Category Archives: Cool Links

Homes to Consider

Posted on by
1

Today’s real estate market is in a slump. What this means, clearly, is that you should be buying.

If you’re willing to live in the middle of nowhere, here are a few very interesting ideas for homes:

  • $320,000 buys this ~3,000 sq. ft. building, a former railroad station. With just a tiny bit of work, it would be a nice home. Check out the living-room-to-be; mount an LCD TV right over the fireplace and put down carpeting over most of the floor (except for right by the fireplace). There’s a bookcase off to the right, although I’d paint it white. Breakfast nook anyone? Just put down a carpet. This view is pretty inviting, too. (And check out the palm trees outside: it’s Georgia, after all.)
  • If you’re more of an athlete, how about this school in Kansas? $325,000 buys you 24,500 square feet on 5 acres. The gym looks ready to use. Read “17 classrooms” as “17 palatial bedrooms” after you renovate them a bit. (Carpet + less-hideous ceiling + ditch the fluorescent lights.) And tell me that library wouldn’t make a nice home theater.
  • This place in Missouri is ridiculously nice. Tell me the third picture isn’t what you want to see as you walk home. It sets high expectations for what’s inside, but it’s even nicer than you might expect.
  • This old Montana bank is dirt cheap. 6,200 square feet for $140,000. I’d want to totally gut the interior, and the location is probably not desirable, but still… Oh, and put a nice fence up on the roof for safety, and then you have a pretty sweet ‘outdoor’ area. And it has a vault!
  • This place is totally undesirable but ohhh so cheap. It looks like it’s ready to fall down, and the power substation in the front yard destroys whatever value the place may have had. The good news is you may never lose power.
  • Cheap place in Indiana with an associated business.
  • This building is butt-ugly but is situated on a nice dam. I want to live here!
  • Whoa! 40,000 square feet of amazing office space? Might make a nice home.

Granted, you’d be an idiot to buy any of these places without looking carefully into all the costs and zoning laws, and I’m not sure any are in good locations.

A Partial Upgrade

Posted on by
2

My AthlonMP system is aging. Actually, it’s aged. It’s down to 512MB RAM (the other 512MB went bad a long time ago). BIOS updates ended 4 years ago, and the thing doesn’t seem to support drives over 137 GB or USB keyboards, two things that have worked for a long time. (Hint: it seems like a good idea at the time, but don’t buy a server-grade motherboard for your desktop. It seems better, but it’s all these little things that will get you.)

I have a decent enough graphics card, a nice HDTV tuner, a DVD burner, 500/200/60/40 GB drives, a nice keyboard, and a monitor. So all I need, really, is a new motherboard, CPU, and RAM.

So here’s a motherboard. Here’s the processor. Here’s the RAM, times two. Net cost? A little under $500. For a quad-core processor, 4 GB RAM, and a motherboard with GigE. Assuming, of course, that all you need is motherboard + processor + RAM. Which is the case for me. Granted, it also assumes that you have $500 to spend on computer upgrades….

Edit: Seems that the RAM might not be the best. Don’t take my word on it being the right thing.

Today’s Photoshoot

Posted on by
Reply

I’m home for the weekend, and stopped by the Turkey Hill Cemetery. Got some nice shots, perfect for Halloween. It’s funny how much of an effect the post-processing can have… Here’s a shot in black and white, with a little glow added:

title=”Photo Sharing”>Eerie Light

And here’s a shot in color:

title=”Photo Sharing”>Gravestone

This marks the second time, by the way, that the 10D’s AE has gone wonky and I’ve had to switch over to full-manual mode.

I created two new sets on my Flickr account, Foliage and the Cemetery Trip.

Not Compact

Posted on by
Reply

The one “problem” with my 10D is that you can’t possibly fit the thing in your pocket. I’m buying a “grip” for it from Andrew, which is going to make it even larger.

So I don’t feel as bad about tacking a huge lens onto it. Heck, the lenses I use are small compared to what the real pros shoot with.

But here’s what I need. Canon made a 1200mm lens. This thing is ridiculously large. At f/5.6, it’s as fast as my camera at 200mm. This is n amazing lens. This is the only lens where photos of the lens are routinely more interesting than photos taken with the lens. I knew for a long time that the lens was very expensive. But I wasn’t aware of the definition of “very” expensive, nor that Wikipedia had a page on it. It apparently cost just shy of $90,000, and was available only by special order.

So then I found this article about Nikon’s ‘version’ of that lens, a 1200-1700mm lens. Of course, being a Nikon, it’s black instead of white. Linked to from that page is this article on Reuters, written by one of their photographers in France who took the agency’s 1200-1700mm lens to an event this July to get some shorts of the new President of France. The situation is one in which most pro photographers would weep and give up, and the lens is barely long enough. (He jokes that next year he’ll put a 2x TC on it.)

I’ll gladly accept donations.

Parfum

Posted on by
Reply

Would you buy perfume from a site called “I hate perfume?”

Check out chemist Christopher Brosius’ collection,  including scents like “Ocean,” “Snow,” dirt, mushrooms, basil, carrot, hay, “Burnt Wood,” pipe smoke, leather, ice cream cones, “Celo Tape,” and rubber.

In another collection, he’s got gems like burning leaves,  beach, and some that can’t be succinctly described like Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.

This one sounds like a winner.

Absurdity

Posted on by
Reply

The news lately has been pretty surreal. By “lately” I mean the past few years.  For example, who would ever think that:

  • NASA would spend $8 million to discover just how often passenger airliners almost collide, and then refuse to release the results to as to not alarm people.
  • Our President would veto a children’s health care plan and say he did it to show that he was still relevant.
  • Our Vice President would almost always be in “an undisclosed location” and declare that he’s not bound by rules for the executive or legislative branch.
  • Our Vice President would shoot someone in the face.
  • One of the defense companies in Iraq would constantly get itself into deeper and deeper trouble.
  • People would begin shooting each other over a football game.
  • A conservative Senator would be arrested for soliciting gay prostitutes in an airport bathroom, and accidentally plead guilty.
  • Colbert, a “fake new anchor,” would announce his candidacy for President, and solicit the aforementioned conservative senator as his running mate, and articles would wonder whether or not he was being serious.
  • A fictional character would be outed as a homosexual, causing worldwide controversy.

Really, I’m not sure anything could hit the news and not surprise me these days?

Tilt-Shift

Posted on by
2

PBase has a cool feature where you can search by lens. I searched for a few I was interested in, and came across some amazing photos taken with Canon’s 24mm Tilt-shift lens. Tilt-shifts are weird, and descriptions of them are either very basic (first sentence on the Wikipedia article), or very complex (involving the Scheimpflug principle).

I came across one particularly neat gallery. Tilt-shifts are known for two things. One is that you can use them to correct the ‘distortion’ where lines seem to converge. Check out this photo as an example, and another. Notice how nice and vertical the lines are? Compare it to this one, which is still a neat photo, but notice how all the building seem to ‘slant.’ (And an extreme example: it becomes more pronounced at wider angles.)

The other thing it’s good for, though, is playing ‘tricks’ with depth of field. An example. And here’s one with it tilted to the right. So I think I want to try a 24mm TS lens some time.

As an aside, since all my photos were to this one neat gallery, I’ll point out some that have nothing to do with tilt-shift, but are just cool. This one is one of the more brilliant uses of unusual angles. (It’s the same concept as some other photos I saw once, which was done on ice/snow for an even cooler effect.) It’s really pretty remarkable. This one is cool, too. (And another.) Here’s a great one of Boston Harbor. And here’s one showing how cool a 12mm lens is. I think it saw some post-processing, but this one is really cool, too. Ibid.

But my favorite, by far, is this set of Logan. Last time I flew into Logan, all I could think was, “Wow, this would be a great spot for photos.”

Renting a Lens

Posted on by
1

I think I mentioned my newfound interest in camera lens rentals. In particular, the prices are lower than I’d have expected. I have a few different things in mind…

The weekend before Thanksgiving, I’m going to an event with all the major presidential candidates. I’ve found that 200mm isn’t long enough to get good close-ups, and that f/5.6 is far too slow for indoor shooting. (Especially as I don’t like shooting above ISO800.) So I need something longer and faster.

  • The ubiquitous choice is Canon’s 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. f/2.8 is extraordinarily fast, and, as an added bonus, it has Image Stabilization, which apparently eliminates motion blur from hand-holding. 200mm isn’t long enough, but with a 1.4x or 2x teleconverter, it’s long and yet still fast.
  • If I didn’t need the image stabilization, Sigma has a 120-300mm f/2.8 lens, which is just as fast but has f/2.8 at 300mm.
  • Sigma makes another interesting one, an 80-400mm lens. It’s slower at f/4.5-5.6, but it has their OS (Optical Stabilization), basically the same as Canon’s IS. And 400mm is nice and long!
  • I’m a fan of zooms, because I like getting things framed exactly, but Canon makes a 200mm f/2.8 prime, which is highly-regarded and small.

There are some other lenses that I’m interested in, maybe for Thanksgiving or just for general shooting, that I’d like to try:

  • Canon’s 85mm f/1.2 lens is ridiculously fast. It gets the shots that nothing else can. (Well, except for its little brother, the 50mm f/1.2)
  • I’m interested in the wide end of things. Sigma has a 12-24mm lens, which is ridiculously wide-angle. There’s some (pretty much unavoidable) distortion at the wide end, although it can be cleaned up in software. It’s seemingly a popular choice with people taking interior shots.
  • Sigma makes all the interesting ones… They’ve got a 20mm f/1.8, which is both really wide and really fast. And it’s quite cheap.
  • Sigma also makes a 30mm f/1.4 lens, sometimes compared to the 50mm f/1.4 series for full-frame sensors. It’s also much cheaper than Canon’s 35mm f/1.4 lens.

There’s also something unavoidable about going for moon shots, something that requires a nice long lens. (And either a steady hand or a tripod.) It looks like the Thanksgiving time-frame will coincide with a full-ish moon.

Grand Central

Posted on by
Reply

I signed up for an account with Grand Central. It’s a limited beta, but they eventually had a slot for me.

Essentially, I give out my GrandCentral number, which rings in multiple locations. (Currently, my cell phone and my school desk phone.) But it treats calls more like e-mail: I can set up ‘rules’ on what calls get through and what calls don’t. There’s voicemail which I can listen to via the Web.

I have a few invites, if anyone is interested.