For a long time I collected Motorola radios. I soon realized a “trick” — a lot of them had the same ‘guts’ and just had different software controlling them. If you cut the little “stopper” off of the channel knob on the channel knob and changed 2 bytes in the firmware, you had a 16-channel radio.
The higher-end radios were even more seriously software-dependent. The price of a radio could go up hundreds of dollars (thousands when new) depending on the features it has. But it turns out that the whole series had the same hardware, and various features were loaded via software. (This was actually publicly-known.) Soon, people realized how to suck the software out of one radio and drop it into another radio, and suddenly most hobbyist-owned radios had just about every feature possible.
I’m getting out of the radio trade, though. I began by getting a lot of two Canon digital SLRs off of eBay. The two cameras were very similar: both, in fact, had the same sensor. I kept the 10D, which was bigger and had a solid-metal casing, and sold the 300D, which was smaller and had a silly silver plastic case. Mine has a bunch of features that the 300D didn’t: ISO3200, the ability to control flash brightness, and a whole mess of “Custom Functions” that let you fine-tune things, to name a few.
It turns out that I was more right than I realized about them being closely related, though. There’s a firmware hack that brings a lot of the 10D functionality to the 300D. (All the ones I mentioned and then some!) Of course some features are missing: you can’t select autofocus points, for example.
But it’s interesting to learn that model differentiation via ‘crippling’ features in software is more prevalent than I’d once believed.
We looked into the cost of hiring a coach bus for the day. $1,300.
Multiply that by 5 and you can buy a used coach bus. (Granted, they’re easily $200,000 new, but there are a ton of used ones, and they’re the type of things that are usually driven until 1,000,000 miles or so.)
Assume 200 miles. (This is actually way, way more than we need.) 8 miles to the gallon. (You may do better.) $3/gallon. That’s $75 in fuel.
Assume you pay the driver very well: $20 an hour, and that we have the bus for 8 hours. (He surely makes less, and we don’t need 8 hours.) $160 in labor.
I want to start my own bus company. (More for being hired out for the day than anything than being a Greyhound / Fung Wah, though.) I think I could do it for a lot less.
Buy something like this, spruce up the interior (carpeting?), and re-install the seats, and you’ve got one heck of a bus with 750,000 miles of life left. And, apparently, 100 gallons of fuel already in it… $10-15,000 buys a nice, complete bus.
$750 a day… Assuming $20,000 fixed costs, you break even after 26 days. You have variable costs (fuel, labor, insurance), too, but really, I think that if you could book the bus regularly, you’d do well.
Oh, and there are lots of little “extras” you could do. Replace those huge old TVs with a few LCDs. Probably under $1,000 total cost if you do it yourself? And, in lieu of showing a movie / TV, you could always do an airplane-style display of where you are or something… Or show ads! No direct value, but I think it’d raise the perceived “value” of the bus.
You could invest your profits into a budget limo service. You compete in the taxi market, not the limo market. If I had the choice in riding in a 12-year-old limo (after removing the garbage from the floor?!) or riding in a taxi, I’d pick the limo. Although I wager most of the costs there are variable costs: labor, insurance, maintenance (probably big on a really old American car?), etc. But really, you’re paying less than it’d cost to buy a used taxi. And this one is even less!
Canon’s 1Ds Mark III is 21 megapixels. Please, acknowledge that Canon has won on the megapixel front, and move on. My camera’s resolution is 6 megapixels, and I have a flawless 20×30″ print from it. 21 megapixels is too many for most uses. Going further is wasteful.
Nikon has the right idea, though: improve things other than resolution. My camera maxes out at ISO3200, and the pictures are very bad there. Sometimes, though, ISO3200 isn’t enough. In a dimly-lit room, there are times when ISO3200 still gives me 1/8 of a second or slower shutter speeds. My lens is pretty slow, with f/3.5 as its widest, but even using something like Canon’s 50mm f/1.2 lens, I might not be able to get a useful shutter speed.
Nikon’s D3 goes up to ISO25,600. The images are practically useless at that point. But at least they’re trying. To you camera makers, I present a challenge: top them. I want to be able to shoot at ISO25600 (“25K?”) and get clean images. Can you do it? I bet you can, especially if you quit trying to one-up unnecessarily large resolutions.
Oh, and give us innovative new features, too. Or let us write our own apps! Why isn’t there “aperture bracketing?” Say I’m not sure whether f/4 is enough depth of field. Why can’t I take the picture at f/4, f/5.6, and f/8 and decide afterwards?
Why, on a camera body that cost $2,000 new, is there no “intervalometer” to let me, say, automatically take a picture every 5 seconds? I can buy a $150 accessory to do it, but is it really that hard to make it a software feature?
HDR photography is all the rage. Why not have an “HDR Composite” feature, that will meter for the darkest region, meter for the brightest region, and automatically bracket across the whole range? (Bracketing is not at all new, but it’s “dumb” bracketing — I can do +1/-1 or +2/-2. What if I want to go from +3 to -5 in 16 steps?)
Why do no cameras have an embedded GPS? It’s not the most useful feature, sure, but it’s cool. Make it a “module” people can upgrade to. I’d be awfully tempted to buy it.
It’s slowly becoming a reality, but why not have a USB2 port and let me plug in accessories? Currently USB2 ports are just for copying images to your computer. Why can’t I stick my thumb drive in and record to that? Or my external hard drive? And why can’t I just copy pictures over to my external hard drive right from the camera? Why do I need a computer?
Why are the LCDs on back such low-resolution? Play with an iPhone for a while, at 160ppi, and then look at any camera’s LCD. It looks like comparative crap. That LCD is important, too: I’m trying to see how my image out. Why would you give me a piece of crap for that? I’m yet to see a camera with an interface that doesn’t look like it predates Y2K, either. Again, play with the iPhone. It just looks cool. Don’t overdo it, but would it kill you to at least make the interface on your cameras look nice?
Some really high-end lenses have an IS/OS feature — basically, the lenses compensate for minor shake through the use of a gyro. This feature gets rave reviews from anyone able to afford the $2,000 lenses. Why not build an IS sensor into your camera instead, so that, regardless of lens, your sensor stabilizes for minor shake?
Please, camera makers of the world, quit it with megapixels. Let’s go for some innovation.
Having spent at least a month in the parking garage, my trip home was a clear cry for help from my filthy car. And if you’re going to do it, you might as well do it well.
I found some stuff called Krud Kutter. It’s a strong cleaning product. So I used lots of it. There were a few spots (like my gas cap) that had lots of caked-on dirt. I also used it on the base of the car, which had gotten quite dirty. As had, not shockingly, some parts under the hood, and my wheels. I’m telling you, wheels are the secret to having your car clean.
I first sprayed it where needed, and then let it sit while I went and got the hose set up. About five minutes later, I hosed off the car. Already, it was looking much better.
Turtle Wax apparently makes a car wash solution that’s supposed to leave a ‘hard wax shell.’ I don’t believe that, because I cleaned my windows with it too, and there’s definitely no hard wax shell on my windows. Of course, while scrubbing the car clean, you’ve got to re-apply the Krud Kutter and scrub the dirty parts, which suddenly looked much cleaner.
When all was said and done, you dry it off with a Calfironia water blade. It makes quick work of drying your car. (If you don’t dry the car, you’ll get water spots everywhere and it’ll end up looking worse.)
Take a break to let everything dry completely, including the tires. (Actually, I cheated and used another cloth during this time to scrub the wheels with Krud Kutter and a rough sponge again: using the same cloth you’re cleaning the car with is just asking for trouble.)
With everything dry, there are some more steps:
Re-apply Rain-X to the windows. I find that you just need to do front and rear, the front side windows, and the mirrors.
Since it’d been a long time, I used a clear-coat safe polish. It was supposed to be a wax, too, but I was using it for the polish qualities. (In theory, a polish is slightly abrasive, so you’ll end up with a much shinier finish, and the extremely thin scratches that had been built up disappeared.)
As I waited for that to dry, I used Armor-All on the tires. It makes much more of a difference than I expected the first time. Over time your tires turn a dull gray, and your wheels go from silver to, well, dull gray too. Having just gotten the wheels shiny, the tires still looked their dull gray. After applying the Armor-All, they looked pretty much brand-new. But they don’t have that ridiculous shiny look that the tire-shine sprays do.
With that done, I now had the tell-tale white haze all over my car from the polish/wax. I took a cloth and wiped the car down. (Hint: for an SUV, you’ll really want more than one cloth.) It’s important to note that the car has to be spotlessly dry, or you’re wasting your time wiping it down: any moisture will just smear the white haze around and make it look even worse. It’s not a fatal mistake, you can wipe it down when again when it dries. It’s just a colossal waste of your time. The key is to dry your car prior to polishing/waxing, but there’ll inevitably be some little bits of moisture anyway: so you just get them as you’re waxing. You’re supposed to apply it with a damp cloth anyway.
You always follow up a polish with a wax. I’m a big fan of this wax, which smells so good that I want to bathe in it. Let that dry and then wipe the haze off.
Here’s a secret: when you’re done waxing the car and you need to wait a few minutes for it to dry, wax your wheels. No, really. Not only will they shine more, but it’ll make it harder for brake dust and tar and the like to stick to them. Even having scrubbed them super-clean, I do them last, to make sure any dirt on them doesn’t get transferred to my car, where it may scratch the paint.
While waiting in between steps, you can apply Armor-All to other plastic/rubber surfaces. (In my case, some trim around the engine, a plastic cover on the rear bumper, the rear windshield wiper, and the ‘knobs’ on my roof rack.)
You don’t want to go too crazy, but it’s worth mentioning that you can clean your engine, as long as you know what not to mess with. (E.g., I wouldn’t spray the battery with a hose, and I avoid certain things that don’t look like they should get wet; overall, an engine’s pretty well suited to getting hosed down. Just make sure it’s cool, or you risk enormous problems!) I’ve cleaned the engine before, so it wasn’t that dirty, but a little Krud Kutter in strategic places got it looking much better, and then Armor-All on some hoses and plastic covers that looked like they could use it. Just use common-sense when doing this: components that are greased probably shouldn’t be sprayed with a degreaser, for example, and steer clear of things like filters, although they’re covered most of the time anyway. While I’m in the engine, I give it a basic once-over: I’m no mechanic, but it’s simple to see if the liquid reservoirs need refilling. I just had to top off my windshield washer fluid, which I just did with water.
It makes sense to me to clean the inside of the car at the same time. I usually do it afterwards, as I usually end up standing inside the car to reach the roof. The steps here are pretty common sense: pick up garbage, vacuum, clean the windows, dust, and wipe down with Armor-All where appropriate. Oh, and make sure the clock is accurate. That’s a pet peeve of mine. Follow the advice on the Armor-All bottle and don’t apply it to your steering wheel or pedals, because they’ll become slippery.
I can’t for the life of me find the quote, but I think it was Thomas Jefferson, or maybe Lincoln, who said in his inaugural address that, “We are all Democrats, all Republicans…”
I think that is exceptionally important these days. Last night, on campus, we had a debate with the Republicans. We bashed Bush, and they bashed Hillary. In the Senate, Democrats seem to oppose whatever the Republicans do, and the Republicans oppose whatever the Democrats do.
In theory, the parties are really important: much like the three branches of government, they keep each other in check. The country probably won’t go socialist, because the Republicans will oppose it. And we won’t become a fascist dictatorship because the Democrats won’t allow it. (Of course, some would call the current Administration a fascist dictatorship, and at last night’s meeting someone went on about how the Massachusetts government is now truly run by socialists; realistically, though, we’re not even close to either.)
In practice, people are too devoted to their parties. I don’t agree with everything the Democrats do: every now and then, I have to go with the Republicans on something. And I have a lot of respect for some Republicans who have taken the side of the Democrats. (Which is happening increasingly often when Bush is involved?)
So nothing gets done. Bush just vetoed a bill that would have given healthcare to children who can’t afford it. Did we ever renew the assault weapons ban? Michigan’s government almost shut down.
What did we debate last night? Whether or not Hillary could lead the country, and whether she could stare down world leaders. (My question, “Why do we want a president who intimidates world leaders?” got lost in the fray.) What else might we have talked about if we’d had more time? Whether or not we’re ready for a black President? Whether or not Rudy is inappropriately using 9/11 for his gain? The MoveOn ad?
It seems like not many people care about what’s right anymore, as much as whether their side wins. What do I think of the MoveOn ad? I don’t know, I never saw it. I don’t give a crap, really, just like I don’t give a crap about whether Hillary can look intimidating, or whether Rudy’s unceasing talk about 9/11 is inappropriate. I give a crap about children in poor families dying for want of health care. I give a crap about our soldiers dying in a pointless war. I give a crap about us not having an assault weapons ban. I give a crap about the fact that when I was a little kid, America was, without a doubt, the best nation in the world, and now most of the world hates us. I give a crap that our economy is going down while the rest of the world watches their economies soar. I give a crap that the government has such a deficit that we’re borrowing money just to pay off our debt. I give a crap that the big investors are moving all their money into foreign economies. I give a crap that schools aren’t getting the funding they need to keep America competitive. I give a crap that the military is losing talented people because of their sexual orientation. I give a crap that college keeps getting more and more expensive and we’re cutting loans. I give a crap that we’re not giving benefits to soldiers who came back from the war.
Please, politicians, get it. I’m a Democrat. I don’t want the Democrats to “win” in Congress: I want America to win. And we’re not.
The poor Zune has so much going against it. For one thing, they decided to make it brown; the most delicate way I’ve seen this put was something to the effect of, “The Zune team decided that brown was the hot new color. No other marketing team has reached this conclusion.”
I don’t like DRM, not even on my iPod, but the thing the iPod has going for it is that it’ll play that DRMed music. A lot of people complained that the Zune didn’t play half the formats of music they had.
And then there was the “orgasm screen,” a really bizarre screen during the installer that’s probably Not Safe for Work. Also probably NSFW is their logo upside-down, although that can be considered more bad luck than poor planning.
But I still gave them credit for trying. They have a terrible market share, but they tried.
Well! They just released the “Zune 2.0,” and, well, see for yourself. They did ditch the brown, although they also introduced “diarrhea green.” But I think this is even worse: the old one made me think, “Good for Microsoft, designing their own MP3 player.” Now I think, “Wow, it’s a bad clone of the iPod.” The looks are just too similar. They added some features, such as more video codecs, which is great. WiFi syncing to a computer? Awesome idea.
There is one thing that I think they got right, though. They failed the design, they failed the color choices (again), they failed having safe-for-work backgrounds in the installer screen, but they have a DRM-free music store now. I didn’t think Apple could lose its edge, but now Microsoft and Amazon are both offering DRM-free songs. And you know what? I don’t think I’m going to get my songs through iTunes anymore. Now that Linux is my primary OS, all the songs I bought from iTunes don’t play due to DRM. Apple’s got to do something, or it’s going to start losing, at least on music sales.
I’m eating some nuts right now. They’re unsalted, unroasted, so they’re really not even that good.
Which got me wondering… How did people discover nuts? Were they accustomed to ripping things off trees and eating them? Did they try acorns? All the trees with inedible berries?
But here are some other things I’ve always wondered about the discoveries of:
Smoking. I think I posted about this before, actually. I think that, even if I lived all by myself in the woods with nothing to do and nothing to eat and no basis for what was normal, I’d never think, “Let’s rip this leaf up, dry it, set it on fire, and inhale the smoke.” And why tobacco leaves? Did they try oak leaves? Grass? Cabbage? Corn? Poison Ivy?
Sex. No, really. What else did they try before their breakthrough discovery? I think a fair amount of what we hold as “intuitive” is really societal. Was it clear initially that it should be a male and a female, and what went where, or were there lots of other variations?
Beer. Who thought, “Let’s take these unappetizing ingredients, let them rot for months, and then drink it!”? Intuitively, wouldn’t you think, “This has been rotting for months, I don’t dare drink it?” What else did they let ferment before ingesting?
Cheese. Kind of the same concept. Spoiled milk is disgusting. But getting it to cheese? I don’t think I could ever even eat cheese if I really thought about its manufacture. And for the first, say, century after cheese was discovered, I’m fairly certain that there weren’t supermarkets that sold pre-packaged cheese.
Milk. Really thinking about where it comes from, what led us to drink that? Did we try drinking bodily fluids from other animals? Do I even want to know?
Meat. Seriously, who thought, “Let’s kill that cow, cut it up, and eat it?” Was cooking devised right away? I love my burgers, but I’d rather starve to death than go up and start gnawing on a cow. And cutting up a cow and then gnawing away sounds even more disgusting.
Contact lenses. I’m glad I got them long after the technology was perfected. I’m fairly certain that if someone came up to me and said, “I’m working on a revolutionary new technology that lets you stick ‘glasses’ directly to your eyeball,” I just would have laughed… Or run screaming. Depending on whether or not they wanted to try them on me.
John Kerry gave a speech at Faneuil Hall today, focusing on economics. Between being interested, having been a Kerry ’04 supporter, wanting to try my hand at photographing the event, and having no classes during the day, I decided to attend. What follows is a write-up of the event, a combination of photography stuff and politics.
I was worried when I found out it was inside. I have a fairly “slow” lens (f/5.6 when zoomed in, which I knew is where I’d be shooting), so I wasn’t sure how they’d come out. It ended up being fairly bright inside, but shooting zoomed to 200mm still requires a fairly fast exposure. I left the lens wide open (which has the added benefit of helping to throw the background out of focus) the whole time, and bumped the camera up to ISO800. (I spent a little time at ISO1600 to try to get some “safety shots,” figuring a little grain was better than motion blur, but I can’t even tell without looking at the metadata which was which.)
This is not John Kerry, but I’ve still got a few photos uploading so I’ll start with those that are already online. This guy was marching around Harvard Square ranting about his dislike for Jews. I kind of wanted to get into his head: momentarily pretending that hating Jews isn’t crazy in and of itself, I have to wonder what possesses someone to dress up in a ridiculous costume and try to convince a ton of other people that they should hate Jews, too. Does this guy have a job? Is he sane in other settings, or is he always like this? Does he go to the grocery store to buy eggs and ham and rant to the cashier about Jews? Does he have a wife? What’s going on with the couple beyond him to the left?
Upon seeing this guy, someone near me wondered aloud, “Can you say that in public?!” This guy must not have gone to our school, because just a few weeks ago, we handed out about 1,000 copies of the Constitution. He wouldn’t have had to read far, even: we put that part right up front for him.
I had lunch in Quincy Market. Since I was by myself and didn’t feel like looking for a seat, I ate at one of those bizarre troffs tables. I took this shot with my 18-50mm lens, at 18mm. Even with the camera’s crop, 18mm (effectively 29mm) is really wide! This picture should also go in textbooks that talk about barrel distortion.
What are the odds that everyone here would be in orange? (It was pure coincidence.) I really like seeing that it’s not just young college students calling for Bush’s ouster.
The room was really impressive, and was a great place to hold something like this. Of course, there was no shortage of flags. The inscription on the bottom of the pictures behind Senator Kerry reads, “Liberty and Union Now and Forever.”
This breaks one of the cardinal rules of photography. You want the subject looking “in.” It’d have been great had he been facing the right (his left), but he wasn’t. Also, at least for me, the object that my eye jumps to is the woman in green, who was just some random audience member.
The enormous picture behind him wasn’t level. Another “cardinal rule” I’m big on is keeping straight lines. I’m more prone to noticing than most people, but when the horizon is slanting, it really detracts from the picture. I realized early on that my pictures were coming out pretty crooked, so I started being careful to try to keep the bottom of the frame nice and level. But on more zoomed-out shots like this, the stage was pretty slanted. I’d love to fix the alignment of the painting, but when I try aligning pictures on walls, they tend to fall off. I think I’d be in pretty deep trouble if I knocked that painting down.
Here’s the room. It’s on the upper floor of Faneuil Hall, and is incredibly nice. (This was a little before we started; the guy on the right is an usher.)
Any idea who this lady is? She was right near the front and a lot of people were coming up saying hello. I’m assuming she’s either a former politician or wife of a politician, but I didn’t recognize her.
See what I mean? Here I aligned the image so the stage was perfectly level. Look at that sloping painting! Isn’t it distracting?
Kerry talked a lot about health care, and the utter disaster that is our status quo. He actually slipped in what I thought was a hilarious joke… Discussing Romney’s move for universal health care in Massachusetts, he mentioned how he’s now downplaying it. “It’s almost as if he’s saying he was for universal health care before he voted against it.”
He also discussed tax cuts and the preposterous situation of giving the richest Americans huge tax rebates. “Teresa and I didn’t ask for a tax break. We didn’t need one, especially not when 43 million [?] Americans can’t afford basic health care.”
I’m not sure I did such a great job going over what happened, but it was great. My one critique is that he seemed a little too quick to bash Republicans: it’s something most all Democrats are quick to do, but unless we start working together, the schism is going to get wider. We need to work with the Republicans, not against them.
I have a lot of excess capacity on this server. The ‘basic’ hosting industry is shot to hell: $3 for 100 GB of disk space and unlimited bandwidth might be considered expensive. (It goes without saying that they won’t actually let you use that much.)
But here are a few markets that aren’t touched on enough:
Personal selling and hand-holding to businesses that don’t have websites. Three thoughts here:
$50 a month is a normal business expenses. Someone who comes and talks to them and gets them their very own domain name? That’s practically a bargain! I bet their credit card processing bill is at least five times as much, and that their phone bill is at least twice as much.
The type of sites I’m talking would be static content, and wouldn’t even need to be updated more than a few times a year.
Keeping a live mirror on another server would be awesome, and it’s something almost no one does.
Web design (and product photography!) could be offered for additional costs.
Hosted services. There are people out there who want a blog and their own domain. $5 a month is entirely reasonable and in the “Why not?” category of expenses. But they’d get nothing but access to their own WP blog and some space to upload posted files. They couldn’t set it up themselves, which would permit a few things:
Security: they’ll all be running the most up-to-date version.
Caching: Default WordPress gets 4 hits per second after rigorous benchmarking. Unsurprisingly, many ‘untuned’ servers go down very quickly when they get linked to. I don’t know if I’d survive digg, but I can at least improve things.
Convenience for the customer!
Theoretically, reduced disk access if I could install it once and have everyone else work off symlinks. This is probably more trouble than it’s worth in practice.
‘Personal’ wikis. I keep a MediaWiki install for my class notes. It also now houses my to-do list, a wishlist, and a list of gift ideas, among with various other thoughts. It’s an incredibly handy way to set things up. Plus, by virtue of being a personal wiki, it’s not going to get a lot of traffic. Again, something like $5 a month.
I don’t have the energy or time right now to aggressively pursue these. But I think all 3 would work pretty well.
