a small part of the picture. You can drag the window (based on the idea of a jeweller's loupe, a one-eyed magnifying glass) around to examine the most important area of the photo.

One corner of the loupe bulges out, almost like an arrow from a cartoon speech bubble. The arrow points to the spot in the photo that's being magnified, so you can see the scaled-down region and the magnified version at the same time. If the loupe blocks part of the photo you want to see, drag it to the left or right to flip the loupe so the arrow comes out of a different corner.

You can use the magnification to judge whether a photo is worth saving, cropping, or blowing up. For example, you can quickly check whether a wildlife shot has enough detail to be worth cropping and showing at close to original size. You can look at some small detail, like a license plate or sign, to see if it's legible at full size.

Where the loupe really comes in handy is to compare multiple photos. Selecting multiple pictures in the Bridge displays several seriously scaled-down thumbnails in the Preview area. If you took several pictures in quick succession, for example an action sequence where some shots are blurry, or a group photograph where different people have eyes open or closed, picking the ideal one can normally be time-consuming. Put them all up in the Preview pane, open a loupe on each one pointing to the same spot, and quickly decide which ones are too blurry, which ones are too shaded, which one has the best detail for the important region, and so on.

In this example, I put a loupe on 2 photos taken a couple of seconds apart, to see whether the shadows on the face in the first photo are too bad.

A Contrarian View on Color Calibration

2008-11-08T16:31:00.000-08:00

Although people say that serious attention to color issues is the mark of a serious photographer, I think these days the "return on investment" isn't great enough to spend a lot of time and energy on it.

The basic issue: screens emit light, printed photos reflect light, so color and brightness that you see on the screen may turn out different in a print. Also, different computer screens (even different operating systems) vary in their display properties, so colors might not be consistent from one machine to another.

For example, when I print a photo at a local location, it will typically turn out a little darker and a little less saturated than it looks on my screen. When my photos (edited on OS X) get projected on a Windows PC at a photo club competition, I know the color balance and brightness will be a little different. And even if I just transfer photos from the iMac to the Powerbook to do a slideshow, the max brightness on the Powerbook still seems dingy by comparison. (Curse this bright iMac screen! ;-)

Old-school photographers often advise a complicated procedure to calibrate your monitor so that it's "accurate" -- the idea being that you'll edit the color balance, saturation, brightness, and so on so that it looks right on the screen, and will reproduce accurately when printed. That's the theory, anyway.

However, there are so many variables to consider that you can drive yourself crazy -- what "color space" is the photo using in Photoshop, what kind of printer are you printing on, what are all the other print settings in Photoshop, how long has it been since you calibrated your monitor because monitors "drift" over time!

And then you transfer the pictures to a computer that wasn't calibrated, or was calibrated differently, or you print on a different printer or type of paper, and once again you don't like the way it looks.

My advice? Follow only the simplest procedures that give the most bang for the buck:

Do a one-time calibration with the simplest, cheapest method. Perhaps borrow a ColorVision Spyder and choose the automated mode where the device rests against the monitor for a few minutes and you don't have to do anything. Or on OS X, use System Preferences -> Displays -> Color -> Calibrate.
Change your display's "Gamma" setting if your images are consistently too dark or too light when printed or on another computer. On OS X, you might find that your images are too dark when displayed on a PC or printed. In the System Preferences ... Calibrate procedure mentioned above, you can set up an alternative profile with a different (darker) gamma value, and switch to it at the drop of a hat. That darker monitor setting will "fool" you into brightening your pictures more than you normally would, which will give better results in print or on Windows PCs.
If you can get a printer profile for your exact printer or your favorite online service, why not. For example, the Dry Creek Photo site has color profiles for many photo labs across the country, including every Costco. You can select the printer profile when printing in Photoshop. (Select Print -> Color Management -> Photoshop Manages Colors to enable the Printer Profile list.)
When you think you have something close, run a bunch of test prints with variations of overall saturation, brightness, etc. Include a caption on each print to say which is which! These days, you can get 8x10s for only a few dollars each. Figure out how much your time is worth to sidestep hours of fiddling with printer settings.
If you find you need to boost brightness by 10%, lower red saturation by 5%, etc. for every picture to get it to display properly on Uncle Bob's laptop or print on your local photo lab's professional printer, set up a Photoshop action, save a set of layers, or find some other way to apply that action to a whole set of photos at once. (Leaving the originals unchanged.) You might display photos in so many different contexts, no one color setting will work perfectly for them all.

How to do Browser-Based Presentations

2008-10-04T09:26:00.000-07:00

If PowerPoint or Keynote aren't lively enough for your presentations, why not run a live demo from a browser instead? You can drive home that what you're talking about actually exists, you can pull in information from other sources rather than showing a single screenshot or brief excerpt.

A couple of things to keep in mind when you go this route...

In most browsers, it's easy to boost the font size as needed to make the presentation visible. You know how people doing projected presentations always make lame jokes about "reading the eye chart" because they put too much small-font text on their slides? With a browser, you can bump up the font size if this happens. Firefox or Safari: Ctrl-+ for Windows, Cmd-+ for OS X. (Although this is how those keyboard shortcuts are billed, you don't need the Shift key, so it ends up really being Ctrl/Cmd-=.)

I see live demos that bog down because the presenter spends a lot of time getting back to their original page, switching between tabs, looking for the right tab, or waiting for pages to load. Here are some tips for keeping the demo going at a reasonable pace:

Whatever is the main page of your demo/presentation, set up as many ways as you can to get back there quickly. Make it your home page, just until the presentation is over. Make it a "quick link" on the browser bookmark bar.

Browsers that can do tabs typically have a preference that doesn't have much use in day-to-day browsing. Firefox: When I open a link in a new tab, switch to it immediately. Safari: Select tabs and windows as they are created. Turn this setting on during the presentation. Every time you want to show what's behind another link, open the link in a new tab, which will immediately appear. (Windows: Ctrl-click. OS X: Cmd-click.) When finished with that page, close the tab and you'll instantly be back at your start page. (Windows: Ctrl-W. OS X: Cmd-W.)

When you're 10-20 seconds from the end of your spiel on one page, close it and open the next link. Wrap up that discussion, with the audience focus on your voice rather than the screen image, while the next page loads.

When you're whipping up the text of your presentation, the key point is to get it out fast. Presentation software is good for flowing text into templates with headings, paragraphs, and list bullets. To get the same kind of efficiency for text you'll slap on a web page, you can use Markdown, a text-to-HTML converter that lets you write in wiki-like style (start a line with a * to make it a bullet point, and so on).

OS X Tip: Storing Screencaptures in a Different Folder

2008-10-03T23:14:00.000-07:00

You may be familiar with the keyboard shortcuts Cmd-Shift-3 and Cmd-Shift-4 to do screen captures in OS X. The "3" shortcut takes a picture of the whole screen. The "4" shortcut lets you drag an area to capture. By default, the screen captures are stored in your Desktop folder. Adding the Ctrl key to the key sequence puts the result on the clipboard.

But what if you want to store the pictures somewhere else?

With the Mac's eye-catching GUI, it's easy to forget there's a real UNIX system under the hood. You can invoke the screen capture feature from the Terminal command line with the screencapture command:


screencapture ~/pic_in_home_directory.jpg # Waits a few seconds, then captures full screen
screencapture -iW /tmp/pic_in_some_other_directory.jpg # -i = use mouse to select; -W = capture full window

There are other options you can use, like -c to send output to the clipboard, or -t to set the output filetype. (I've got my system set to save JPGs by default, so I didn't use -t jpg in the examples above.)

In the UNIX shell, you could use the alias command to run screencapture with a preselected set of options. But that still forces you to specify the full path to the file on the command line, or switch to the directory where you want the file stored.

A more convenient technique is to use shell functions, which let you pass parameters. For example, here I create 2 commands I can use to take screen captures. blogsnap foo puts the output in foo.jpg in a predefined folder. clipsnap sends the output straight to the clipboard. mailsnap sends the output straight into a new mail message.


blogsnap() {
 screencapture -iW ~/documents/Blogs/Screencaps/$1.jpg
}

clipsnap() {
  screencapture -icW
}

mailsnap() {
  screencapture -iWM /tmp/$$.jpg
}

You can paste the commands below straight into a terminal window to define those commands temporarily, or put them into the shell initialization file (depending on the shell, typically .profile, .bashrc, or .kshrc) so that they're available in each new Terminal window.

US Open: Federer at the Halfway Point

2008-09-02T23:50:00.000-07:00

Well, after tonight's 5-set victory over Andreev, Federer is actually past the halfway point, but everything still applies!

The last few Grand Slam tournaments, you can sort of see Federer's preparation for the later rounds (especially an anticipated match against Nadal). For example, at the French Open, he was leaving a bigger margin for error around the court, not aiming quite so close to the lines. That was working well, cutting down on unforced errors, but he seemed to forget that strategy in the final.

Now in the US Open, different tactics but same theme. Against Alves, a right-hander, Federer was hitting tons of slice serves breaking wide in the deuce court. Why do that against a right-hander? It may still prompt a weak return that can be volleyed or angled away for a winner. But I think it's really practice for Nadal. The same play came up now and then against Andreev.

Another tactic that proved counterproductive against Andreev was to consistently approach and then volley over to the deuce side, Andreev's forehand, his best shot. Roger lost a number of points to passing shots where clearly the higher percentage play was to go to the backhand. I think he's been focusing so much on Nadal that those attacks, to a left-hander's backhand, are stuck in his head against other opponents.

I was pleased to see Federer hustling around the court and banging flat backhands against Stepanek. That's the style that will intimidate even the toughest opponents. Just have to remember to keep doing it in the last couple of rounds. I hope Muller in the quarterfinals will be an easier match, the better to recover from 5 sets in the round of 16.

John's Olympic Experience (first week)

2008-08-16T20:42:00.000-07:00

With the first week almost over, I thought I'd offer my personal perspective so far.

Television coverage has been inexplicably bad, as noted by The Chronicle.

Now, I happen to like beach volleyball. It's a sport I'm pretty good at, from experience with tennis and regular volleyball. I have this fantasy of wangling my way onto the Latvian team by way of my paternal grandmother. So I don't mind that coverage. But I do agree that other sports like table tennis, and non-US athletes, have gotten the least coverage ever.

The announcing I also don't mind so much. The schmaltz factor seems to be toned down since Athens. If you like to quantify such things, here's Slate magazine's "Sap-O-Meter":

But I can't let the piss-poor tennis coverage pass. We scanned the TV listings and Tivo'ed sometimes 8-12 hours per day, any block on any channel that mentioned "tennis" in its program summary. We didn't get any tennis the first 3 days, and after that only a few points here and there, no charts showing the draws or results, hardly even any match highlights. It was over a day between the time we heard that James Blake lost in the semifinals, to the point we heard who he had lost to, i.e. the other player besides Nadal who would be in the gold-medal match. Couldn't find the men's semifinals anywhere.

On other occasions when big tennis events are covered on more than one channel simultaneously, we've always been able to pick up the pattern after the first day. One channel has highlights, another jumps around while matches are on live, a certain time slot has the best match of the day, any remaining American will get a night match, and so on. This time, not a glimmer of any pattern. And online updates are a Catch-22. Because we're a day or so behind with the watching, it's no good reading the tennis news or going to the Olympic site for the draw, that would just give away matches that we forlornly imagine might be in some block we haven't seen yet.

The most interesting tennis story for me from the Olympics is Roger Federer. I'm concerned by his lack of confidence lately, and I didn't think he played very well in the Wimbledon final, despite all the "best match of all time" blather. His loss to Blake demonstrated that he didn't read my blog post about things to learn from Nadal. He didn't change up the speed when the rallies got hard and flat as Blake prefers. When he ran around his backhand, his forehands were either predictable inside-out ones, or he missed the occasional down-the-line attempt or didn't put anything on it.

Winning the doubles gold may help Federer get back on track. In doubles, you have to keep things positive with your partner all the time. Instead of hanging your head after you (or your partner) make a bad shot, you have to cultivate short-term memory loss. If the opponents win a point with a good play, you can still give your partner a fist bump or low five to acknowledge that you're following the right strategy. Serving in doubles involves changing positions, going for extra angle, and getting a high percentage of first serves -- all things that have gone wrong for a game or two during each of Federer's recent losses. The net play forces you to hit volleys in crunch situations, unlike the Wimbledon final where Roger had too many desperation volleys in the fifth set, and even ceded the net to Rafa over the last couple of games. And doing it for Queen and Country, and mentoring a less-experienced player through a bunch of tough matches, may help Roger in singles when he needs to visualize the positives of getting through a close match, not just the negatives like "shouldn't lose to this guy", "there goes the #1 ranking", "Rafa made a comeback, maybe this guy will too", and so on.

Inside Outside, Metadata

2008-08-09T22:15:00.000-07:00

Every time I hear the word "metadata", I cringe a little bit. It's one of these simple intuitive notions that everyone has experience with, but in the tech world it's loaded up with so much jargon that it gets lost in the clouds.

With iTunes, you might be familiar with metadata as the editable Song, Artist, Album, etc. fields on the Info panel when you do File -> Get Info. This is information about each song that's stored inside the song file.

There's also metadata that's outside the file itself, like what directory it's in or even the filename. You can move the file around and rename it, and it's still the same song. It just might be harder to find unless you name it and file it in a logical way.

When you import songs into iTunes, this "inside/outside" distinction can be important if the songs come from a source other than songs ripped from a CD by iTunes. For example, maybe the songs have names like "01 - Great Song.mp3" in a folder "My Favorite Band/Their Best Album". You drag a bunch of songs like that into iTunes, only to discover that the fields in the "Get Info" panel are all blank, and now the song is filed in your iTunes Music folder under "Unknown Artist/Unknown Album".

How do you avoid that happening? The key is to make sure that all the information -- the metadata -- that you know about each song gets stored inside the song file before you let iTunes start messing around with the file names and locations.

You have some options, depending on how you're importing...

Let's say you are ripping a CD out in the woods or in a plane, someplace with no Internet access so iTunes can't automatically retrieve the track info. If it's a well-known CD, you can probably retrieve the track info later, so no worries. But if it's an indie release, an import, or just something obscure, you might be forever left with some files named "Track 20" and so on and nothing else to go by.

When you're ripping or importing a bunch of songs all from the same artist, import them into a playlist named for the artist and album. That way, even if no other information is available, you can go back to that playlist, select all the songs, and in the "Get Info" dialog, fill in the same artist, album, genre, year, "Disc n of n", and so on for all the songs at once. If you're importing several albums by the same artist, you can make a separate playlist for each one. Perhaps make an iTunes folder named for the artist, then separate playlists underneath named for each album.

Let's say you're importing songs that weren't created by iTunes, say a fanboy collection of bootlegs that are arranged in some special hierarchy, like one folder named "1972" with a bunch of concerts from the same tour, then another one "1975" and so on. You want to preserve the information from this hierarchy so you can fill in the year etc. if those fields aren't filled in in the "Get Info" panel.

This situation calls for a more elaborate process. Make sure that the setting under Preferences -> Advanced -> General, "Copy files to iTunes Music folder when adding to library" is turned off. Then you can drag the files into iTunes and the Get Info -> Summary panel will still show you the full folder path of the file. You can examine the files to see which info fields are filled in, which ones you need to fill in yourself, and you can refer to the Summary panel if the track number, year, album, etc. aren't available in the title of the song.

When you're done with this initial step, remove the files from your iTunes library -- select the songs and hit Delete within the main Music part of the library, or Alt-Delete within a playlist. Because the songs aren't actually underneath the iTunes Music folder, iTunes won't ask about moving the original files to the trash. They'll stay exactly where they are, just now with some extra metadata inside the actual files.

Now you can go back to Preferences and turn the "Copy files..." setting back on. Import the files again, and now they'll go into the iTunes Music folder under the familiar "Artist/Album" folder path. Because you've already filled in these info fields for all the songs, you don't have to worry about them ending up under "Unknown Artist/Unknown Album".

In this example, we see some files that I really did rip way out in the wilderness with no Internet access. Learn from my mistake! First, we see the completely unhelpful song names, with no artist or album filled in. Because I just imported them into my main music library, instead of dragging into a descriptively named playlist, there's no clue I can use to go back and fill in the info. The Get Info -> Summary panel is no help, it shows me they're filed under "Unknown Artist/Unknown Album". I tried using the menu item Advanced -> Get CD Track names, but the CD was too obscure , it isn't listed in the Internet CD Database. If I had imported existing MP3s from a folder named after some combination of band, album, year, etc., I could avoid the "Unknown Artist/Unknown Album" mystery by unchecking the "Copy files..." option in Preferences -> Advanced -> General, at least until I had filled in all the other fields. Then I could turn on that option, remove the files from the library, and re-import them to file them in a central, easy to find location.

When you import songs that have all the info encoded into the filename, such as "1. 1991 - One-Hit Wonder - Flash in the Pan - Only Album.mp3", it doesn't have to be tedious to retype all these items in the Get Info fields. For users of iTunes on the Mac, there's an Applescript called TrackParser that can pull out these extra pieces of information from the song name, fill them into the appropriate fields, and strip them out of the song name field.

In this example, we start with a song that has all the info packed into the song name. After running the TrackParser script, we construct a pattern using placeholders for the important parts, and matching the punctuation and spacing of the remainder of the song name. First, we click the "Test Run" button to see whether the pattern will pull out the right pieces of information and put them in the right fields; we keep clicking OK until we're satisfied that the pattern is accurate, then click Cancel to end the test run. We go through the same steps again, and the same pattern is still filled in. Clicking Run this time makes the script really fill in the other fields and trim the extra info out of the song name. In the end, the Get Info panel reflects the right song information.

Tennis - What Can a Right-Hander Learn from Nadal?

2008-08-03T23:07:00.000-07:00

Chatting with my opponent during a match, we remarked that (as right-handers) we couldn't take a whole lot from Nadal's serving or positioning strategy. And as people with normal shoulders, we couldn't figure out how he does that heavy topspin forehand motion.

But, even so, there are some things that a right-hander can take away from the Nadal game.

Nadal's opponents usually know his game plan in advance. He has his favorite shots, and attributes like fitness and concentration, that he just figures are better than the opponent's. So it doesn't matter if the other guy is ready for what's coming, Rafa will stick to the plan knowing that he has an excellent chance if the match is played on his terms. You can do the same, whether your strength is the volley, consistency, angles, speed, and so on.

Clay-court positioning is way back behind the baseline. Why is this so effective? Just try hitting some balls from that position, next time you're picking up near the fence after a drill. You can fire line drives as hard as you like, with little worry that they'll go out. So next time your opponent hits something deep and/or high, retreat a few steps, bang an offensive shot someplace they don't expect, then move in and take control of the baseline again.

Ever notice how every left-hander has a heavy spin serve in the ad court that goes to your backhand? That's perfect for the left-hander because (a) the backhand tends to be the weak side, and (b) the ad court is where you serve most game-winning or game-saving points. A right-hander would be serving those sliders and kickers in the deuce court. Well, why not work on that serve anyway? Even though it's directed to most opponents' forehands, it can still push them way off the court and set you up for an easy putaway on the next shot.

Rafa has more options than most players when he runs around his backhand. In addition to the inside-out forehand (most players' favorite choice from that position), he'll often hit a heavy topspin forehand down the line, with plenty of margin for error. Not intended to be an outright winner, just to surprise the opponent, pull them out of their normal position, and prompt a weak response that makes the next shot much easier to put away. I find this shot is so rare for right-handers, they usually pull it into the alley when they attempt it. Practice this shot -- down-the-line forehands from your backhand corner -- with a little extra height and well inside the sideline. You'll mess up opponents who expect every forehand from that spot to be inside-out, and you're pretty much guaranteed that your next shot will be a forehand too.

While you may not be a natural right-hander who plays tennis left-handed, like Nadal, you can take advantage of your off-arm even if you don't have a powerful two-handed backhand. When cradling the racquet in the ready position between points, support it entirely by the left hand on the throat. The racquet is only a few ounces, and you only need a few seconds before the next point starts, but by the third set of a long match, the energy savings can really add up to keep your racquet arm fresh.

Rafa's Wimbledon win demonstrated some new shots, particularly the one-handed slice backhand. Take note! Even a player renowned for his speed is willing to slow down the pace when he's out of position or the ball is too low and hard to hit an aggressive shot. You can stay in lots of points with a deep slice, a defensive looper, or an off-speed ball. Just stay ready to go back on offense once this tactic disrupts your opponent's rhythm or wears out their patience.

New Feature in Google Maps: Walking Directions

2008-07-29T12:50:00.000-07:00

This is one of those features that everyone has daydreamed about when getting short-distance directions in Google Maps. You get some convoluted route with loops and hairpin turns based on one-way streets and divided roads, when all you really wanted was to walk from your hotel to a restaurant a couple of blocks away. Now you can, with walking directions in Google Maps.

Life without iPod

2008-04-29T22:56:00.000-07:00

When I spilled some water on my desk, I thought I had whisked the iPod to safety in time, but the next day I noticed telltale droplets on the bottom surface and it wouldn't turn on or charge.

I Googled various combinations of "ipod water damage", and the gist of the suggestions was to keep the iPod turned off while letting it dry (under gentle sun where possible) for up to a week. I had already made some attempts to turn it on, which may have sealed its doom. I haven't been able to get a peep out of it after several days. All the advice seemed to be for a disk-based model, and I have a flash-based Nano; don't know if the all-memory models are more susceptible to damage this way.

This poses an interesting conundrum for the commute by car. I have a 6-disc CD changer, but it only reads music CDs not MP3 CDs. The compromise I've settled on is:

- 3 CDs worth of music.
- 3 CDs worth of podcasts. (I'm working my way through the early CS courses of UC Berkeley, just to see what it is that makes Silicon Valley companies so snooty when they ask where you went to school.)
- Music CDs burned at random from one of my favorite playlists, suitable for driving.
- Music CDs not labelled at all, so I can swap 3 in randomly from a bigger selection, and have no idea what will come up.
- Podcasts carefully labelled (title and episode number), so I can fill up slots 4, 5, and 6 and keep track when wrapping around. E.g. sometimes I put the next 2 episodes in CD slots 4 and 5, before I've listened to the earlier episode that's still in slot 6.

The downside of podcasts on music CDs is that one episode takes a whole CD, assuming it's reasonably long, regardless of the bit rate / sound quality.

Eyes on the Prize

2008-03-22T08:48:00.000-07:00

What lessons can we learn from the physical world that also apply to the higher realms of the mind and the spirit? The old quote "eyes on the prize" is actually very practical advice!

It occurred to me that lately I've been biking, playing tennis, and discussing golf if not actually playing. And each of these activities has some variation of that same "eyes on the prize" lesson. Tennis in particular has the idiom "keep your eye on the ball", repeated so often perhaps people stopped thinking about what it really means.

The most accurate tennis shot comes when you keep your head still as you make contact with the ball. The natural impulse is to pull your eyes and attention away a moment before contact, swivelling your head so that you can follow your own shot and see where it lands. But that motion can result in a shot that's off-center or that goes off-target. Now, a tennis match involves hundreds or thousands of shots, but the outcome hinges on maybe a dozen or two critical moments. The more important the shot, the more temptation there is to be distracted, the more important it is to focus on this lesson at that moment. If your opponent is at the net and you must hit a precise passing shot, or you have a seemingly easy put-away close to the net, that's the time to keep your head very still and your attention focused on the ball as you hit it. Even for a moment after you hit it, since you'll either win the point or not based on how well you execute.

In tennis, experience means being able to visualize the whole court, pick a target, and hit that target without looking at it, while looking at the ball instead. You'll hear this same advice applied to the serve; look at the other side and decide on a target, then concentrate on the ball while executing the service motion. Like magic, the ball will seek the target more accurately than if you peek at the other side partway through the swing.

Cycling has different considerations, but along the same lines. You might have noticed, if you spot something dangerous in the road and fixate on it (a rut, a pebble, a bump, a gate), you are likely to ride straight at it despite a fervent desire to avoid it. Muscle memory doesn't know how to interpret a negative directive, "don't go there". You have to turn the impulse into something positive -- focus on some area away from the danger zone and steer towards it. Depending on how treacherous and steep your path is, you either focus on what's immediately in front of you (avoid this obstacle, reach that next milestone), or you let your imagination wander farther ahead to your ultimate goal (the finish line, home sweet home).

Golf offers a third variation on the same theme. As in tennis, you perform the same precise movement over and over. As in cycling, you are going for a positive goal that's a long way off, but it's important to avoid obstacles along the way (the trees, the water, the wrong fairway). During the golf swing, again you should keep your head still and focus on the spot where the ball is, even for a moment after you've actually hit it. The golf course is big enough, and usually unfamiliar enough, that you can't visualize an entire hole the way a tennis player pictures the court. But you can form a mental image of an intermediate target, something that if you can fly the ball over it probably means you're on-target. You want that target to be something positive (the green on the other side of the water hazard) rather than a negative obstacle (the tangled brush where you'll never find the ball).

The lessons for life almost write themselves. Focus on the positive steps you're taking towards your goals and to avoid potential problems, rather than fretting about the dangers themselves. Keep executing until success is ensured; don't look away too soon (the old "counting your chickens before they've hatched"). Concentrate on the things you can control (the ball), don't be distracted by your opponents or the hazards along the way. Gain experience and think ahead, so that you can either visualize your whole plan, or (if the whole system is too big or complicated) pick the right intermediate target to know you're on the right path.

First Look at the iPhone SDK

2008-03-08T22:01:00.000-08:00

I've just started downloading and reading up on the recently announced iPhone SDK. The Apple development environment, Objective-C and all those frameworks, has never quite appealed enough to me to dive into them. Using those same things for iPhone apps could be the tipping point for me.

Looks like quite a nice set of sample applications to use for a starting point. And FAQs and tutorials available the first day. That's a good sign for me. People have thought through use cases, likely questions, and getting-started scenarios. Too often, good technology is bogged down in technology for its own sake, or installation/startup problems are assumed to be handwaved away.

I'm a bit saddened that Palm didn't entice me with this kind of stuff several years ago when I tinkered with Palm programming. (I have a blog post in the back of my head entitled "Why Palm Didn't Take Over the World" that deals with that notion.) With all the emphasis on rewriting Palm OS using Linux and what have you, I never saw a push for things that I felt would yield a lot of bang for the buck. Enhancements to the PC-based client software -- the Windows version never changed much, and the moribund OS X version is so limited and painful I've stopped doing any entry or synching on OS X. (With the iPhone, is there any doubt that iTunes will keep gaining more and more capabilities? Already, the iPhone demos are supplied as movie downloads through the iTunes store.) Pushing the platform to its limits -- does it really take a complete Y2K-style rewrite to, let's say, allow to-do records to have more than one category, or 256 categories instead of 16, or some combination?

The thing that continues to hold me back me a bit, looking at the sample material, is what I think of as "frameworkitis". For every conceivable thing you might want to do, there's a different method with a long name. Just memorize a few hundred of those and you're off to the races. For learning any large system, there's a balance between the number of things to learn at the first, second, third, and sometimes fourth levels. When I evaluate the usability of any development environment, I look at whether too many things (class or procedure names) are pushed up to the top level, or whether you can learn a small number of general things, and then branch off to other things that follow logically. Let's break out that simulator and see how the iPhone APIs fit into that view of the world!

iTunes: Adding Track Numbers to Songs

2008-03-02T13:48:00.000-08:00

Everyone fills in the basic facts in iTunes for their songs -- name, artist, and usually album -- but don't forget another valuable piece of information, the track number!

Track number is important when you're burning an audio CD. You'll want to sort by that field to avoid the songs coming out in alphabetical or some other unhelpful order. It's important when you want to verify that you have all the tracks from an album. When listening to the album in iTunes, you can sort the songs and turn off Shuffle to re-create the album experience. Ditto on your iPod, if you turn off Shuffle or set it to Shuffle Albums, and listen to songs in album order.

If a group of songs don't already have the Track Number field filled in, don't give up hope. A couple of Applescripts let Mac users of iTunes fill it in without a lot of gruntwork.

Use the first script if your song names in iTunes are stuffed with several pieces of information, including the track number. Typically, all the songs from an album will use the same format for the name, for example "01 - Happy Birthday - Greatest Birthday Songs" or "5. Christmas Album / Jingle Bells". But each album might use a different format. That's where the Track Parser script comes in. You select some tracks, enter a coded string that says how to interpret the data, spaces, and punctuation in the names. The script scans through the selected tracks and slots the information into the right fields, while stripping that extra information out of the name field. You can experiment by doing "test runs" on a single track before you turn it loose on dozens of songs. And you can save the string patterns, so that if you encounter similarly named songs in the future, you can "decode" them just by picking from a list of sample song names.

If the track information isn't in the song names, all is not lost. You'll just need to do a bit more work. First, you'll need to download and install the Albumize Selection script. Go to Wikipedia, Amazon.com, or some other "discography" site that lists all the tracks on that album. Turn off Shuffle in iTunes, put the tracks in a playlist, and sort that playlist by the first column -- the one with no label, just numbers. That puts the tracks in the order that is iTunes' "best guess" of the right order. Once these settings are in effect in the playlist, you can drag songs up and down to reorder them. When they're in the right order, select all the tracks from the album (or from disc N in a multi-disk set), run the Albumize Selection script from the iTunes script menu, and it will fill in the "Track X of Y" information for the selected songs.

If you have to go to these lengths to find out album information, don't forget to also fill in the year for all the songs in each album. That will let you create Smart Playlists based on year or decade, and sort an artist's work in chronological order.

Overheard in Berkeley - February 27, 2008

2008-02-27T22:16:00.001-08:00

"This is like the whitest place ever. Nobody's gonna shoot us!"
-- Girl hanging out in front of elementary school.

Photography: Shooting Action with an Ultra-Zoom

2008-02-22T22:14:00.000-08:00

I have a love/hate relationship with my Canon S3 IS when it comes to shooting action scenes like sports. Well, actually, more like hate-hate-hate-(repeat for 2 years)-like-like-sorta-love.

The S3 IS sports a 12x zoom, which after all the crop factors and sensor sizes are said and done, gives essentially the same maximum magnification as my Canon 20D with a 70-300mm zoom lens. (I've shot identical pictures with both cameras from a tripod to verify.) However, the S3 IS is hampered by its electronic viewfinder and higher noise at high ISO settings, so it's only recently that I've started using it successfully for action scenes. At local pro tennis tournaments, the ushers come down like a ton of bricks on anything that looks like an SLR or big zoom lens, so the S3 with its barely extended lens is perfect for flying under the radar.

That 12x zoom, with such a small light body, makes it very hard to hold the camera steady and track any kind of moving subject. Like I said, it took about 2 years before I was able to track a distant flying bird, or athletes moving around a field. Even just a small turn of the body would put the subject off the screen, and the slow refresh rate of the EVF or the LCD screen meant I would overshoot trying to find it again. With an ultra-zoom camera, you have to tone down your reflexes to move or turn the camera by much smaller amounts than seems natural. Also, it's helpful to develop the technique of zooming out until you can see the subject (even as only a small dot), then zooming in while holding steady on that subject.

For an indoor sporting event, it's a challenge to shoot with available light. I choose from a few techniques here, depending on exactly how much light there is.

As a first step, I ratchet up the ISO setting with the mode dial on "P", and take note of the exposure chosen by the camera when I half-press the shutter. I look for a setting between 1/60-1/125, ideally getting it with an ISO setting of 400 max. If the shutter speed is even faster, like 1/200 or better, I'll reduce the ISO speed as far as possible while keeping in the desired range of shutter speeds. Each step in ISO setting typically changes the shutter speed by 2x, so it's easy to predict what will happen when selecting a higher or lower ISO setting. If the camera is picking 1/50 of a second at ISO 200, chances are it will pick 1/100 of a second at ISO 400.

If there is some combination that produces acceptable results at a decent ISO setting, I'll set the mode dial to "Av" for Aperture priority, then bump the aperture value as low as it will go, typically to 3.5 at minimum zoom, down to maybe 5.6 at maximum zoom. Keeping the aperture value small makes the camera select the fastest shutter speed that it thinks is reasonable, and makes the camera more responsive to the shutter button because it has fewer choices to make when you press the button.

If the camera can't quite do what you want, that is, you can't get a good picture without going to ISO 800, then consider zooming out somewhat until you can lower the aperture setting a bit. The minimum aperture depends on the zoom level, so the camera can get a brighter picture (and faster shutter speed) if you aren't zoomed in all the way. Sometimes, cropping the picture a bit is preferable to a closeup shot that is too grainy or blurry to be useful.

Another consideration is, how close to get to the action. If you are within about 30 metres of the subject, the camera needs a little time trying to focus for each shot. Even if you are farther away, it might try to focus as you lose track of the subject, or something intrudes on the foreground or background. For sports, I find the fastest response when I get far enough away to set the camera on manual focus at infinity, and then just leave it on that setting for all the shots. The same applies to distant wildlife.

Another way to speed up responsiveness is to turn off the "review" setting, which brings up the image for a few seconds after each picture is taken. If you want to snap multiple shots in quick succession (as opposed to continuous shooting where you just hold down the shutter button), you'll have to half-press the button to get rid of the review image, recompose the shot in the viewfinder, then complete the shutter press. Very difficult to do with a moving subject. Set the camera on continuous shooting mode, but also turn off the review feature. Wait for a lull in the action to go back and delete any that didn't turn out.

When composing a sports picture with an ultra-zoom, plan ahead to minimize the amount of panning and tracking, because the EVF/LCD just aren't very good for that. For example, at a tennis match, compose the shot leaving room for the player to move forward as they serve, so that you can hold the camera steady and just press the shutter at the right moment. In the same way, zoom out far enough that you can get a large area of the court in your field of view, rather than swivelling the camera as the player runs back and forth. In a doubles match, you might keep the camera locked on the area up by the net, to capture exciting volleys. With the camera covering a large enough are of the court, you can forget about the EVF and LCD altogether, just watching the action as normal and firing the shutter without looking at the camera at all.

One last tip, this one a bit specialized. The Canon S3 IS has a special "wide-angle" mode that essentially just crops off the top and bottom of the frame, so the picture becomes a panorama, even though the resolution isn't any different than just taking a normal picture and doing the cropping yourself. I've rarely felt the need to use this mode in day-to-day shooting. It's one of the choices for the "Size" button, alongside Small, Medium, and Large.

For sports, surprisingly, I do find some uses for the wide setting. Shooting a tennis match, I noticed every picture had a large area at the top showing nothing but the crowd in the stands. With the panoramic setting, I could focus in on just the court. From a practical point of view, taking a picture of a smaller area makes it easier for the camera to measure the exposure for the important part of the picture, and probably makes the camera more responsive because it's processing and saving fewer pixels. (Although I haven't measured the precise speedup.) Also, if space on the memory card or the computer is an issue, each picture shot this way is smaller than a full-size photo.

Final Season of The Wire

2008-02-02T16:45:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts from me on "The Wire", widely acclaimed as the best show in TV history, now entering its final season.

Personally, I would vote for "Barney Miller" as #1, but "The Wire" is closing the gap fast.

When I want some insightful analysis, I turn to the blog of Tim Goodman, TV critic for the San Francisco Chronicle.

This season with the newspaper subplot seems to be starting off a little slow for me. But then, I thought that the school subplot was heading in a predictable direction last season, but then it went in surprising and very effective directions.

The theme I saw emerging in the latest episode, "Transitions", was one of advice offered but not taken, leading to complications for the younger generation and peril for the authority figures giving the advice. Marlo clearly didn't take Prop Joe's offer to step aside. Scott the reporter is blowing off the cautionary advice from his editor. Burrell did a kind of passive-aggressive ignoring of Nerece's advice to bow out quietly, putting on a public face but still handing over the incriminating folder on Daniels. In just a momentary scene, Michael distances himself from his dysfunctional mother. The cop who goes psycho doesn't take Carver's advice on how to deal with Internal Affairs.

Wow, that's a lot of parallel action. The other show that excels at that style of narrative is "Rescue Me". Notice on that show, you don't have one character having marital problems, a drinking problem, or caring for elderly parents, you've often got two or three of them going the same way. Then sometimes the situations resolve the same way, sometimes the outcomes are complete opposites.

Tim Goodman mentions that this last season of "The Wire" seems to be rushing to tie up loose ends with the story arcs for different characters. The archetype for this tactic on HBO must be "Oz", which shares lineage with both "The Sopranos" and "The Wire". (The creators of "Oz" and "The Sopranos" are pals; many actors from "Oz" moved over to "The Wire", for example Lance Reddick and Reg Cathey.) The final season of "Oz" was hugely entertaining precisely because the plot twists zoomed by at breakneck speed, so each character could get their comeuppance or redemption.

Microsoft + Yahoo

2008-02-01T09:14:00.001-08:00

I had a funny feeling now might be the time for Microsoft to acquire Yahoo. Yesterday, I went to Yahoo Mail for the first time in a looooong time. The new message it had notified me about turned out to be spam. When I closed the mail window, Firefox on OS X crashed. I recovered the browser session, closed that window again, another crash. Navigated away from Yahoo to another page, closed the window, crash. Used the "Zap" bookmarklet to disable all Javascript event handling and timers in the mail window before closing, crash.

At that point, I said to myself, Microsoft has got to have these guys. It's perfect synergy.

What Google Really Needs...

2008-01-27T09:39:00.000-08:00

Google is all right as a search engine, I guess, but one obvious feature is lacking: a Scrabble mode!

Those who play Scrabulous on Facebook often find the need to Google a word to confirm if it's a real word. Notice that for any word that Google finds in its dictionary, there is a link to a definition in the upper-right corner of the results page. Search for one word, and there's a separate link "[definition]". Search for multiple words, and each valid one becomes a link to its definition. This leads to the technique of searching for multiple variations in one shot, like trying different vowels and searching for, let's say, "nat net nit not nut" to see which ones are valid. (Looks like Google gets confused about "not" and doesn't think it deserves a definition.)

However, Google will happily give you definitions for abbreviations and acronyms that aren't in the Scrabble dictionary. AO is the country code for Angola. EXO and EXA are prefixes that mean things. No good for Scrabulous.

So, how about it Google? If you can give me "personalized" search results, surely you can put a checkbox somewhere to only show definition links for real Scrabble words!

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga vs. Rafael Nadal: The Fred Thompson Strategy

2008-01-26T21:51:00.000-08:00

[I'm writing this having watched the semi-final of Tsonga def. Nadal, but don't know how Tsonga will do in the final.]

Tsonga's win over Nadal illustrates perfectly how less effort can translate into more results in tennis. Knowing that Nadal likes to grind his opponents down, Tsonga refused to get into a competition of emoting and fist-pumping, which would just play to Nadal's strong point of endurance. Instead, Tsonga played it cool between points and after winning games. Plenty of effort to race after defensive shots or bash his own winners, but dialling down the energy afterwards. No elaborate jumping around while waiting to return serve. And when faced with favourable court geometry, winning points with short dinks and drop-volleys. (Amazing how many players have no strategy for approach shots or volleys other than hitting risky deep shots, that are easy for a fast player to get if they move early and guess right.)

I was also impressed at Tsonga's crafty approaches, again taking a cue from Fred Thompson by coming in later than anybody else would. Nadal has his options worked out in advance when someone hits an obvious approach shot and rushes in behind it. Tsonga paused just long enough for Rafa to decide on a safe high defensive shot, then closed for winning volley.

Tennis is like rock climbing in that the best strategies often require less physical effort than you would think. In rock climbing, you keep reminding yourself to just hang there with muscles relaxed when you're not actively pushing higher. In tennis, you should remind yourself periodically that the racquet and the ball each just weigh a couple of ounces, you should never feel like you're straining to swing hard.

To get a power boost on groundstrokes, start swinging a little before you normally would, accelerate gradually but steadily, and keep the followthrough going until the swing stops by itself. It's when you tense the opposing muscles, either in anticipation of a sudden impact or to stop the swing suddenly, that each stroke feels like a major effort. Keep things loose, and your opponent's hardest shot feels like a feather coming off your strings.

For a faster serve, visualize yourself using 75% effort. Making yourself relax a little can (paradoxically) produce more power than straining trying to fire away at 100%.

I also like to minimize the exertion while waiting to receive serve. Some amount of rocking, flexing the knees, or going up on the toes can keep you ready to move in any direction, but the motion should always be slight enough to feel effortless. Otherwise, you'll tire yourself out in long matches or lengthy receiving games.

One last tip along these lines. You've probably heard advice to support the racquet with your opposite hand. That's not just to keep everything lined up at a sensible angle. Use the opposite hand to take the weight of the racquet between points; even drop your racquet hand occasionally and support thcquet at the throat with your other hand. That can make a big difference in whose shoulder or wrist cramps up in the third set!

Berkeley Restaurant Review: 900 Grayson

2008-01-10T21:16:00.000-08:00

I was telling someone about this blog over lunch, when they asked whether I posted restaurant reviews. I've never gotten into Yelp or other sites that take ownership of user-written reviews, so why not post some of my own here? Good idea.

Let's start with 900 Grayson, a breakfast and lunch place just inside the Berkeley border with Emeryville. We went there today while running some errands in the area. It's on 6th, a couple of blocks north of Ashby.

On an earlier visit, we were perturbed by how loud the place was; everyone was carrying on a full-volume conversation that never let up from the moment they sat down. Also the staff was inattentive, which was a common theme in the Yelp reviews. But the food was OK, and most breakfast/lunch/brunch places have some strike against them, so they stayed on the list for a followup visit.

Again, loud loud loud inside. This time the staff was very polite and attentive -- clearly management has read the reviews of the service. But today the food was markedly vegetarian-unfriendly. Four sandiches on the menu, including "panini of the day", and nothing meatless. A dish combined seitan and waffles -- clearly intended to be the single vegetarian entree -- but eggs feaured too prominently so I passed. I'm not a vegan, but dishes that are heavy on egg don't agree with me, and I notice when otherwise vegetarian-friendly places go overboard with cheese and eggs. Nice soup with a smoky pepper flavour. A nicely presented salad with pear, spinach, cashews and cranberries, but (a) not enough to be filling, and (b) hardly any pear or any noticeable flavour. The herb fries are always good, but when trying to make a meal out of the sides, I can't help but notice how pricey they are. The sandwiches all come with fries, but again, no vegetarian sandwiches today.

So, although I don't own any copyright on the whole "thumbs" deal, if I did, I would reluctantly have to point mine down. OK to pop in for fries and soup and maybe dessert if in the neighbourhood, but not for a substantial meal. I deduct points but still enjoy fancy dinner places like Lalimes that have a similar-themed menu -- natural beef this, prawn that -- yet 900 Grayson falls short for me on vegetarian/vegan-friendly dishes.

Coincidentally, the SF Chronicle just interviewed author Michael Pollan over lunch at this same restaurant.

Signed, Sealed, Delivered

2008-01-01T16:53:00.000-08:00

Quick, what's the most boring thing you could possibly photograph during a trip? A sign? Right! Now I will tell you... why you should photograph lots of signs.

Even if you never include any signs in your photo slideshows, just having the pictures as you're sorting through them helps you remember exactly where you were for a sequence of shots. Maybe you did several trails and scenic overlooks on the same trip, and it's useful to know which pictures are from which spot. For famous locales, you might even assign keywords using the tags feature of Photoshop or other photo management software. Be scrupulous in starting every trip segment with a shot of the relevant sign, and you can quickly select a bunch of thumbnails and assign them all the same tag.

When you are doing a slideshow, a quick shot of a sign can help to serve as an establishing shot for the photos that follow. You can skip over it quickly, with just a few words in case the name isn't familiar. It adds more impact than if you just say "next we did the such-and-such trail" -- your viewers will see how long the trail is, the elevation of the peak you're climbing, how antique and ornate the street sign is, and so on.

Our recent trip to The Grand Canyon, Bryce National Park, and Zion National Park really illustrated this point for me. My wife diligently took a picture of the sign at every landmark. I figured, why use up several megabytes on the memory card of my expensive DSLR for a picture of a flat board with some lettering? After all, my wife is getting it in case we need it in a slideshow. Well, now sorting at home through a few thousand pictures, I really wish I had taken some reminders of which pictures are from Rainbow Point and which from Fairyland Point. Or when we did the Queen's Garden trail, did we do the Wall Street branch or Thor's Hammer?

Trying to cross-reference mine and my wife's pictures would be a pain -- the clocks on our cameras are a few minutes apart, and we only adjusted one of them for the right time zone, so combining them and doing "sort by date" wouldn't work well. For a long or far-ranging trip, go into the settings menus and make sure all cameras have identical times to the minute, and are all on the same time zone.

A little skill with the camera menus will also help with memory card anxiety. Practice switching to a lower resolution to shoot the sign (which after all, you're not going to blow up into a poster-sized print), then back to high resolution, RAW+JPEG, or what have you for the other pictures.

OK, trail signs, road signs, what other sign-like things can we think of to shoot?

Take pictures of informative signs about plants, wildlife, and geology. You might use 'em to identify flora, fauna, and landmarks from other pictures. If the sign is too wide and your camera resolution isn't high enough, take separate right and left shots so that you can read the text when you view the picture.

If you have a memorable meal in a restaurant, take pictures of the relevant menu pages. (You can take the menu away with you and do this at home or at your lodging later.) You'll have a reminder of what to recommend to others, or what wine you really liked.

Sometimes taking a picture of a map display, or a printed map, comes in handy later. I've had situations with 2 people and 1 map, the people need to separate, and the mapless person has a picture for safety. Zoom way in and scroll around in review mode if you need to consult the map on the trail or on the road.

One last tip on this subject. Sometimes I'll want to know at what point I changed some camera setting, such as white balance or ISO. I might want to evaluate how well the change worked, or apply some adjustment like color correction to only the photos taken with a particular setting. (For example, lighten all the photos taken at ISO 100; apply warming filter to all photos taken with white balance "cloudy".) I'll take a throwaway photo of a consistent subject (the sky, the ground, my foot, etc.) to signal when I'm making a change like this in the camera settings.

I hope you'll agree that signs aren't really such boring subjects after all!

I'm Living in an Apple Commercial

2007-11-27T21:07:00.000-08:00

So out of the blue, someone asks my opinion on a computer question. I must have seemed knowledgeable when we talked about iPods. Turns out he bought a laptop the day before... and it runs really slowly... and of course the word "Vista" comes out during the same sentence. Just like in the Apple ad, I tell him the only solution (for a Windows-based laptop) is to "upgrade" from Vista to XP. Thanks to Apple for their ad that told me this was possible ("PR Lady")! :-)

Photoshop CS3: Problems with Stacks

2007-11-23T14:00:00.000-08:00

Although I like the "stacks" feature in the Bridge, as discussed in my last Photoshop post, it's not without flaws. Let's look at things I would classify as problems, or at least unintuitive.

First up, there are 2 operations, "ungroup from stack" and "expand all stacks" that are a little too similar. "Expand" makes all the stacked pictures visible like in the original list of thumbnails. "Ungroup" makes a stack disappear and all the pictures are separate again. If, in a moment of distraction, you select all pictures and do "ungroup", poof all your stacks are gone. I lost a couple of hours worth of tedious work this way, after stacking together zillions of triplets produced by auto-exposure bracketing.

But, you say, "Undo". Sorry, Edit->Undo doesn't work for stack or unstack operations.

The menu operations would be less likely to get confused, if they employed consistent terminology and structure. You've got "Ungroup from Stack" and "Open Stack" right next to each other. "Open" does the same as "Expand All", only for a single stack, so why not use the same verb in each case? To ungroup all stacks you must select all, there's no menu equivalent to "Ungroup All" like there is for "Expand All". So the menu operations are indistinct in terms of what verb is used, and whether you need to select all first.

I wouldn't have been futzing around with "Ungroup" except that the "Group" operation has a problem with keyboard shortcuts. If you select a bunch of separate pictures, Cmd-G groups them into a stack. Select multiple stacks, or some pictures plus another stack, and Cmd-G does nothing. It doesn't work if any of the selected items is already a stack. To do that via the keyboard, you have to ungroup the existing stacks, then add new thumbnails to the existing selection, then group again. Yet you can drag-and-drop separate pictures onto an existing stack, although only when the stack is closed, er, collapsed. So a mouse operation doesn't have a keyboard equivalent, even though it would make sense for Cmd-G to handle the case of merging or adding to a stack.

The online help says that selecting the top picture in a stack means that operations apply to all pictures in the stack. But that's only true if all the pictures in the stack are selected, which they are when you first group them, or if you click on the thin 3-D border around the right and bottom sides. So in experimenting with stacks, I ended up with several cases where labels or keywords intended for the whole stack were only applied to the topmost photo. Also, when you mouse over the bottom region of the border, a tooltip comes up that obscures the whole clickable bottom area, so in practice it's only the right part of the border that you can use for selecting the stack.

The Bridge can be sluggish to process input events. A number of times, I've done a Group or Open operation on a stack, selected other pictures and done Cmd-G to group them, and had the Bridge decide I really wanted to open those pictures in Photoshop. So even though stacks save time overall, while putting them together you have to pause between clicks to give the Bridge time to catch up.

One nice feature of stacks, related to the drag-and-drop idea, is that you can stack photos that aren't in sequential order. Have you ever taken several shots of some landmark, taken shots of something else, then more shots of the first subject? (Anyone who has photographed Half Dome in Yosemite knows what I'm talking about here.) With a stack, you can put all the pictures of that one subject, even from different days, into one pile where it's easy to pick out the best one. Or, once they're in a stack, you can give them the same keywords or label.

Photoshop CS3: Looking Back vs. Charging Ahead

2007-11-17T18:33:00.000-08:00

I just had my first in-person Russell Brown seminar, where he demonstrated some of the nifty features in Photoshop CS3. CS3 is the first release in a while that's tempted me, since CS2 is so unusably slow running emulated on an Intel iMac. With CS3, the Bridge + Photoshop combo is actually fast enough to make sense to make them separate programs, and some of the processor-intensive features like HDR and Photo Merge run in reasonable time.

I was struck by the way several of the features have to do with that scary 4th dimension -- time! That's a trend I'm seeing a lot lately across many types of software (cf. "Time Machine" in Leopard, "flashback query" in Oracle).

On the one hand, CS3 will make you want to go back and re-examine pictures you thought you were finished with. The enhanced Photo Merge makes doing panoramas a snap, with very good auto-aligning and even auto-blending to match colours across the different pictures. If you're like me, you have tons of photos filed or tagged with the intent to turn them into panoramas later, but the process was tedious and error-prone enough that it never seemed worth the trouble.

Also, you can bring JPEGs into the Camera Raw editor and apply some of the settings (sharpening, white balance, chromatic aberration, etc.) in there. The information gets stored as metadata inside the JPEG, and applied only when the file is opened in Photoshop. I expect it will be a big space-saver vs. taking every halfway decent JPEG and turning it into a 20+ MB PSD file just to improve levels and saturation.

If those were the only features, you might say CS3 is a time sink, because you're just going to go back over your old pictures. But with the ability of the Bridge to group pictures into "stacks" (similar to the feature by the same name in Aperture), you can display a folder full of images and see just the unique shots -- all 50 shots of the same waterfall, bird, etc. can be condensed into one thumbnail in the Bridge, and you can work preview the pictures in a stack together and pick the best one. This should prove especially useful for:

* Auto-exposure bracketing where you have 3 copies of every shot.
* Portrait and landscape versions of the same scene.
* Wildlife shots with many close-together pictures of the same animal.
* Individual frames from panoramas, which can be collapsed into one thumbnail entry.

With stacks, you can do your ranking in 2 stages. First, pick which compositions and subjects deserve a place in the final portfolio, then pick which exposure, orientation, or moment in time is the best for each stack. If that faraway bird was just a speck in all 50 photos, just disregard that stack; the individual pictures won't get in the way of critiquing the rest of that folder.

Nitpicking "The Bionic Woman"

2007-11-15T22:12:00.000-08:00

I think this last episode exhausted my (considerable) patience with this show. I waited for it to find its footing, but it's just sinking into quicksand!

Forget that the tired cliche of a plot (good guy must protect bad African dictator from assassination attempt) would work just as well to set up a skit on "Whose Line is it Anyway?". Forget that they're trying to introduce characters who are separated at birth from the daughter from Gilmore Girls and Xander from Buffy.

You know your show is in trouble when the viewers start nitpicking the lighting. The stock tech geek guy looked like he was wearing fluorescent lip gloss in his scenes. Isiah Washington's big death scene (oops, sorry, spoiler) was overshadowed by all the weird glare that made it look like one eye was still open after he was dead. Did the writers call in some pre-strike favours from the gaffers?

Nitpicking "Bones"

2007-11-15T22:00:00.000-08:00

The only CSI-style show I watch is "Bones". Yes, I know the test results would take weeks in real life, and you'd never be able to draw firm conclusions from tiny scraps of evidence. But I expect at least the first level of facts to be accurate -- Latin names for microbes, things like that.

So the last episode was like fingernails on a blackboard for me when they brought in an Amiga (yay!) which they said was based on the "Motorola 6800 series" (er, dropped a zero there) and said that a Doom-style first-person shooter for it in 1987 would have made the creator "a billionaire several times over". Yeah, well, "Defender of the Crown" had first-person jousting, and where are those guys now? (Cinemaware went bankrupt in 1991.) The ones who prospered did so because they went least-common-denominator and ported to the PC et al. The best animation was actually in European demos -- mindless fun, but did anything more ever come out of it? Lastly, the Amiga used 3.5" fairly rigid floppy disks (an oxymoron I know). The black 5.25" floppy they held up on the show would only have been readable by someone using a PC-style drive (probably with a Sidecar for full PC compatibility). Someone running 5.25" floppies on an Amiga would not likely be a super-secret game coder.

A Photo that's Too Good to Win

2007-11-11T12:44:00.000-08:00

Here's a picture that I figure should do well in several competition categories. It did OK in Nature and Pictorial at the local club.

Yet when entered in a regional competition, the judge ruled it out saying "It looks like something was done to the wings", i.e. Photoshopping outside the rules. That's a Catch-22. The wing detail popped out after I did just the normal (allowed by the rules) amount of Photoshop sharpening. I sharpened the picture as a whole. The startling translucent effect is because the bird in flight is actually shot from above -- a very unusual angle -- with the afternoon sun hitting the wings from side-on. What am I supposed to do, put all that in the title?!

Watermarking Pictures in Photoshop

2007-11-07T22:57:00.000-08:00

I've just started using this technique for watermarking photos, like the Carousel picture in the previous post. If you've only done photo retouching with Photoshop, this technique opens up the whole new world of text rendered as vector objects, paths, and all those layer styles and options like drop shadow, bevel, and so on. Until you lay down some text on a picture, all those things don't have much use.

I've saved my original watermark as both a custom shape, and as a single layer in its own file. The custom shape can easily be stamped onto any picture, while the layer can be dragged from the layers window onto another picture (carrying along all the layer options).

A Photo That's Too Good to Lose

2007-11-07T20:45:00.000-08:00

I've taken maybe half a dozen photos in my life that qualify for a personal "hall of fame". This one just keeps winning awards in different categories. It illustratesmany aspects of photography and photographic competitions.

When I first entered this photo in competition, our club was still only judging slides. So I had to send the original file to a service that produced slides from digital images. In fact, it projected much better as a slide (more detail, brighter colours) than ever since as a digital image. It won "Creative image of the year" at the Berkeley Camera Club, even though I was only competing at the beginner level.

Savvy photographers know that you have to get as much mileage as you can from your best images. So I entered it again, in the Pictorial category. This time, it got an honourable mention at the year-end BCC competition.

This year I entered the Fotoclave competition for the first time. That's a regional competition for all of northern California. I entered it separately in several different categories, but it was only accepted in the Journalism category. It received an honourable mention, going through 2 rounds of judging -- top 20 pictures forwarded from the local group of camera clubs, then judged in a pool of 60 images from all across NorCal.

As a potential money-maker, the knock against it is the lack of a model release form. The iStockPhoto site, for one, won't sell an image with a recognizable face without a model release form. Obscuring the faces would solve that problem, but I think would weaken the image.

Geek Glimmerings #1 - Random-Access Kindergarten

2007-10-29T19:30:00.000-07:00

They say most people can't remember anything before the age of about 5. For someone in the tech world, that's just so wrong. By the time I was 5, I already knew I was destined for a career in high tech!

At age 5 in kindergarten, I would do the little alphabet assignments in my little notebook. Every day the teacher would say "open your notebooks to a new page" and go from there. Now, it soon became clear to me that we were never asked to refer back to any previous day's work. And those notebooks had a lot of pages, way more than we would need in any school term. You can see where this is going. It was much faster just to open to a random page, and if the page was already used, repeat as needed until arriving at a blank page.

When I had the chance to work on the IBM compiler book "Optimization Guide for Fortran, C, and C++", it all made perfect sense -- all the caching and page-faulting techniques from kindergarten!

Photography Tips: Demystifying the Advanced Modes

2007-09-23T00:20:00.000-07:00

With automatic exposure in digital cameras so good, it's tempting to just leave everything on automatic. It feels like a daring move just to flip the dial one more notch to "P"! (Of course, P is just automatic with some options to make things a bit brighter or darker than the camera would like.) Here are some tips for the beginner or intermediate photographer to encourage you to get beyond P into the exciting world of Tv, Av, and even M on the camera's mode dial.

The simplest way to keep track of all the settings is to realize that (for a typical picture) we want some numbers to be as big as possible, and some numbers to be as small as possible. But when the numbers go ridiculously far in the good direction, that causes other undesirable things to happen, so the ideal picture tends to have numbers that "meet in the middle".

What are these numbers? Shutter speed. Aperture. And ISO. Those are the big 3. Normally, the camera trades off between shutter speed and aperture. The third number, ISO, only comes into play when there's no combination of the shutter speed and aperture that works. (We'll cover ISO last.)

With Tv and Av, you control one number (either shutter speed or aperture) and the camera judges the other one.

Tv means that you control the shutter speed. It's the stupidest mnemonic ever devised. Just remember that A = Aperture, so Tv must mean the other one.

For most of the shutter speed range, the camera shows numbers representing fractions of a second, so a bigger number represents a briefer time when the shutter is open. "30" on the display means 1/30th of a second. "200" means 1/200th of a second. For most pictures, we want this number to be as big as possible. A picture taken at 1/200th of a second has relatively little chance of blurring due to the subject moving or camera shake. A picture taken at 1/400th of a second has even less, and so on. When the number starts to get low (60 for some people, 30 for others, even 15 or 10 if your hands are really steady), it's difficult to get a sharp shot while holding the camera in your hands.

This concept is relatively easy to understand, so Tv is a good first step for someone just venturing beyond P on their camera dial. Pick a number between 100-500, dial it in, and see if the camera will shoot without flashing any warning lights. If warning lights blink at you (meaning not enough light is getting in, and the camera can't find a good aperture value to "meet in the middle"), dial the number down a little bit and try again. Don't let the number get lower than your personal minimum, which you can only find through experimentation.

Av means that you control the aperture width. Easy to remember, but aperture is a tricky concept to understand. It's the width of the lens opening, which you never really see when you're behind the camera. So you have to take it on faith that the camera is doing something different as you dial different numbers.

Again, for the typical picture, we want this number to be as big as possible. Big numbers mean a larger area can be in focus (in terms of how far away things are). If the number is too small, Uncle George is in focus but the mountain behind him is blurry. Or the tree 2 feet behind Uncle George is in focus but he's blurry.

Here there's less chance of things going wrong, and a fairly reasonable set of values that work for most situations. Shoot with aperture values of 5.6, 6.2, or 7.1 and you can get good results for most situations. If there's plenty of light and you have a good SLR, go up to 16, 22, or higher and pretty much everything is guaranteed to be in focus, no matter how many close and distant objects are in one picture. That high chance of getting an in-focus picture makes this the mode that most photographers eventually end up with, once they advance to a certain level.

M is for manual, another easy one to remember. Now you have to pick the numbers for shutter speed and aperture. That would be intimidating to do if the numbers came out of thin air. But with a digital camera, just look at the numbers the camera gives you in one of the other modes, then plug in those numbers or ones close to them. You can either review a picture you already took and get the numbers from it, or half-press the shutter button and watch the numbers that appear on the display. (The camera tells you what numbers it would use, if you took the picture right at that moment.)

Manual mode is not needed in normal situations, only when something odd happens with the light that tricks the camera into taking shots that are too bright or too dark. If you are taking a picture that's half in shade and half in bright sunlight, you might have to start with the camera's suggested numbers, then dial a higher number for shutter speed to make things darker, or a lower number for shutter speed and/or aperture to make things brighter.

Remember I said that things go wacko if you push the Tv or Av numbers too far in the good direction? Basically, increasing those numbers lets in less light, which reduces the amount of motion blur (for Tv) and blur due to physics-related properties of light (for Av). Go too far though, and your pictures will be too dark, or the camera won't be able to come up with a small enough value for the other number. (As the Tv number goes up, the Av number goes down, and vice versa.)

So, what if you get a picture that's too dark (or flashing warning lights) when you bump the shutter speed to what seem like minimal values, like 60 or 100 for shutter speed, or 4.5 or 5.6 for aperture? That means there's not enough light overall to find a happy medium. That's where the ISO value comes in. Unlike the other 2, we want to keep this number as small as possible, and only increase it until the warning lights stop blinking, or the histogram stops being scrunched up on the left. With a point and shoot camera, ideally you'd never let it go above 100; going to 200 or 400 means you're in a dim situation and have no other way to get a bright enough shot. With a DSLR (particularly Canon), you might go to 200, 400, or 800 just as insurance in case lighting conditions darken unexpectedly; and if you're really in a dark spot, you might shoot with 1600 or even 3200. The negative factor with a high ISO value is a different sort of blurriness, random speckles throughout the picture, referred to as noise.

Photography Tip: Slow Synchro Flash

2007-09-22T23:19:00.000-07:00

On our recent trip around the national parks of Arizona and Utah, we explored some new photographic challenges and solutions. One involved the use of "slow synchro" flash. Read on if you're not familiar with how to use that particular camera setting.

Slow synchro. Sounds intimidating, doesn't it? Do you need to be an expert on shutter speeds and flash strength to use it? Not at all.

This flash setting is the one to use if the flash isn't strong enough to light up the whole area of your picture. That's it. Slow synchro keeps the shutter open a little longer than normal, so whatever's in the background comes through more brightly than in the typical flash picture. There might be a little bit of blur from camera shaking, but you can't have everything.

We ran into this problem in two contexts. Sometimes in a restaurant, taking pictures of food, the light was dim enough that the flash from a point-and-shoot camera would only light up the closest part of a dish. Slow synchro evened out the lighting. Outdoors, a picture of a person in front of a landscape might also call for slow synchro. In the evening, the person might need a flash to be exposed properly, but normally the background would go all dark. At mid-day, harsh light might cast big shadows on the person, again calling for flash, again possibly underexposing the background (such as a mountain slope not in the sun).

Slow synchro isn't consistently placed or labelled across cameras. On smaller point and shoots (e.g. the Canon SD700), it's a distinct flash setting alongside red-eye reduction or auto/on/off. On bigger point and shoots and SLRs, it's typically a setting on the mode dial, often labelled Night Scene.

Be Not Afraid of Auto-Levels

2007-07-16T21:41:00.000-07:00

Don't scoff at the "Auto" button in Photoshop's Levels dialog. Although it might seem designed for newbies who can't work a slider, it can come in handy no matter what your level (no pun intended).

Pick a photo that could use some punching up. (I shoot with a Canon 20D, which tends to undersaturate and undersharpen, so for me this is essentially any photo. :-) Create a new Levels Adjustment layer. Click "Auto", "OK", and just gaze for a minute at the result. You might see the color balance shifted way too much, or an excess of contrast or saturation.

But even if the end result is garish, Photoshop is at least showing you what direction to take. Back in the Layers dialog, select this new layer and gradually lower the opacity slider. If the Auto Levels adjustment made the color balance way too green, probably it needed to be just a little more green; if it supersaturated the colors, probably they could do with a little more saturation. Don't feel embarrassed to lower the opacity to 30%, heck even 10%, until visually it looks improved from the previous version.

With some more practice eyeballing your photos with such a layer visible and hidden, you'll develop a feel for when to apply some extra contrast, saturation, or shift the color balance. But until then, feel free to achieve the same effect via a low-opacity "Auto Levels" layer.

My Theory on the Sopranos Finale

2007-06-11T22:34:00.000-07:00

[Stop reading now if you haven't already seen the final Sopranos episode...]

My first thought when the episode ended was that the cut to black signified that our window into this world had suddenly shut, i.e. the show was now officially dead. (After all the little hints along this line, like the use of Vanilla Fudge's "You Keep Me Hangin' On" at multiple points in this episode.)

But after a little more thought, I'm forced to reluctantly conclude that Tony really did get whacked. Yes yes, everyone who has that point of view mentions the foreshadowing with the conversation with Bobby about never hearing the shot that gets you, and when you die everything just goes black. But there are a couple of other things that were sticking in my mind already from previous episodes, that I think tie in even more decisively. (After all, clues that everyone picked up on could just be more feints, like all the next-week teasers lately that didn't have any payoff.)

First, there's a common thread running through most of the recent killings on the show. Bobby was killed because he was absorbed in his model trains. Didn't you have the thought when the gunmen came into the store, maybe Bobby will display lightning reflexes and make his escape? Didn't happen. Silvio's getaway from the Bing was delayed by just a few crucial seconds because he wanted to bring along his business ledgers. Didn't you wish that Sil and Patsy would be well armed and great shots? Uh uh. Phil got surprised because he was paying attention to his grandkids. In each case, someone paid the price because they took their eye off the ball, distracted by the thing that they loved the most. Even Christopher died because he was dazed by drugs, and the music distracting him was from the soundtrack of a gangster movie. He qualifies for a two-fer.

What was the significance of Meadow having so much trouble parking? The moment she came in was when Tony would be the happiest and least cautious, and easiest to take by surprise. So that moment was dragged out while we got an eyeful of all the shifty characters in the restaurant.

Some have said that's no good, we don't see the series through Tony's eyes, so why would we experience his point of view if he was being whacked? But remember when Sil was in the restaurant with Jerry Torciano. Reality seemed to go out the window for a few seconds, it was very confusing, and then we realized that we were getting Sil's perception of the scene with time slowed down and the gunshot seeming to come later than it really did. That was a notable departure in the cinematography from previous acts of violence. Which makes sense as foreshadowing, if the finale takes the idea to another level, by giving us the perception from the person who gets hit.

Life in the Left Lane

2007-05-31T20:23:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to let a wonky shoulder keep me off the tennis court. The rotator cuff injury from falling on the ice at Berkeley Iceland isn't healed yet, and I'm sitting out this season of the local tennis league to rest it.

But where there's a will, there's a way. I've started practicing left-handed, and now can do everything OK that way except serve. Strangely, I had an easy time learning to judge topspin backhands on the left side, where I sometimes mishit the ball doing that with the right arm. Not sure if that's a vision thing, or a holdover from a right shoulder injury from the teenage years.

The rotator cuff is supposed to take "in the low months" to recover from this type of injury. As with ribs, the doctors don't do a whole heck of a lot unless there's something really serious. If it doesn't come all the way back, then an MRI is the only way to see exactly what's wrong. There are various tendons and ligaments that fall under the heading of "rotator cuff", plus the labrum which has its own set of things that can go wrong.

The Personal and the Professional

2007-05-31T20:21:00.001-07:00

What does it mean when your professional life overshadows your personal life? I mean, I try to strike a good work/life balance. But not long after I set up a separate blog for work-related (i.e. Oracle) topics, that became the top-rated Google result related to me for a search on "John Russell". Last week it was on page 2 of Google results, now it's on page 1.

I guess it means that the web is growing up, that Oracle has a healthy and interested user community, and that my professional interests are worth sharing with others along with vegetarian recipes and Cancun travelogues. Or on a mundane level, it could just mean that my Oracle blog is the page most closely associated with me by name -- the people who link to it tend to call it John Russell's Tahiti Views blog.

Ice Ice Baby

2007-05-05T16:15:00.000-07:00

Although California isn't the first place that comes to mind when you think "ice", there is some to be found outside a freezer or a cocktail. Berkeley has its historical "Iceland" rink, or anyway it did until the end of March. We went for a skating session the last week before it closed.

In Canada, we all grew up using hockey skates, which have a smooth blade all the way around. Iceland, by default, supplied rentals that were figure skating skates. Those have a set of spikes, the "toe points", at the front of the blade. For someone used to hockey skates, that means the normal motion of sliding the foot forward causes the skate to dig into the ice. Not good for maintaining balance at high speeds! Luckily, I protected the digital camera the one time I fell. Unluckily, I tweaked my rotator cuff, which typically takes a few months to get back to normal.

Iceland's history includes Kristi Yamaguchi, Brian Boitano, and the old California Golden Seals. (I used to have Golden Seals hockey cards back in third grade or so.) A group is trying to raise funds to keep it open, but they have a long way to go to meet their goal.

Two-Handed Input with the Apple Remote

2007-04-13T22:39:00.000-07:00

The future of user interfaces is in our hands, literally. Both hands. A lot of people are saying the way forward is multi-touch input on the screens of devices like the iPhone. I say, don't forget about the Apple Remote which is here right now!

When I worked at IBM Canada, I attended a talk given by Bill Buxton, who was doing UI research at Alias|Wavefront at the time. Bill is heavily into multi-touch interfaces. He described some gestural interfaces and two-handed input techniques employed by artists at alias, and that idea really struck a chord with me and has stayed in my mind ever since.

Fast forward to 2007. In photography, I'm losing patience with the tradeoffs between DSLRs and point-and-shoots, and have started using a two-handed, two-camera shooting technique for combined landscape/wildlife outings. At home, I have an iMac with an Apple Remote, and have started using the remote with Mira, a driver that lets the remote control any application.

At first, the remote seems like a good way to cut down on eye and wrist strain; it replaces the mouse for dead-simple interaction that shouldn't require hunching over the keyboard. I set up Firefox shortcuts so the remote can boost the font size, page up / page down, and close the current window. That way, open a bunch of tabs and then sit back and read 'em at a comfortable distance on the 24" screen. I set up shortcuts for image-viewing applications to go full-screen, forward/back, and delete the current picture. Then it's much simpler to cull the bad pictures from a picture-taking trip.

But as I ponder my most laborious interactive tasks, I realize that the remote can supplement the mouse by working in concert. In Photoshop, I can make remote flag, delete, launch, and do other common operations that usually involve double-clicks, multiple keystrokes, or widely spaced menus and icons. I still need the mouse to select the photo to act upon. Mouse in one hand, remote in the other, I'm a whirling dervish of photographic productivity.

It would be even better if Mira could adapt its remote functions based on which Photoshop window was open: in the Layers menu, do this and this, in the Levels dialog do that and that. I'll suggest that to the fine folks at Twisted Melon. Another multi-use sort of app is iTunes; half the time I want the usual Play/Pause/Next controls, half the time I want to assign ratings or edit metadata using shortcuts.

Other challenges await. A lot of programming work already involves cursoring up and down and copying and pasting. Maybe I can come up with a set of mappings for OS X's Terminal. I'm sure Mail.app will go faster when one hand selects a message and the other chooses from half a dozen actions on that message.

Now that I think about it, possibly the finest days of multi-handed input for the average person came in the '80s with the Commodore 64. I remember using a light pen, Koala Pad, and game controller spinning knobs all in the course of a day. Today, the parallels are a Wacom tablet, that glowing knob/button whose name I forget, and the Apple Remote. Ah, if only the infrared sensor could record position like a light pen!

One-Hear Wonders

2007-03-07T08:43:00.000-08:00

Am I the only one who ever had this experience? In the heyday of cassette recording in the '70s and '80s, sometimes I would hear the first few notes of a song on the radio, instantly decide it was worth recording, and turn on the tape recorder. (Until I acquired a radio with built-in tape deck, this process involved slapping a manual tape recorder upside-down on top of my clock radio.) Sometimes, I never heard the song again. Some of the songs had no or incomprehensible lyrics, so that I didn't even know their titles. I think of these songs as "one-hear wonders", where they stuck in my mind or even became favourites, just from a single airing on my local radio station.

My favourite examples from this category are:

Tempus Fugit (Yes): I didn't know its title or who did it, for about 15 years, until I bought "Drama" at Vortex Records in Toronto.

Battle Scar (Max Webster, guest vocalist Geddy Lee of Rush): I'm sure I only ever heard this once on the radio. For years in the MP3 age, I couldn't find any digital version of it.

Hocus Pocus (Focus): The only vocal on this song is some yodelling. I didn't know the group or the title. Iron Butterfly stuck in my mind, but that was wrong, leading me down a dead end. I vaguely remembered a DJ saying that it was a Dutch group, and ultimately some Googling turned up the song details.

Phasors on Stun (FM): Canadian group FM is very hard to track down online. Ditto the solo efforts of member Nash the Slash. I wound up getting a secondhand CD of "Black Noise" from Amazon and recognized this song from way back. I probably heard it several times on the radio, but never actually had it on tape.

Cinnamon Girl (Neil Young): "Live Rust" was an early addition to my CD collection, so it was only a one-hear wonder for six years or so. I only remember one radio play, yet it became one of my favourite songs on my own mix tapes.

Godzilla (Blue Oyster Cult): Between the SNL "More Cowbell" sketch and some old videos resurrected on VH1, other Blue Oyster Cult songs are more well-known. But this for me is their best. Bonus points to this band for inventing the Heavy Metal Umlaut.

TVC15 (David Bowie): I must have gone about 30 years without hearing this song. Not sure how I missed it through various Bowie "Greatest Hits" collections. Never had it on tape.

Candy Candy (Iggy Pop featuring Kate Pierson): My wife tracked down the vide for this song on VH1. She remembered it clearly. I only have a faint recollection of the tune, probably from a single play on the radio.

Shooting Out a Plane Window

2007-02-11T22:53:00.000-08:00

Every flight out of California over the Sierra Nevadas offers great opportunities for aerial landscape shots. I've tried with teeny camera like the Canon S30, and monster cameras like the Canon 20D with various sizes of lenses. On a recent flight to Florida, the Canon S3 proved the champion in this type of situation.

By chance, I booked a right-side window side on every leg coming and going. (6C, 24C, etc.) That was a lucky break, because the flip-out viewscreen made it easy to shoot sideways to the right. It wouldn't have worked nearly as well on the left side. When an interesting landscape came into view up ahead, the best unobstructed shots came while shooting straight out to the right. I framed those shots comfortably by tilting the viewscreen at close to 90 degrees, so I could look straight ahead but still see the view to the right, downward, and sometimes even a little behind the plane.

The S3's 12x zoom was also very handy. Zooming in from a great height produced a bunch of interesting shots with abstract shapes of mountain ridges. The S3 goes from wide angle to full zoom with only a tiny extension of the lens -- seems like about 1 millimeter! Zooming with the 20D required a lot more room next to the window.

Canon SD700 and S3 for Candid Food Photographs

2007-02-10T22:18:00.001-08:00

One of the reasons I like a small camera is to snap pictures of tasty restaurant meals. I found the Canon S30 was a little underpowered in the flash and ISO areas for taking good closeups indoors in dim light. The 20D obviously is overkill to pull out at a small table in a crowded dining room; besides, it would probably still have the 300mm lens on! Now that we have the Canon S3 and Canon SD700, can we say we've got the solution?

The SD700 actually turns out to be the champ here. Normally, flash burns out the whole picture when it reflects off dining plates. But with the SD700 in manual mode and the flash turned down in strength to -1 EV, it gives a great exposure at low ISO every time.

The S3 has a problem because of its strong flash. I haven't found a consistent flash setting that avoids burnout. Luckily, with its powerful zoom, I can back off a little bit and zoom in. But that takes a bit of experimentation each time.

Large Bread Sighted in California!

2007-01-23T17:22:00.000-08:00

Teensy weensy bread is one of my pet peeves about California. Artisan this, multigrain that, but none of it big enough to make a real sandwich. For $4-5 dollars a loaf, I expect it to come with a free toaster. I was pleasantly surprised by the veggie burger at the Wild Plum Cafe in Monterey. Not only is it a double burger with so many fixin's you have to attack it from different angles, it comes on a giant-sized bun that looks like a bun/bread hybrid.

Now if only I can get some shipped up to Berkeley!

Lydia's Restaurant in Fairfax Closing

2007-01-17T18:28:00.000-08:00

Sad news for all of us vegetarian and organic restaurant fans: Lydia's Lovin' Foods is closing on Monday. According to her website:

Dear Lovin’ Customers,
I will be closing the restaurant portion of my business effective Monday, January 22, 2007. I have decided to focus more attention to my nationally known dehydrated foods company and the festivals and fairs we have catered for years. Lydia’s Lovin Foods will, however, still is available to cater events and parties in the bay area as well.

This was a tough decision as I am grateful to all of my loyal and devoted customers. I want to thank you for all of your support and patronage throughout the years

Many blessings and love,

Lydia Kindheart
Lydia’s Lovin’ Foods

We will miss this wonderful place.

2006 Roundup - Shark-Jumping Edition

2007-01-07T22:40:00.000-08:00

The last couple of years, it's seemed to me that certain companies, sites, people, and so on have clearly jumped the shark -- timed nicely to coincide with the end of the year. So let's take a moment to reflect on the 2006 jumpees.

Salon.com: Went from a daily destination site to something akin to a visit to the dentist, mostly due to their "Day Pass" system. I have to turn off half a dozen flash blocking, ad blocking, and Greasemonkey scripts even to see the Day Pass ad. Some article pages still won't load on the first try. The process is onerous enough that I only visit about once a week, opening up a dozen or two tabs. Then if I don't finish them within the prescribed time, or the browser crashes, the whole machine grinds to a halt as these dozens of pages all constantly reload themselves.

Microsoft: Do I even need to elaborate here? Vista. DRM. Free laptops for bloggers. All that "Live" business. Has a monopoly ever imploded so completely from its own actions rather than external forces? (Regardless of the money still rolling in.)

Photoshop: As someone with an Intel iMac, I'm faced with Photoshop CS2 that wants me to do all my file manipulation in the Bridge, yet the Bridge takes tons more memory and is far slower than Photoshop CS with the File Browser. Plus it's not a Universal Binary, so the slowness is multiplied. The only potentially compelling feature for me is HDR -- slow again. Perhaps CS3 can un-jump this shark...

Online air travel booking: Try to book a flight through any online consolidator. Get past pages that won't load, date widgets that don't display properly, and bad input fields. Get waylaid by links saying there is a better fare, or other flight times. Find out that those other options cost more because of bogus extra charges, or involve several stopovers. Finally make a decision, only to find out that the system breaks down because you had different tabs open for the same site, or you left a page up for more than 10 minutes. Repeat about 30 times. That's my experience this year, anyway.

Air travel in general: This liquids business is really the last straw. Half a dozen people in England had a plot that they didn't actually carry out, so everyone in Duluth and San Antonio has to throw out their bottled water and suntan lotion? This is the same administration that's talking about building a moon base, right? How will that work if all the astronauts have to keep taking off their space boots and venting all their liquids and who knows what else because of some terrorist plot in 2015 in Fiji?

Slashdot: The reader comments used to add details, perspectives, and alternative links over and above the linked articles. Not anymore. Better to find articles via Digg and ignore the comment sections altogether.

The word "sectarian": How did I manage to make it through university and into the 21st century without hearing that word used in a non-pompous sentence? Gee, maybe it's the most obscure way possible of talking about religious violence, religious fanaticism, fanatical religious violence... You'd think an administration that loves to talk about faith-based this and that wouldn't try to bury the word "religion"...

Gossip columns: Note to every syndicated gossip column in the world. No one outside the UK cares about Jude Law and Sienna Miller, Posh and Becks, or any other narcissistic British demi-celebrities. Note to every place that reprints these columns: stop recycling this British drivel. Also, spare us from the dispatches from every D-lister's publicist. "Rising star ___ was spotted cuddling and kissing ___ at dinner. They weren't even trying to hide it, said a source." Oh for the days of alt.showbiz.gossip.

Political reporting: Just take the last item and substitute "major daily newspaper", "White House officials", and "GW Bush" where appropriate. I hear in the NY Times that GW got bad advice from generals in Iraq and now has to deal with their bad planning. Anonymous senior officials say so. Careful not to mix in Jude Law and Sienna Miller by mistake guys.

New York Times movie reviews: What's with this trend of movie reviewers who think the way to write a review is to summarize every single plot twist and then give away the ending? You know, the kind that say, "...but then the best friend turns out to be a Russian spy, and the hero's wife leaves him for the dentist, and in the end the killer gets away". The New York Times takes the prize for this technique. Even when they're not actually reviewing a movie, they can't help themselves. I ready the NY Times retrospective on Robert Altman, and had to give up after it tried to make some point by saying how several of his movies ended. Hey, ever consider some of us have yet to see some of these movies?

Google: Hasn't definitively jumped the shark, but is showing signs. The press has stopped talking about how clever their strenuous hiring process is, and now focuses on how the system doesn't work so well for anyone over 30 or anyone already working who doesn't have the time to pursue the drawn-out interview process. The business of selling vested options could be seen as an innovative, or as a sign of major discontent among post-IPO hires. And now right at the end of the year, many legitimate bloggers find that their sites are pushed way down the rankings, and Google gives different results depending on which data center you happen to hit. Some people's GMail data gets nuked. The saving grace(s) are: Blogger and Maps continue to improve, and the second-tier search sites don't make much of an impact despite a lot of press hype. Today's San Francisco Chronicle follows the lives of some ex-Googlers, and their reasons for leaving sound like a shark of some kind is involved.

New York Times regular columnists: First was "Times Select" where you couldn't read the regular columnists without signing up and paying. Then some bloggers re-posted the columns, but the Times came down on anyone who did that regularly. Then any buzz around the columnists completely evaporated -- I still find links elsewhere to Times Select articles, but rarely if ever to Times Select op-ed columns.

Now it wasn't my intention to bash the New York Times particularly, but I see they've made several appearances on my list for various reasons. So perhaps they should win the award for "broadest" shark-jumping, alongside Microsoft which I would say did the "deepest" shark jump.

Newer Kid in Town: Canon SD700 IS Camera

2006-12-30T11:14:00.000-08:00

Our household has always had a "small" and a "big" camera. My wife typically uses the small one and I use the big one. (Once I got a Canon 20D SLR, the former big one became the "medium" one.) This Christmas, I figured it was time to upgrade the small and medium cameras, to get better resolution, low-light capability, storage capacity, zoom, movie capability... and lots of other things.

For my wife, "pocketability" was the main factor holding her back from taking the camera everywhere, so the small camera got upgraded from a Canon S30 to a Canon SD700 IS. It actually has a bigger screen than the Canon S3 IS that we also got! Most of the familiar Canon controls are there, but in different configurations that present a bit of a learning curve for long-time Canon users. For example, the mode dial is on the side; review mode is a choice on the mode dial, so you can't just hit the shutter button to resume taking pictures; and "Manual" mode just lets you adjust things like flash and white balance, not shutter speed or aperture.

I'll put a full review up on Epinions.

Photoshop Tip for OS X: Use Aliases for Sorting and Sifting

2006-12-30T10:29:00.000-08:00

This tip is all about ways to categorize pictures in multiple ways, without wasting space with multiple copies.

One of my big challenges with photography is figuring out what pictures to use in different contexts. When I come back from a trip, I might want to pick one batch of pictures to print, and different batches to enter in camera club competition, turn into panoramas, and so on. Yet I'd also like to dump the whole batch of originals into one directory for ease of backups and viewing thumbnails.

The way I have settled on organizing these different categories is with OS X's "alias" feature. Drag and drop one or many files while holding Option and Command, and OS X will create tiny files that point back to the originals. (The icons have little curved arrows in the lower-left corner.) Photoshop can work (reasonably well) with aliases; you can view their thumbnails and open them for editing. What I typically do is "Select All" in my Originals folder, and Option-Command-Drag all the files to a different folder. If it's easy to select a group of files, like a sequence of pictures all of the same subject, I'll only select those files before dragging. The other folder will be something like "Panoramas", "Black and White", or camera club competition categories such as "Travel" or "Pictorial".

Once these folders are full of aliases, I can look at the thumbnails in Photoshop. At this point, the Trash Can becomes my friend. As I decide which photos are relevant for each folder, I can trash all the others through Photoshop or the Finder. The alias goes in the trash, not the original file. If the choices are not obvious, I keep a large set of aliases in the folder and flag only the ones I think are best. This way, the same picture can be flagged in one category, but not in another.

Aside from the freedom to trash pictures without losing the originals, using aliases has two main benefits:

You can use the same pictures in many different contexts without creating separate copies. I always wait until the pictures are converted to PSD before copying aliases. Each PSD is on the order of 20 MB. So it wouldn't be practical to file separate copies under Travel, Nature, etc.

Any edits you make to the picture, either through the original or one of its aliases, are reflected everywhere. For example, if you improve the contrast while preparing a photo for a camera club Nature competition, you'll see that same improvement when you go back to the Originals folder to make a slideshow. Any dust removal, Levels, and so on only needs to be done once. For pictures that I want to try as black and white, I'll create the Channel Mixer adjustment layer, but turn it off before saving, so the B&W effect does not show up in all the other folders.

I find that having folders of just the relevant photos is more convenient than assigning keywords in Photoshop for all the different categories and doing a keyword search -- less typing, fewer dialogs, and the finality of trashing photos that didn't make the cut is reassuring.

Now, Photoshop's support for aliases is not perfect. Although you can do things like flagging and ranking, where Photoshop remembers your choice, you can't go through aliases to assign metadata that's stored in the file itself. So any keyword assignment has to be done using the originals. I'll typically go through a folder of pictures from Yosemite and assign relevant keywords like Deer, Hawk, etc. and then filter by keyword to identify all the pictures to create aliases in my Wildlife folder.

The other big drawback with Photoshop's alias support is that you can't run a batch operation on aliases you've selected. If you want to boost the saturation of every picture by using Automate->Batch and an action, you've either got to go back to the originals, or open all the files and choose Opened Files in the batch dialog.

When sending photos to get printed, you typically need to crop them to a particular aspect ratio such as 4x6, 5x7, or 8x10. Although you can sift through aliases to pick out candidates for printing, be careful not to save the cropped version and overwrite the original. What I typically do is to make a selection using the Marquee tool with a fixed aspect ratio, and then do Select->Save Selection and give it a name like "4x6 Crop". I might even save more than one selection if I plan to make both a snapshot and a framed 8x10 of the same picture. I save the uncropped version after doing "Save Selection", so that I have the full-sized original, but at any time I can load it, load the selection, crop and save the cropped version under a different name for printing.

Tennis: Don't Let That New Racquet Hurt Your Arm

2006-12-29T20:57:00.000-08:00

Got a new racquet because I didn't feel like I was getting quite enough power behind my shots. The Babolat Z/OS felt the best in practice. Once I started using it "in anger", I realized that I needed to do some things to protect my arm from the extra shock that comes along with the extra power. (Not to mention, I overheard someone on the next court say they had to stop using Babolat because it hurt their arm.)

The first thing to remember is, since the ball is coming off the racquet with greater force, all things being equal, you can slow down your swing a bit and hit the same type of shot as before without any extra strain on your arm. This is especially important to keep in mind with any kind of awkward shot, like a wrist-flick to save a ball that's almost out of reach, or a desperation drive down the line while running wide. Don't hit these as hard as you can; chances are you're off-balance or not using ideal form anyway.

For normal rallying shots, what you need to keep in mind and practice is a return to good old "classic" form. With today's lightweight racquets, you might have adopted bad or sloppy habits like taking the ball late, hitting with all arm, or using excessive wrist. The heavier Babolat will make you pay for bad form -- the ball will jump off the racquet and zip through the air with a lot of spin, but all that extra force comes back to your arm. So remember what your earliest coaches told you:

Step into the ball, so much of the force comes from the forward momentum of your body.
Swing early and smoothly, don't wait until the last moment and make a rushed swing.
Get the ball out in front, don't let it crowd you or get behind you.
Get racquet speed by turning your hips and shoulders. I find it especially useful on the forehand to bring the left arm around as well as the right, and start the forehand by turning the shoulders so it feels like the left arm pulls the right along with it.
Keep wrist motion to a minimum; get the racquet in position and on course early so you don't need any last-second adjustments with the wrist.

"Stuffed" Sweet Potatoes

2006-12-17T14:03:00.000-08:00

Since John and I are both vegetarians, I keep running across variations on Stuffed Acorn Squash recipes as suggestions for Thanksgiving and holiday dinners. In fact, this was my choice of entree at our Thanksgiving dinner at Millennium. I decided to create my own version for our dinner the day after Thanksgiving. Since John prefers not to have to separate out skins or shells from his food, I baked one each regular and one Japanese white organic sweet potato, peeled and mashed them (one on each side to maintain the two separate colors) as a low bowl. I drizzled freshly-made pesto on these, and then filled the center with bhutan red rice, and added organic broccoli, onions, and chopped almonds and more drizzles of pesto. This was a rousing success and was heartily enjoyed by all!

I would like to dedicate my first food blog post to two of my favorite food bloggers, gluten-free girl and vegan lunch box, who write passionately about eating on diets limited, but not restricted, by health or ethical reasons. You are truly inspiring! I hope everyone has a wonderful holiday.

iPod, oh iPod, Where Art Thou?

2006-12-17T13:40:00.000-08:00

When John bought his first iPod, it came with a bright blue case, and so was fairly easy to find. By the time he bought his 3rd iPod, the Nano version (which we affectionately call "Nanoo"), he also had a Palm, a cell phone, and a digital camera, all stored in small black cases. We took Nanoo on a trip in May and hadn't seen him since we got home until mid-November, when John did a massive desk clean-up and found the little black case resting quietly under some larger items! So my (self-imposed) project for the Thanksgiving week-end was to make the case more visible. I showed John the choices of colored ribbons I had available, and he rejected pink (you think?) for this pumpkin version. I gave the black case a kind of belt. I joked with him if I was Martha Stewart I would have needlepoint hearts or flowers on it! We haven't lost Nanoo since!

Photoshop Tip: Semi-Opaque Adjustment Layers

2006-12-16T22:16:00.000-08:00

When exactly would you use an adjustment layer that's not at 100% opacity? Seems like a silly thing to do. If the effect didn't turn out exactly right, wouldn't you just re-do the layer from scratch or tweak its slider settings?

That's the way I worked for a long time, and still do in most cases. But there are certain times when it makes sense to create an adjustment layer that goes too far, then dial it back a little by lowering the opacity using the slider in the Layers window. That's a different technique than, say, applying a gradient to a layer mask to darken the sky but not the foreground.

When a photo has a colour cast, the natural adjustment is to do a Levels layer and set the Gray Balance. However, sometimes the photo doesn't really have any gray -- the rocks, street, or whatever is made out of the wrong-coloured material, is under reddish sunset light, and so on. In this case, pick the closest-to-gray colour to apply the Gray Balance, which will swing the whole photo too far towards blue, yellow, or sometimes magenta. Instead of endless re-doing the Gray Balance looking for an elusive speck of pure gray in the photo, lower the opacity of the Levels layer until you find the accurate-looking percentage.

When a subject is a little too dark, but the background is pretty much the right brightness, I like to apply a "spotlight" effect by doing a Levels layer and using a circular gradient for the layer mask, centered on the person's face, their whole body, or whatever subject is too much in shadow. But sometimes, the Levels adjustment that makes the subject look realistic is too bright to blend well with the rest of the picture. In this case, lower the opacity of the Levels layer until the falloff in brightness is imperceptible. You'll still have the "ideal" Levels adjustment setting that you can apply if later you decide to sacrifice the background by brightening the whole picture.

Mac Tip: Auto-Connect to Shared Drives

2006-12-10T12:35:00.000-08:00

I don't use shared drives on OS X as much as I would like. It sounds great in theory: access a folder or entire hard drive on one computer, when it actually lives on another. Using drag-and-drop is simpler than ftp for copying files over to the laptop, or sharing song files between two computers, or editing a file from a different computer without making a separate copy.

In practice, this technique has always had a few glitches. OS X tends to be clumsy when you're connected to another computer and then that other computer goes to sleep, or you start a VPN which cuts off all other network connections. You might see a complete freeze for several minutes before OS X realizes the other computer isn't responding. You'll see that freeze at random times, for example when OS X puts up a File Save dialog and decides to check all connected drives. Once it decides the shared drive is kaput, you have to reconnect, which involves a sequence of dialogs even if you've stored the password in your keychain.

Lately, OS X has been improving in this area. There hasn't been as much freezing, the timeout period is shorter, and when the error dialog comes up, you can unsleep the other machine and the operation goes ahead without you having to reconnect.

One time-saving tip that I just discovered recently: If you make a shortcut to a folder on a shared drive, you can drop a file on the shortcut, and the shared drive is automatically mounted without any password prompts or other dialogs. The file is copied, and the shared drive stays mounted. I use this trick to do timed audio recordings on one computer, then shoot them over to the Music folder on another computer, even though most of the time the shared drive isn't connected. To make the shortcut, drag the original item while pressing Command and Option, so the mouse pointer changes to a little curved arrow.

The next trick will be to figure out some way to auto-mount the drive in the absence of a file I really want to copy. Perhaps have some dummy file that always gets copied to the same place. Also, this technique doesn't work when copying a file from the command line. The copied file just overwrites the shortcut.

Photoshop Tip: John's Shortcuts for Cropping

2006-12-09T16:27:00.000-08:00

With a 24-inch screen and a DSLR that takes super-sized pictures, cropping is more of a concern than it used to be. Here's some Photoshop advice to make the process simpler.

Use the Marquee tool to make a rectangular selection, then the Image->Crop menu choice, rather than the Crop tool. Using a selection gives more flexibility than the Crop tool, for example the ability to make a selection with a fixed size or to save selections as alpha channels.
If you plan to make a photo print of the picture, make a selection with a fixed aspect ratio of 6x4, 7x5, 10x8, or whatever dimensions you plan to use for the prints. Reverse the numbers for pictures printed in portrait style, i.e. taller than wide.
If you need to have different-sized crops of the same picture -- for example, to print both a 4x6 and make an 8x10 enlargement -- make the selection and choose the Select->Save Selection menu item. Save the selection as an alpha channel. You can make several selections this way with different sizes, save them as part of your .psd file, then later do Select->Load Selection and Image->Crop. Just remember to always save the file under a different name after you've cropped it.
If you will be projecting the photo or displaying it on a laptop, crop using an aspect ratio that matches the projector or laptop. For example, my local photo club uses a projector with 1024x768 resolution, so I crop competition photos to an aspect ratio of 4x3. That way, I can always resize the cropped image to 1024x768 and not lose anything.
For pictures where the subject doesn't take up a lot of the frame, such as a wildlife shot taken from a distance, consider doing an initial crop to match the dimensions of your monitor. You'll need to use the rectangular Marguee technique with options set to a fixed size. That way, you can do the rest of the work looking at the picture at 100%, and only later decide whether to crop even more. This technique works best if your screen resolution is greater than on the projector, laptop, etc. where the picture will end up. For example, I do my photo editing on a 1900x1200 screen but typically display slideshows on a 1280x960 laptop. If I am reviewing and working on dozens of surfing pictures where the surfer is surrounded by lots of ocean, I can work faster and save disk space by cropping out lots of blue. Using an absolute size of 1900x1200 means I don't have to worry about cropping out too much, there's always some excess to trim later.
Once you've made a selection, you can preview how the cropped version will look by pressing Q to go into Quick Mask mode. The part of the picture outside the selection turns red, so you can visualize how the photo will look without the extra parts, the same as when you select with the Crop tool and it darkens the unselected portion. Quick Mask mode has many other uses, but for cropping purposes, just press Q again to go back to normal.
Once you've made a selection, you can resize or move it with the Select->Transform Selection menu choice. Press Enter once you are satisfied. By default, the transformation ignores any size or aspect ratio options; hold down Shift while resizing to keep the selection consistent with those options.
I find it inconvenient not to have keyboard shortcuts for Image->Crop and Select->Transform Selection. In Photoshop CS, you can assign your own keyboard shortcuts with Edit->Keyboard Shortcuts. Photoshop already has shortcuts using most combinations of letters and modifiers, but whatever operations used Shift-Command-C and Command-T, I never used 'em and so reassigned them to Image->Crop and Select->Transform Selection.

New Kid in Town - Canon S3 IS Camera

2006-12-05T22:28:00.000-08:00

I recently recommended the Canon S3 IS to some friends as a good choice for a modest-sized camera with good zoom, good picture, and good movie capability. With my reputation behind it, what choice but to buy one too?

I'm already finding it very educational, with a live histogram showing how well the picture is being metered. The dedicated movie recording button is also a boon. Look for a full review soon on Epinions.

Memories, of a PC2-5300 DDR2 667 DIMM...

2006-12-05T22:12:00.000-08:00

You know it's time to upgrade memory in the new Intel iMacs when it starts to make noise. Every switch between one big program and another involves grinding and endless waiting. Even switching to Finder or Terminal can be interminable. You start regretting keeping all your songs in one iTunes library, or keeping Firefox open with a week's worth of backlogged tabs.

Unfortunately, the stock memory comes as 2 512MB modules. Meaning any upgrade you do means selling or otherwise disposing of one or two old memory chips. You can upgrade from 1GB to 1.5GB by swapping in one 1GB module, or to 2GB by swapping in two 1GB modules. Upgrading to 3GB is way too expensive still, with 2GB modules running from about $600 all the way up to $900+.

The little latch door on the bottom of the iMac screen is easy to get off with a small eyeglass-size screwdriver. The screws are attached to the door so they can't get lost. The old modules come loose when you push on a couple of plastic levers. If you don't seat the new modules firmly enough, when you power up you won't hear the chime and the light flashes steadily. Since you might have to fiddle around with the chips a couple of times, leave the latch off until you've successfully powered up again.

With the extra memory in, you should see an immediate speedup in application switching or user switching. An application like Photoshop can be running a batch job while you switch over to iTunes or Firefox with everything running at full speed and no grinding (technically, paging).

Taj Mahal cools his heels in Berkeley again, blending thirst for world's music and its link to the land

2006-11-27T11:49:00.000-08:00

Looks like I'll have to be on the lookout for Taj Mahal sightings when I go to Shattuck Ave. for lunch!

Taj Mahal cools his heels in Berkeley again, blending thirst for world's music and its link to the land

I Ain't Gonna Get No More Socca!

2006-11-11T21:36:00.000-08:00

Socca Oven, which I blogged about previous, has closed:

eastbayexpress.com The East Bay Express Blog � Gregoire Sticks a Fork in Socca

(At least in this location.) Too bad, they were just about to go on my list of Berkeley-area pizza places!

Wiki Wiki Woo

2006-11-06T23:46:00.000-08:00

The other day, I set up MediaWiki as a kind of household chronicle. You might ask, why yet another system when you already have half a dozen e-mail accounts, Palm desktop for to-dos, at least 3 calendar systems and 3 address books, not to mention spreadsheets for general-purpose lists, this blog or my personal site or my iWeb experiments for prose, and PBase for photos. (Note to self: must set up Flickr and SmugMug accounts soon.)

Good question.

It's an experiment. We'll see. I like how categories spring into being when referenced. So do stub articles -- create a link to a non-existent article, and the link goes red to show it's for future expansion. Follow the link and you're editing the article.

The ease of cross-linking appeals to me. Brings back memories of
Lotus Organizer. Back before the abomination of Notes, Lotus actually had a product that was enjoyable to use. ("To get away from Lotus Notes" is one of my stock answers to the question of why I left IBM.) You could link disparate things together in many-to-many relationships.

I'm also interested in the ease of getting pictures into the system, auto-thumbnailing, and how well the text flows around a layout with a lot of pictures. You know, all those travel stories with dozens of links off to photos, rather than photo galleries where all the text takes the form of captions.

The real test will be, how easy is it to get data out? Printable format for informal to-do lists. XML export format for bringing stuff up to my personal site. Copying the MySQL database to sync with another MediaWiki instance. These aspects are yet to be explored.

Tea for More than Two

2006-11-04T21:52:00.000-08:00

In the ongoing search for good vegetarian dim sum in the Bay Area, tried out Tin's Tea House in Walnut Creek. Several reviews focused mostly on the traditional (i.e. meat-heavy) dishes: East Bay Express, San Francisco Chronicle. (Is there an editorial rule at the Chronicle that they are forbidden to mention a single vegetarian dish, unless it's a lame salad?)

But by wading through dozens of mini-reviews on Yelp etc., I pieced together that they really do have some vegetarian dishes. And it's true. I especially liked the sesame balls with lotus seed paste. In addition to half a dozen vegetarian choices on the dim sum menu, there is a vegetarian section on the regular menu and we ordered a couple of larger dishes there. (Mongolian faux beef for me, veggie chow fun for Lotus.) The only knock on the veggie offerings is that both the dumplings and the potstickers were jammed full of mushrooms and nothing else. A bit more variety there would be welcome.

All in all, a nice find now that Long Life Vegi House in Berkeley has stopped doing weekend dim sum.

Can I See Clearly Now?

2006-11-03T15:49:00.000-08:00

Previously, I did some monitor calibration by eye using various test charts. I finally tried out some real calibration equipment (the Gretag Macbeth "Eye One Display 2"). Now, I know someone in the business of high-end color management who scoffs at all the consumer-level products. So my expectations are not sky-high.

Running through the wizard on the Easy setting turns out to be a snap. Just hang the mouse-like contraption over the front of the monitor, let the software flash different colors on the screen to be measured by said contraption, and it's done. Watching the software do a binary search with white and black squares to locate the sensor against the screen is kind of entertaining.

I read one review (ehhh, can't find the link now) that concluded that the Eye One Display actually was more accurate on the Easy setting than the Advanced one, so I left it at that. (Ran the process on new 24" iMac, old 15" iMac, and old 15" Aluminum Powerbook.) I can say that, subjectively, I do see some difference, with reds and blues looking a little deeper. The real test will be working with skin tones, gently graded skies, and high-contrast scenes.

My skepticism about color profiling comes from the fact that most color problems I experience are rooted in the camera (3x Canons). The S30 takes pictures that are a little too saturated. The G3 tends towards too much yellow in the color balance in any kind of tricky lighting. And The 20D oversaturates the reds (by about +15 in Photoshop terms) in any picture with big patches of red.

After a couple of days of use: I am actually seeing over-saturated reds now on the monitors, both flesh tones in news photos and solid red patches in GUI apps. The next test will come on Tuesday, when I'll have a couple of post-calibration images projected in the local camera club competition.

Gapless Playback in iTunes 7

2006-10-29T21:27:00.000-08:00

Having used iTunes 7 for several weeks now, I'd have to say the worst thing about it (for me) is the whole "gapless playback" idea. On the surface, it seems fine. iTunes analyzes all the songs and figures out which ones don't need any silence between then when they're played consecutively. The gaps have always bugged me on, for example, Pink Floyd's "The Wall" where one song trails off into a bunch of sound effects and dialog, which then segues straight into the next song. But consider:

iTunes 7 tries to analyze every song in the library the first time you run it. (That process is very slow, you might have to let it run all night and all the next day.)
If you interrupt the analysis, iTunes tries to run it again for your whole library the next time you import any music.
If you use the technique of removing the iTunes library data file, and re-importing a modified XML data file, iTunes does the analysis yet again! The "gapless / not gapless" setting isn't preserved in the XML file. I've used this technique several times recently while moving songs between hard drives, and the constant "analyzing songs for gapless playback" is driving me up the wall.
How often do you actually listen to an entire concept album with shuffle turned off? I'm much more likely to hear a song from "The Wall" as part of some playlist. For me, it would be more useful to have a way to join two songs into a single unit retroactively. You can join songs like this, but only when you rip them; neglect to plan ahead, and you have to go back to square one with that CD.

A Canticle from Leibowitz

2006-10-29T21:07:00.000-08:00

The National Kidney Foundation hosted its annual Authors' Luncheon, with featured speaker Annie Leibowitz. (Actually, I was only vaguely aware that there were five other speakers, because all the buzz among the local camera club members was about Annie and her new book.)

I did learn a number of things -- some contradictory -- from the other authors. From flipping through the Annie Leibowitz book, I got some ideas about portraiture (always more to learn there) and black and white. Now digital cameras are still weak when it comes to dynamic range, making for less overall contrast in black-and-white shots. But my impression, which goes against the conventional wisdom, is that when taking a single exposure, it's better to underexpose a little rather than try to get the histogram concentrated in the brighter part of the range. The photos in he book seemed to bear this out (despite being shot on regular film rather than digital) -- the brightest parts were well short of being blown out, and some of the darker parts seemed solid black.

Stop Draggin' My Heartbreaker Around

2006-10-29T20:06:00.000-08:00

Took in the last Tom Petty concert at the Greek Theater in Berkeley on Friday. I think this is the fourth time I've seen him in the Bay Area. (Once in full concert at the Shoreline, a couple of times at Neil Young's Bridge School Benefit concerts.)

Stevie Nicks was a special guest who sang on a couple of songs, and sang backup on some others. Stevie can still hit the high notes.

This tour (for the album "Highway Companion") has been announced as the last from Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Tickets were hard to come by. The first two shows at the Greek sold out pretty much before the box office opened -- we were first in line but couldn't get two seats together in reserved seating. Luckily, this third concert was added, several weeks later.

Interesting show. Good lighting. We had a great view of the sound guys and cameramen doing their thing. Each cameraman focused on one band member the whole concert, even when the lights were off them. I was jealous of one sound guy working 6 monitors at once.

Trivia time: The lead singer of The Dandy Warhols said the Greek Theater was designed by Bernard Maybeck, but it was actually designed by Julia Morgan. (Maybeck did some of the other buildings. Seems like every prominent American architect of the early 20th century had a hand in some of the UC Berkeley campus buildings.)

Separated at birth:

Guitarist, keyboardist, and singer Scott Thurston from The Heartbreakers. (He has less hair these days than in this picture.)

Canadian journalist and pundit Rex Murphy.

New Sensation

2006-10-22T12:42:00.000-07:00

I've always had a love/hate relationship with my tennis racquets. The good ones made playing a joy, the bad ones prompted endless frustration. Sometimes I played with free racquets from a sponsor, even if the model wasn't the best choice. Whenever I would switch to a new model, I'd always have a couple of excellent matches to start. Several times I had to borrow totally unfamiliar racquets due to broken strings or cracked frames with no spares on hand -- resulting either in total disaster (that would be the Canada Games), or inspiring heroics.

The last few years, during my latest comeback phase, I've played with a very light racquet. It has great control for dropping the ball neatly into corners, the better to run opponents into the ground. But I was a little annoyed at not having enough oomph on shots to sock clean winners against speedy opponents, or having to finesse passing shots. Volleys seemed to require too much swing.

It's interesting to look back at previous years, when I would try to adjust my game based on the characteristics of a racquet, or tweak my strokes based on the tension of the latest string job. I reached the point where I realized, if the ball is landing 6 inches out, I'm not going to change my swing, I'm going to get the strings cut out and re-done at a tension that works better with my natural game. In the same way, I'm not going to rework my serve or volleys, I'm going to experiment with racquets to find the one that works the best for my particular style.

Years ago, I bought racquets sight unseen or after a single trial where they seemed to work OK. This time, I did a more thorough compare-and-contrast. I took out 2 prospects and tried them alongside the current racquet. Then 2 totally different models. Then the best of each group for a side-by-side comparison. Each time, hitting buckets of balls to check how each one worked for different shots.

The one I settled on is the Babolat Z-OS. (Yes, a tennis racquet that could be confused with a mainframe operating system. :-) It does just the right amount of work on volleys and half-volleys. Spin serves curve down to hit the sidelines at sharp angles. Groundstrokes kick up high, topspin backhands stay in the court.

When I tried the new axe for the first time "in anger", I could feel it in the wrist the next day. If the racquet is hitting the ball with more power, the force isn't coming for free. But soon I could play on successive days without ill effects. I'm taking this season off in the local tennis league; things are looking good for next season.

Prius Mileage - 1 Year Later

2006-09-16T21:13:00.000-07:00

We took a 1-week trip to Yosemite exactly a year after our first long road trip in the Prius. This time, we covered more miles because of a 78-mile roundtrip within the park, up to Tuolomne Meadows in the High Sierras. But having learned the tricks to squeezing out the MPG, the fuel efficiency was higher overall for the trip: 573 miles @ 49.3 MPG. (Last year's trip averaged 48.0 MPG.)

Polarizing Filter

2006-08-29T14:15:00.000-07:00

Up to now I've mostly been concerned with interchangeable lenses for my digital SLR (Canon 20D), for different amounts of zoom and wide-angle. The only filters I have are UV filters that I leave on the lenses all the time, more for scratch protection than anything to do with the pictures themselves.

I've been spending a lot of time cleaning up landscape shots by darkening the sky and/or lightening the ground though. Sometimes mashing together 2 or 3 auto-bracketed shots to get decent contrast in bright outdoor situations. I finally got a polarizing filter, and I can see that the editing time will be much reduced!

Despite what you might think from the name, a polarizing filter has nothing to do with Joe Lieberman. It acts like sunglasses for your camera -- reducing glare, increasing colour saturation, reducing blown-out highlights. It reduces the overall amount of light that comes in, but a camera like a DSLR that meters "through the lens" (TTL) can automatically compensate. Camera mavens consider a polarizing filter the #1 most important filter for photographic effects. (They'll advise you not to skimp based on price. In this case at least, I'll concur with that advice.)

There are 2 types of polarizing filters, circular and linear. DSLRs require a circular polarizer, whose effect increases and then decreases again as you spin its front element around. This fact triggers several interesting consequences. A circular polarizer would be useless if zooming or auto-focusing actually caused the lens element itself to rotate, because you could never rely on the polarizer to stay at the rotation where you left it. Cameras that do rotate their front lens elements must therefore need a linear polarizer, which I won't mention again. Because the circular polarizer has two pieces, the back that stays steady and the front that you spin around, it has the potential to be relatively thick. You can pay extra for a "slim profile" filter. (I did.) Now the DSLR owner has three things to spin around on their lens: the zoom ring, manual focus ring if you want, and the polarizer. Luckily, once you get into a bright situation with refections and glare, you can spin the polarizer to the setting you want and then leave it there the rest of the time.

Although a DSLR like the Canon 20D does compensate for the decreased light coming in, that's at the expense of shutter speed. Be prepared to boost your ISO value by a couple of steps -- 400 where you might usually use 100, 800 the moment the daylight is anything less than bright.

The polarizing effect doesn't apply equally in all directions, and its amount depends on the angle you are shooting vis-a-vis the angle of the sun overhead. You can predict where the effect will be strongest by pointing at the sun and tracing an arc directly perpendicular to it; the usual advice is to make a "gun" shape out of your index finger and thumb, aim your index finger at the sun, and rotate your wrist (or imagine doing so) and your thumb traces out a path that points at all the places where the filter will have the most effect. But I only find that useful for figuring out where to look as I turned the ring to gauge the effect. Looking towards reflective water, I could actually see texture appear and glare fade as I adjusted the filter.

I've always been annoyed that Canon DSLRs by default produce photos with low saturation. I've actually got a Photoshop action set up to boost saturation, that I run practically all shots with. (In pictures with bright reds, sometimes the right adjustment is boosting saturation for blue and green, but leaving it unchanged for red.) However, now with the polarizing filter, I can see that this dull-looking default leaves room for the natural increase in saturation you get with a polarizer.

Net result: My pictures taken against the sky or ocean came out much better than usual -- no burn out, good cloud definition, even correct exposure for an eagle in flight instead of the usual black silhouette. I had to boost exposure time and ISO maybe more than I'd like for a set of fireworks pictures, but those pictures had good colour that required less adjustment and saturation-boosting than normal.

One other tip for shooting with a polarizer. Because the darkening effect on the sky varies depending on the direction, you might want to leave the filter off when shooting multiple shots for a wide panorama, to avoid uneven brightness in the sky.

Dining for the Birthday Week

2006-08-27T22:30:00.000-07:00

Recently I celebrated a birthday in high style. Because it was inconvenient to dine out on the actual birthday date, my wife and I spent the whole week treating ourselves at some top Berkeley restaurants. And by coincidence, I also got to dine at one of the top San Francisco restaurants the same week. Watch for a meal-by-meal account on my food blog.

Hot Town, Summer in the City

2006-07-24T21:29:00.000-07:00

Played a tennis match over the weekend, mid-day in high '80s temperatures. The court was so hot, my opponent's inner tube exploded while we were sitting down on a changeover. Straight set win for me.

When I was a skinny teenager, the heat was my nemesis. Now it seems like I specialize in winning on the most scorching days. I've learned... well, let's not give it all away here! One thing I notice, is that whatever things I bring to beat the heat, I've got more of 'em than the other guy.

Among the Weeds

2006-07-19T22:53:00.000-07:00

Woke up extra-early this morning. Felt like going for a row at Aquatic Park, which was my first time in a while. The bulletin board had a diagram showing a new course around the lake, to avoid patches of weeds. Well, I'm still learning the basic contours of the shore, so naturally I kept getting tangled in the weeds. Just like the Sargasso Sea! I finally happened upon a trick for untangling the oars, getting a little bit of speed and then spinning the oars entirely around while dragging them in the water. Not sure if that's the approved method!

Grateful Dead keyboardist dies

2006-07-01T23:18:00.000-07:00

Here's the story from the San Francisco Chronicle. Keyboardist Vince Welnick was the last member to be added to the band. Playing keyboards for the Dead seems dangerous on the scale of playing drums for Spinal Tap. Welnick was also a member of The Tubes, who I vaguely knew but didn't know that they were also a Bay Area band.

First Look: Canon Powershot S3

2006-07-01T22:56:00.000-07:00

Well, it's my first look anyway. My neighbours asked for some advice about cameras. After I laid out all the considerations, they asked what I would get if I was buying a new camera of such-and-such size and capabilities. The Canon Powershot S3 sez I. So that's what they got. I like the 12x optical zoom, familiar Canon controls, and how compact and light it is. (More even than the G3 I think.) Review to follow.

I'm Gonna Git You, Socca

2006-07-01T22:46:00.000-07:00

Today browsed around a little bit at the Epicurious Garden, a new gourmet food court in Berkeley's "gourmet ghetto", steps from the famous Chez Panisse. I had tried the gelato place before. This time I got one of the chickpea-flour mini-pizzas from Socca Oven, something new from the owner of Gregoire's just up the street. No wheat, no dairy, vegetarian choices -- can't go wrong there. Nice little eggplant-covered treat.

Auto-Exposure Bracketing: An Idea Whose Time has Come

2006-05-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

On this last trip to Yosemite, I finally tried out auto-exposure bracketing (AEB) on the Canon 20D. I had used this feature on earlier point-and-shoot digital cameras, but on an SLR it seemed a bit heretical. Aren't you supposed to fiddle with exposure and metering to get everything exactly right in one shot? Can't you slap on graduated neutral density filters and polarizing filters to keep sky detail from being blown out?

Well, it turns out there's nothing inherently wrong with using AEB on a good camera. I used it extensively to shoot landscapes, rushing rapids, waterfalls, and people in front of all of the above -- situations with a lot of dynamic range, or rapidly changing light, or unpredictable metering such as when you hand the camera to someone else to shoot a picture of you.

Along the way, I learned a lot about the 20D's advanced options for bracketing, and how to sort, choose, and combine the results in Photoshop. I'll turn these lessons into a series of articles on my new (yet-to-be-named) digital photography blog.

Prius: Tire Pressure and Gas Mileage

2006-05-21T19:13:00.000-07:00

On our first trip to Yosemite National Park in the Prius, the average miles per gallon worked out to 48.0. But lately, commuting and puttering around town has been getting 46 and change. The only change car-wise is the addition of a bike hitch, which adds maybe 30-40 pounds total. That doesn't seem like enough to account for the difference.

I read that underinflated tires can lower MPG by about 2% for each pound of lost pressure. The Prius recommended pressure isn't written on the wheels, and it isn't listed on the door jamb or in the owner's manual. It's actually on a sticker on the inside of the glove compartment. Turns out the front and rear tires should be 35 and 33 PSI respectively, and they were about 2 pounds low according to the tire gauge.

Normally, a figure like "2% better gas mileage" is hard to get my head around. But with the Prius getting close to 50 MPG, that 2% is around 1 mile per gallon. Sure enough, inflating the tires an extra 2 pounds resulted in an extra 2 MPG for this trip, clocking in at exactly 50.0. (On arrival at Yosemite, we were actually up to 52.)

Birth of an iTuNation

2006-05-11T09:00:00.000-07:00

To keep long music-related posts from overwhelming this personal blog, I've set up a new one strictly for posts related to iTunes, iPod, and music in general:

iTuNation

iTunes: iPod-Only Playlists

2006-05-07T09:58:00.000-07:00

Anyone can enhance their iPod experience by making some iTunes playlists that are used exclusively on the iPod. In particular, iPod-only playlists are useful for:

Trimming big playlists to fit onto a small iPod.
Trimming huge playlists so that you have enough space for other things on a big iPod.
Minimizing synching time for playlists that only need to hold enough for a specific trip (say, your daily commute).
Simplifying the synching process for a multi-iPod household.
Quick lookup for a particular song or artist, without navigating through several distracting layers of menus.

The Outline

I have a 4 gigabyte iPod Nano, which isn't nearly enough to hold all my songs. When I listen on the go, I want to have a wide selection, broken down into two main categories: favorite music, where the songs have high ratings and potentially appear in several different playlists, and unfamiliar music where the songs are unrated and/or have low play count.

I also have a 40 gigabyte iPod (pre-video), which often skirts the edge of being able to hold all the music I want to bring with me. It's easy to download several gigabytes at a time of South-By-Southwest indie rock, Grateful Dead concerts, then get an unpleasant surprise when a synch doesn't have enough room for all the songs, or when I try to use the iPod for file storage and discover there's almost no room left.

When listening in iTunes, I want the widest selection possible, so I have one Smart Playlist with all my 3-5 star songs, another with all my 4-5 star songs, another with all my unrated songs, another with
all the unrated songs with zero play count, and so on. (In addition to my standard playlists where I've picked out each song myself.)

The core technique for iPod-only playlists is to make Smart Playlist "clones" of some of these other playlists, varying the conditions a little so that they work better on the iPod than the original playlists.

With this technique, it's essential to choose the setting "Synch selected playlists" in Preferences > iPod. Each iPod has its own separate setting, so you'll pick different sets of playlists depending on which iPod is plugged in. If more than one is plugged in at the same time, choose the iPod name from the dropdown inside the Preferences > iPod dialog.

Space Savers

The key consideration with an iPod is, thou shalt not run out of space. You might think this is easy to guarantee if you have a big iPod with many gigabytes free, but things can change in a heartbeat:

You can download a big song collection. These days, you're likely to find hundred of free songs all packaged together in a promotional download from the South-By-Southwest conference, or dozens of free full-length concerts from the Internet Archive.
You can get a second, smaller iPod and find that your current system of playlists doesn't work for a 2-iPod setup.
You can decide to use your big iPod for backing up critical files, and realize that you have to free up several gigabytes.

Thus, to save space with an iPod-only playlist:

Identify each playlist that has the potential to grow beyond what your iPod can comfortably hold (given that you might use the iPod to hold lots of other playlists and/or data files).
Identify each playlist used for unfamiliar music that holds more songs that you could listen to between synch sessions. For example, if you rate unfamiliar songs during your daily commute, and sych that iPod once a week, do a back-of-the-envelope calculation to figure out how much total time the playlist needs.
Make a folder in iTunes by selecting the Library icon in the Source list and choosing File > New Folder. Give the folder the same name as the iPod.
Inside this folder (i.e. select the folder before creating each playlist), create a new Smart Playlist for each of the original playlists you're cloning. Name the new playlists by concatenating the original playlist name and the iPod name, for example "My Top Rated - Joe's iPod".
Give each Smart Playlist a single condition, "Playlist is Name of Original Playlist". This creates a clone of that playlist.
Check the box that limits the size of the new playlist. Choose a measurement that makes sense in this context. For example, when dividing up space on my 4 GB Nano, I give each playlist a fixed number of megabytes so I can allocate or free specific amounts of space when the iPod is almost full. On a bigger iPod, I choose perhaps 100 songs selected by rating to get the "top 100", or a specified number of hours to last through a week-long trip away from the computer.
If the original playlist is a mix of good, bad, familiar, and unfamiliar songs, you can add an extra condition like "My rating is between **** and *****" or "Play count is greater than 0", so the iPod-specific playlist contains only your most familiar or favorite songs. For example, I might have a "Flamenco" playlist in iTunes, while its iPod-only clone only contains my favorite Flamenco songs.
Plug in the iPod, set it to synch only selected playlists, and choose the ones from the appropriate folder. Because the iPod preferences show playlists in a single big list, you'll need to give them distinctive names as above so that you can tell them apart from the original playlists.

Repeat the process for each iPod you have.

Time Savers

Do you ever get a craving for a particular song, artist, or album while listening to your iPod? If you're right in the middle of a playlist, satisfying that craving can be very disruptive -- keep pressing the menu button until you get to the main menu, then navigate down by song, artist, or album scroll through some very long lists, and maybe in the end you didn't really want every song from that artist or album, so you must navigate more menu levels and scroll through more lists. To top it all off, now you're out of the original playlist, even if you just wanted to listen to one song.

The trick here is to take advantage of a few subtle properties of iPod playlists:

Once a song is on the iPod, there's really no penalty in including the same song in multiple playlists. So why not make variations of the same playlist?
The iPod has a single global setting for Shuffle Play, unlike iTunes which lets you choose shuffle or sequential play for each playlist.
Whatever order you sort a playlist in iTunes, the songs are listed in the same order when you bring up that playlist on the iPod.

Can you see where this is going? Using the same technique as in the last section, you can make Smart Playlists that are clones of other playlists:

Just use one condition, "Playlist is Name of Other Playlist".
Don't set any limit on the size.
Use a name that reflects the original playlist but adds some qualifying information. For example, I have playlists "My Top Rated (song)" and "My Top Rated (artist)". (I would have made the names a little longer, except that anything longer is truncated in the iPod listing.)
Sort the playlist by the appropriate column. Then never touch that playlist again! Use the original playlist for searching or fiddling with song info.
In iPod preferences, check that playlist so that it's automatically synched with the iPod, in addition to the original playlist.

Now, instead of listening to "My Top Rated" on the iPod, I listen to its clone, like "My Top Rated (song)". If I get a sudden craving for a particular song, I press the menu button once to get to the list of songs in this playlist, then scroll straight to that song because the names are listed in alphabetical order. If I want to zero in on a particular artist, I press the menu button twice to get to the list of playlists, move to the adjacent playlist to switch to the same list of songs arranged by artist, and scroll through the songs alphabetized by artist. As a bonus, I see in this playlist only the favorite songs from that artist, not all the others that might happen to be on the iPod.

The same technique applies any time you want to access the same list using different criteria. For example, you might have a playlist full of podcasts sorted by Date Added, so you could listen to episodes in order. But you might have another playlist with those same podcasts sorted in order of time, so that you could pick a long or short one to match the length of a drive.

Advanced Tip: Pseudo-Shuffle Playlists

I mentioned earlier how the iPod has only a single, global Shuffle setting. Again, this can lead to inconvenience if you're listening to songs in random order and want to quickly switch to sequential play, or vice versa. You have to navigate to the main menu, down into Settings, change the Shuffle setting, then come back up and go to Now Playing or navigate to some other playlist.

For example, in the case where you start jonesing for a certain band, you probably want to hear several songs in a row from that band. Even if you switch to a playlist arranged by Artist, that doesn't help if Shuffle Play is still turned on -- you can pick the next song, but iPod will jump randomly when it finishes.

There are enough instances when it's helpful to turn off Shuffle Play -- sequence of podcast episodes, that I sometimes leave it off for long stretches. As a shortcut, instead of turning Shuffle back on, I'll use even another playlist, like "My Top Rated (random)", where the songs are already in shuffled order.

Let's think about that a minute. Even if you don't go the extra step to create this final playlist, how would you get the songs in unpredictable order? You could sort by some other column like Time or Size, but then the songs at the start would be kind of weird (either very long or very short). Most other columns are largely blank; for example, sorting by Comment gives you the songs with Comment fields in order by that field, then all the ones with blank Comment fields in order by song name. No good there.

iTunes has a little-understood notion called "Play order", represented by the column of numbers on the left, with no column title. Click on the unnamed column title, and you'll see the essential order that iTunes thinks the songs should be in for that playlist. (Either ascending or descending, depending on the direction of the arrow in the column header.) With the playlist sorted by that column, click the Shuffle icon in the bottom-left (looks like two snakes having a good time), or option-click the icon if Shuffle is already turned on for that playlist. You'll get a whole new randomized order for that playlist, that you can utilize on the iPod to give you random play even if Shuffle Play is turned off.

Periodically, I'll get sick of always seeing the same first screen of songs every time I go into a particular iPod playlist. Reshuffling them in iTunes and synching again helps keep them fresh, and I could swear that even Shuffle Play turns up more interesting songs after a playlist is re-randomized like this!

Categories: itunes, ipod, music, mp3

iTunes: Music Backups for Music Collectors

2006-05-04T23:14:00.000-07:00

In this article, I address a topic that's bugged me for years: how to back up your big and/or fast-changing music collection through iTunes.

Serious nerds don't feel the need to do anything special to back up their music, because they're already backing up their whole computer all the time. But that's cumbersome if you have a big music collection, or if your music library is spread across multiple drives, or if you frequently make changes to song info. (Any such change updates the MP3 file so the backup software backs it up again. Any change to the artist, album, or song title can cause the file to get renamed, messing up the way the backup software tries to track changes to the same file.)

The man on the street can burn a CD or DVD from iTunes every now and then. OneDigitalLife.com has a popular page showing how to do that. But that's cumbersome if you have a big music collection, or you keep a lot of songs unchecked but still want to back them up.

There must be a middle ground, a technique using iTunes but still flexible enough to handle extensive music libraries!

The Outline

As in the OneDigitalLife article, the core of this technique is a smart playlist that accumulates all your recently added songs. That is, it has a "Date Added" condition so that all music added since the last backup appears in the playlist automatically. At periodic intervals, or after the playlist grows big enough to make a backup worthwhile, you burn it to one or more CDs or DVDs. Then you reset the "Date Added" condition so the playlist becomes empty, and gradually fills up again as new music is added.

The Essential Smart Playlist

Let's call this Smart Playlist "Backup - Monthly", for lack of a better name. Later, we'll rename it temporarily while doing the actual backups.

We're actually going to go a bit farther than a single-condition playlist; we'll add some touches to make the process work better.

Use a between test for the "Data Added" condition. Make the second date be way off in the future. For example, right now my "Backup - Monthly" Smart Playlist has the condition "Date Added is in the range 4/30/06 to 12/31/06". For most backups, you'll leave the end date alone, but if something goes wrong with a multi-disc backup and it stretches over more than one day, you can set the end date to the date you started the backup process. If you import more songs or fix some typos in song info partway through the backup process, you want to save those songs for the next go-round.

Use a second condition, also with between and the same start and end dates, for "Date Modified". Changes to song info, such as the song name, track number, comments, year, and so on are all stored inside the song file. After you fill in blank fields or correct mistakes and typos, those song files need to be included in the next backup. ("Date Modified" is not changed when you add a rating.)

Before burning the playlist, change its title to something that makes a sensible CD title, since iTunes titles the CD the same as the playlist name. For example, most of the time my Smart Playlist is titled "Backup - Monthly", but before the most recent backup I temporarily changed its name to "Backup - April 2006", then back again after burning the discs.

Don't set a size limit on the playlist. If it's too big for a single data disc, iTunes automatically splits it across multiple discs. Under Preferences > Advanced > Burning, leave the Disc Format set to Data CD or DVD, which ensures that all the files in the playlist are burned to disc. (MP3 CDs omit AAC, MOV, PDF, or other filetypes that you can manage in iTunes.)

Leave the checkbox unchecked for "Match only checked songs". Even though iTunes leaves unchecked songs out when it burns discs, you want them in this playlist. You'll see why in a minute.

Do check the box for "Live updating", so that the playlist grows whenever you add or change a song. You can play games with this checkbox if something goes wrong during the backup and you need to restart it or remove things from the song list. But as a standard practice, leave it checked.

Leave the playlist sorted by either (Song) Name or Artist (or, rarely, Album). The sort column determines how the files are arranged on the burned discs. Sort by song name, and the files are all placed at the top level of the CD, with no directory structure. Sort by artist name, and the songs for each artist go into a directory named for the artist. Sort by album name, and the songs from each album go into a directory named for the album. In each case, an ascending sequence number is tacked on to each item in the root of the CD.

I prefer to sort by artist, because the artist names are easy to scan, and if I'm going to import the songs somewhere else I'll probably do that for all the songs by that artist. I don't sort by song name because I want the song files on disc to keep their original names without the leading 001 etc. If the files are renamed, it's harder to locate or compare against the original files, and I've had the sequence numbers show up in the song titles when I imported the renamed files on another computer. I don't sort by album name because it's hard to tell one "Greatest Hits" album from another without a lot of work fixing up album titles.

Leave the playlist sorted the way you want when you first create it, and doublecheck the sort order before each time you do a new backup.

The Supplemental Playlists

Here's where one of my pet peeves with iTunes comes in: there's not a whole lot you can do with unchecked songs.

I uncheck songs for lots of different reasons -- because I have the same song on both a regular and "Greatest Hits" album, because I've ripped the same CD or downloaded the same Grateful Dead concert at different bit rates, or to keep audio book and other long files out of certain playlists. (Yes, you can also set the "Skip when shuffling" setting for a song, and add extra conditions to Smart Playlists based on Length and Kind, but the checkbox is a convenient shortcut that works in all situations.)

However, I do frequently want to burn discs and include all the unchecked songs. Maybe I'm making a backup copy of a CD ripped at multiple quality settings; maybe I'm about to get rid of a bunch of 2-star songs, but want a backup of those songs in case I change my mind someday.

iTunes makes this process kind of roundabout. Skip to the next section if you don't care about unchecked songs. Otherwise, please bear with me!

What we'll do is use a standard playlist to hold a list of the unchecked songs. We'll turn on the checkboxes for all songs in this playlist, burn the disc(s), then uncheck them again.

Make a new Smart Playlist titled "Backup - Monthly - Checked". Give it one condition, "Playlist is Backup - Monthly" (or whatever name you gave to the Smart Playlist you're using to do backups). Don't check the Limit box, check the "Match only checked songs" and "Live updating" boxes. Now we have a playlist containing only the checked songs from our backup list. We'll use this playlist for no other purpose than to figure out what songs in the backup list are unchecked.

Make a new Smart Playlist titled "Backup - Monthly - Unchecked". Give this playlist two conditions, "Playlist is Backup - Monthly" and "Playlist is not Backup - Monthly - Checked" (or whatever names you used for the previous two playlists. Now you've got a list of all the songs whose checkboxes you must flip while making the backup.

Now make yet another playlist, a standard one this time, titled "Backup - Uncheck afterwards". When you're ready to do a backup, drag and drop the Smart Playlist "Backup - Monthly - Unchecked" onto it, so that it lists the same songs as that Smart Playlist. Select all the songs in this playlist, right-click over one of them, and choose "Check Selection" from the pop-up menu. The songs disappear from the "Backup - Monthly - Unchecked" playlist, but remain here so you can uncheck them later. Most importantly, they will now be included in your backup.

All these playlists, just for backups, can clutter up your Source list in iTunes. Here's where folders come in handy. Make a new folder by selecting the Library icon in the Source list and choosing File > New Folder. Call it, oh I dunno, Backups. Drag and drop each of the backup-related playlists in there. Now you can get at them all at once, and hide them in between backups.

Feel the Burn

OK, at this point, you're ready to actually do a backup. To include your whole library, edit the conditions in the "Backup - Monthly" Smart Playlist so that the start date is in the distant past, before you started with iTunes. Otherwise, take a look in your "Recently Added" Smart Playlist to see when you added your last big batch of songs.

You've got the "Backup - Monthly" playlist sorted by the correct column to give the desired CD layout, right?
You've renamed that playlist temporarily to include the date or some detail to help you remember why you're backing up this particular batch of songs, right?
If any of the songs in the playlist are unchecked, you've set up the supplemental playlists as described above, then checked all the necessary songs, right?
Your disc format in Preferences > Advanced > Burning is set to Data CD or DVD, right?
You've looked at the total size of the playlist (at the bottom of the iTunes window, when the playlist is selected) to see whether you need a CD, a DVD, or multiple discs, right?

OK, select the playlist to burn, click the Burn icon in the upper-right corner of the iTunes window, and click Burn again after inserting a CD or DVD.

If your backup fits on a single disc, skip ahead to the "Aftermath" section. Otherwise, keep reading to learn the finer points of multi-disc backups.

Multi-Disc Backups

If the playlist is too big to fit onto a single disc, iTunes prompts you when the first disc is finished, then automatically continues burning a second, third, etc. disc until the whole playlist is done.

As each disc is burned, the status area at the bottom of the iTunes window shows how much is left to go. If you've already burned one or more DVDs, but the remaining songs would fit on a CD, you can pop in a CD and iTunes will happily use it for those last few songs.

As each disc is burned, iTunes also shows (with icons and grayed-out song names) which songs go on the current disc. Make a note of the first and last songs, on this disc, so that if something goes wrong you'll know where to pick up.

What could go wrong? During multi-disc backups, I've had (a) iTunes crash after finishing each disc, (b) iTunes error out while burning, creating a useless "coaster", (c) no power failure yet but I'm sure that's coming.

If your backup gets interrupted like this:

Edit the conditions for your backup Smart Playlist to turn off live updating.
Delete from the playlist all the songs successfully burned to disc.
Start burning again with a new disc.
Afterwards, turn live updating back on for the Smart Playlist.

Sometimes, these crashes occur while I've left a disc burning overnight, and maybe the next day I can't afford to tie it up burning more discs, or maybe I'm out of discs and need to make a trip to the office supply store. So the process stretches out over 2-3 days or even more. In cases like this, edit the two between conditions in the Smart Playlist so that the end date is the day you started the backup. That way, any songs added in the interim won't sneak in or be skipped over by mistake. You're deliberately leaving them until the next backup.

The Aftermath

Once you've completed a backup, potentially with multiple disks and temporarily checked songs, just a little cleanup makes things simpler for next time:

Set the beginning date of your "Date Added" and "Date Modified" conditions to the day you did (or started) the backup.
If you turned off live updating due to a failure partway through the process, turn it back on now.
If you temporarily checked some songs, go back to the "Backup - Uncheck afterward" playlist, select all the songs, right-click, and choose "Uncheck selection" from the pop-up menu. Then remove all the songs from that playlist.
It's not a bad idea to select the backup playlist, choose File > Export Song List and store a copy of the backup playlist somewhere for posterity. You can consult the list someday if you're looking for a song and the backup discs aren't easily accessible.
Rename the backup Smart Playlist to a generic name like "Backup - Monthly".

Happy iTuning!

Frequently Asked Questions

Seriously, why not just use dedicated backup software?

I don't have a whole lot of room left on my hard drive(s) even for music, so backing up to another drive isn't practical, I need to burn discs.

If I need to recover a song, it's easier for me to get it from a clearly labelled disc with a folder structure arranged by artist, rather than browse through some months-old representation of my entire directory structure within a backup program.

When I pop in a disc burned by iTunes, I can browse it within iTunes, drag-and-drop songs straight into the library, and recover their original ratings. Recovering a song via backup software means recovering the file back to its original location, then finding that location and importing back into iTunes.

I'm not expecting to recover my entire library this way, more likely audio books or podcasts that I trashed due to lack of space, low-rated songs that I changed my mind about, and so on.

Backup software isn't smart when files move around or change names. With iTunes, I might split a music library across drives, consolidate all songs on a new bigger drive, or change the file path by editing the song name, artist, or album. iTunes knows which of these operations requires backing up the song again better than Retrospect or what have you.

Related Reading

OneDigitalLife article about iTunes backups

Categories: itunes, ipod, music, mp3

I Might Lose on Jeopardy, Baby

2006-04-25T16:25:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, Jeopardy held their online tryouts for the west coast. I didn't do nearly as well as the time I auditioned in person in Los Angeles. The categories were a little bit vague, the questions a little more America-centric than is good for me. In cases where I had to guess, later when I checked my guesses, they turned out to be mostly wrong. (During the in-person audition I did a year and a half ago, even my complete wild guesses were mostly spot on.) To even be considered for further consideration, I needed to get at least 35/50 right, and later in looking up answers I wasn't sure of, I found about a dozen that were definitely wrong.

Since this test was for the whole west coast, I was extra nervous. There must be thousands of Silicon Valley geeks who would know their art history, American history, etc. better than me, who would take the test only because it was online. If too many people qualified, they might not let everyone audition, even if they qualified based on their score. About 2 weeks ago, I decided enough time had gone by that I hadn't made the cut.

Until today, when I got invited to an audition in San Francisco in June. Excellent!

Last time, I did great in the written test, great in the practice game, but didn't think I was that great in the practice interviews. This time, forget about cramming with trivia, it's all about being smooth in the interview!

iTunes Cleanup: "Rolling Stones" vs. "The Rolling Stones"

2006-04-23T14:04:00.000-07:00

As a database nerd, I'm bothered by inconsistencies in iTunes song data that seem easy to fix, but are too time-consuming for a large library.

I'm using a combination of Perl & Applescript to simplify the process of cleaning up information that is similar but not identical across different songs and artists. I wrap everything in Perl, and call Applescript only when necessary. That way, people on Windows (or even Linux) systems could use the code to identify problems, even if the fixes required editing the song info by hand. And on the Mac, the relevant songs can be automatically put into a playlist for later editing or fixing via other Applescripts.

For example, here's a little snippet that identifies all the artists who are represented as both "something" and "The something". Copy and paste it into the Terminal to run it.


grep "Artist" ~/Music/iTunes/"iTunes Music Library.xml" |
sort -u |
sed -e 's/>The />/' |
sort -d |
perl -e '

while($line = <>)
{
 chomp $line;
 if ($line =~ /Artist<\/key><string>(.*?)<\/string>/)
 {
    $artist = $1;

    if ($artist eq $last_artist)
    {
       print "Inconsistent THE: [$artist] and [The $artist]\n";
    }
    $last_artist = $artist;
 }
}
'

What this does is get an alphabetical list of all the artist names, with the initial "The" stripped off. If two consecutive names are identical, the full list of artist names included both the "The" and "no-The" forms.

Advantages:

All the songs for an artist will be filed under a single folder, rather than separate folders for "Beatles" and "The Beatles" and so on. Makes it easier to copy or transfer the files via the command line.
When going through the iPod "Artists" menu, you'll be able to get to all of the songs by that artist, instead of having separate entries with different groups of songs.
Having consistent names makes it easier to check for duplicate songs and weed out other sorts of problems.

Watch this space for more developments on this front!

Tags: iTunes, iPod, MP3

Six Months in a Leaky Boat

2006-04-19T23:45:00.000-07:00

I've joined the Berkeley Paddling and Rowing Club, as a nearby place for both fresh air and fitness. My particular build responds very well to rowing, rather than running or heavy weights.

I've got rowing in my blood from a great-uncle, Martin Boland, who was part of a record-setting crew in Newfoundland. Not only a record, but a record-setting record! The St. John's Regatta is the oldest continuously held sporting event in North America. The record stood for 80 years, which I believe (citation needed) is some kind of record for athletic records.

Oracle XE in the news

2006-04-19T09:42:00.000-07:00

Good review here of the free Oracle "Express Edition" (XE) database. I'm waiting (i.e. pushing) for a Mac version, and would like to see it offered by hosting providers.

Oracle XE: It's Not Your Typical Oracle

Regarding the GUI options... I've tried a lot of them, from various sources, and have never been impressed. But SQL Developer (formerly "Project Raptor") is growing on me!

Life in the Green Lane - New York Times

2006-04-17T10:25:00.000-07:00

Some Prius-bashing in the NY Times op-eds today. The idea of Prius mileage "plummeting" on the highway strongly disagrees with my experience.

In our first major trip in the Prius, from the Bay Area to Yosemite, we averaged 48.1 MPG in hours of highway driving to and from the Sierras. A Prius owner soon learns that although you can get great mileage downhill, going up and down the same inclined stretch of road burns more gas than an equivalent flat stretch.

On days when I commute (an hour plus each way, all on the highway), I've noticed that I can increase my average MPG by 1-3, after a few days of purely around-town driving. If I reset the mileage figures at the start, I typically see 52 MPG for the highway commute, vs. around 46 for local driving.

I've always heard that the city driving done by auto magazines is a little unrealistic, that they're babying the cars more than you could in real life. If so, perhaps the reviewers need to pay attention to the Prius's real-time MPG readout; ease up on the gas just a tiny bit at the right time, and you can maintain the same speed (or 1 MPH less) without the gas engine at all. Yes, even at high speeds on the highway.

I didn't notice any URLs of online resources to bolster the article's claim of bad highway mileage. Hope the author isn't just trying for controversy to boost the sales of his magazine...

Another problem with the article is the total straw man position regarding carpool lanes. Laws are being passed allowing carpool lane use based on a combination of mileage and/or emissions specs. See here for the California rules:

ELIGIBLE VEHICLES - SINGLE OCCUPANT CARPOOL LANE USE STICKERS

It's completely bogus for the writer to act as if anything labelled "Hybrid" is getting special treatment. Some non-hybrid cars qualify, and some hybrids don't.

Tags: Prius, hybrid

Cookin' in the Kitchen

2006-04-15T22:58:00.000-07:00

My recipe site has been languishing along with the rest of my personal site. Makes sense to spiff it up first, as it's near and dear to my heart for several reasons. So here goes...

John's Vegetarian Recipes

Oh What a Lucky Man

2006-04-15T16:02:00.000-07:00

This article takes me back... or maybe brings me full circle!

Mac Geekery - Pretty-Print Manual Pages as PS, PDF, or HTML

Back in university, learning UNIX was something you had to do on your own time. Here are some commands, they're documented online in "man pages", you figure out the rest and don't be late with your assignment.

After university, it was on to IBM's documentation group for programming languages. Naturally, there was a lot of emphasis on online information. Programming languages lend themselves to hyperlinking to look up language keywords and API names.

When AIX first came out, it had an online hypertext viewer (InfoExplorer) with a whole set of rewritten UNIX documentation. But customers didn't care much for an X11 application just to look up the syntax of ls. They wanted man pages, but didn't find any. I believe the customers finally got their way.

On every UNIX-oriented project I've worked on since then, customers have griped that there weren't any man pages, or they couldn't be viewed from the desired context, or they weren't good enough. (Typically ignoring the whiz-bang online documentation tools that came with the product or OS.) I've had this gripe myself in Oracle's SQL*Plus, where 'help xyz' brings up man-style text help, but it hasn't always been installed.

Now OS X comes along, with BSD UNIX under the hood, so once again my home computer work involves periodic use of the man command. And this article is the coup de grace -- a way to get the man output into the most elaborate viewers yet, Firefox and Acrobat Reader!

To be fair, a lot of man pages are full of obvious flaws. There are some options and restrictions that were unclear when I read a man page 20 years ago... and now on OS X I see exactly the same murky text. 'man tar' and many others don't show enough examples. 'man rsync' puts the options too late on the page.

Berkeley Critical Mass ride

2006-04-15T15:26:00.000-07:00

Last night was the first time I saw the Critical Mass ride in Berkeley, rolling down Solano Avenue at 7:30.

That couch looked pretty comfy!

Knife Is Beautiful

2006-04-13T14:36:00.000-07:00

Article today in the SF Chronicle, a retrospective on the Japanese girl punk group Shonen Knife.

ASIAN POP / Knife Is Beautiful

I got introduced to them with their Let's Knife album, and was saddened to hear a few months back that their former drummer had died in a car accident.

Web 2.0, Here I Come

2006-04-11T09:21:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, it feels like the possibilities on the Web are opening up again. I've set up an account at 1&1 Hosting, and mirrored my home page at JohnRussell.name. Got a couple of other domains reserved for exploring opportunities.

Back in '93 or so, the Web was wide open for anyone who knew their way around Unix and a text editor -- and worked at a big company or went to a connected university. But after the boom and bust, things were kinda dull. Every unused domain was parked. People stopped having "home pages" and put away their FrontPage and DreamWeaver; now they had blogs, but still just content poured into a template with some ads around the sides.

Now we've reached a point where things are once again interesting. You can hook up to Amazon web services, do a mash-up with Google Maps, sell music through the iTunes Music Store, run your own database apps for pennies a day. Every Internet account I've had has come with some paltry amount of web space, usually 10 MB; the 1&1 package has 15,000 times that (150 GB), plus scripting support and full shell access (allowing easy publishing via scp and rsync).

Canadian election

2006-01-24T11:42:00.000-08:00

Results are in...

A Price Above Rubies

2006-01-06T23:42:00.000-08:00

Following on from the 24-hour rule from the previous post... tonight I learned Ruby in about an hour, including some exploration of branches like XML processing, Ruby on Rails, and RubyCocoa for the Mac. Takes me back to the days of Scheme and SNOBOL back in university. Since the advent of Java I've gotten bored with memorizing a zillion variations of IF syntax or array notation. But the way I could immediately grok Ruby made me think it really will be worthwhile to pursue.

John's 24-Hour Rule

2006-01-06T23:36:00.000-08:00

One of my most cherished maxims is that anything that's worthwhile to learn or implement, you should be able to do within 24 hours. I've found it's true for everything computer-related. If you get an idea in the morning, you should have a working prototype that evening. If you start researching a subject at lunchtime, by lunchtime the next day you should have developed some expertise in it.

Conversely, if you can't get something working within 24 hours, whatever system you're working with is too user-unfriendly, or the idea is a dead end, or the methodology doesn't match up well with your mindset.

300mm of Fun

2006-01-06T15:58:00.000-08:00

This year, Santa brought a new Canon lens, 70-300mm to go on the Canon 20D that was last year's gift.

Recently, we took a vacation down to Santa Cruz where I took pictures of butterflies clumped together on tree branches, and wetsuited surfers riding the waves. In each case, I got some good pictures but only by extensive cropping, losing enough detail that it would be tough to enter those pictures in competition or get good prints.

Hoping to use the new lens soon for some birdwatching pics along the SF Bay shore!

This lens is the mid-range of Canon's 300mm lenses for mere mortals, that is, the ones without "L" glass. The highest-priced one is the super-compact DO model, which uses some optical engineering to give the same amount of telephoto without actually extending the lens. The lowest-priced one is actually a very inexpensive model without Image Stabilization (IS) or Ultrasonic motor (USM). I couldn't justify twice the $$$ for the DO lens just to make the camera easier to handle. I was very tempted by the cheapest model -- it should be affordable for anyone with a Canon SLR -- but the bigger and heavier the lens, the more important the IS and USM features are. No point in having a 300mm lens where I couldn't handhold a steady shot at full zoom!

Tags: photography, Canon, cameras, digicams