I went back to visit my mother and she threw a little shindig on the farm. She has a small lake on her property, so they set up a fireworks show near the water. My mother also pulled out her little scratch-built ATV train for kids. It’s pretty cute. You can check the train out after the break.
A Texas Fourth of July
August 20th, 2009Kind of Blue after 50 years
August 18th, 2009Here’s a great article from Slate about Miles Davis’s seminal work Kind of Blue. It’s a great jazz album. If you don’t have it, you can click on the handy Amazon link to order it. This is one of my favorite jazz albums. Plus, you’ll recognize a lot of the music if you’re a film geek.
That’s one slick penguin
August 14th, 2009
Is he guilty of performance enhancement?
One of the penguins at the Hampshire Wildlife Park in England molted all of his feathers at once. It seems that he does this every year. Normally, it takes a few weeks for all the feathers to fall out, so you don’t see too many bald penguins.
Electrifying Shuttle Photo
August 6th, 2009National Geographic has a new set of Space Photos up. You can check out a beautiful picture of lightning arcing through the clouds while the shuttle Discovery is rolling out to the launch pad. Stunning!
Cool photos of the Space Shuttle
July 30th, 2009The Sacramento Bee is hosting a series of photos of the Space Shuttle Endeavour’s recent mission to the ISS. There are some really great shots. Check it out, space geeks.
My favorite photo is this one:
The shuttle has such amazing texture up close. You don’t see any of that in the long shots on the pad or at liftoff.
Apple releases MobileMe iDisk for iPhone
July 29th, 2009For those of you who use iDisk to sync or backup files, this is a great little app that will give you access to any of those files from your iPhone. Previously, you’d have to email yourself a copy of the file and put it on a web server someplace if you wanted to view the file while away from the computer.
Now, if they’d only figure out a way you could edit files on your iDisk…
Apple MobileMe iDisk
Google Goes Comic Con
July 23rd, 2009Those crazy cats…
Google’s ode to Comic Con
Man lands on the moon. News at Eleven.
July 17th, 2009The 40th anniversary of man landing on the moon is coming up (July 11th, 1969, just under the wire for Kennedy’s goal). Here’s a couple of interesting links.
Lowry Digital in Burbank was brought on board to apply their video processing techniques to the available footage from Apollo 11. You can check out the press conference at National Geographic.
Unfortunately, a group of researchers were unable to locate the original telemetry tapes from the Apollo mission. They hoped to rebuild the video from those sources, which would have been first-generation video copies, but it turns out the tapes were recycled (probably).
And, of course, the obligatory “Would anybody care about the moon landing if it happened today” opinion piece. People would care if it were the first time we walked on the moon, but it’s not. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were hardly the first explorers to be lauded and then quickly set aside. Magellan anyone? Even Columbus Day is more of a hassle to us than a celebration.
If you do want to follow the events of that celebrated mission, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and AOL have put together a really awesome Flash site that lets you follow along.
It’s bad enough that we use so much oil…
June 11th, 2009Now Nature has created a strain of bacteria that eats it.
Chinese Scientists Discover Bacteria Eating Up Their Oil
Scientists have had critters like this in the lab for some time now. In fact, years back I remember talk about using these oil-eating bugs to clean up oil spills at sea. It seems Nature has gotten the same idea.
It’s interesting to ponder why a complex ecosystem like the Earth would spawn a bacteria that eats oil. It’s even more interesting to theorize why these bacteria are only now being discovered, when oil, at least easy to reach oil, is going down in quantity.
Free Tilt-Shift software
June 8th, 2009Tilt-shift photography has become quite popular lately. Unfortunately, an actual tilt-shift lens can cost thousands of dollars. The Lensbaby
is another option for this type of photography, but it isn’t a true tilt-shift. However, there are a number of software options for tilt-shift imaging. You can, of course, make judicious use of masks and blurring in Photoshop, but often you just want to do something quick-and-dirty to spice up a blog post.
There’s a new Adobe AIR app that creates tilt-shift images for you and it’s free. Check out Tilt Shift Generator from Art & Mobile.
