jorge's jome

Try Picasa. I have to admit that I don't use it, but a couple of people have been asking me recently for a recommendation on a cheap photo editing app. I tried Picasa and was impressed by the feature list. I shoot mostly RAW (NEF) format these days, since I want to have the most image data available for post-processing. I was pleased to find out that Picasa has RAW support, and picked up all of my photos when it scanned my hard drive. It also has all of the basic features you would want for photo editing - crop, straighten, highlight and shadow adjustments, as well as various effects you can apply (sepia, soft focus, etc.). And, it's free.

Of course, the feature I hope people will use the most is the export tool. This will allow you to resize your images as you export them, while preserving the originals at their full image size. Particularly, if you're going to email photos, I suggest a resolution of no higher than 800 pixels, otherwise the photo will just be too large and will require scrolling. Your parents are going to get annoyed when you send them a picture of their grandchild and when they go to view it on their ancient 800x600 resolution monitor all they will see is the corner of someone's head.

Posted by at 11:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

This may be the first Apple product I purchase. Walt Mossberg has a good review. I'm currently using a BlackJack, but have been mostly unimpressed. I'm not a huge fan of Windows Mobile, I think it's bloated, slow and has other annoying issues. For example, ActiveSync starts itself automatically several times a day. I don't use ActiveSync, and it is a huge power hog. I get easily double the battery life if I kill ActiveSync, the problem is I have to bring up task manager repeatedly throughout the day to see if it is running, since it seems to spawn itself at random times. The T-Mobile Dash, at least, lets you disable ActiveSync entirely, which leads me to believe this isn't a problem with Windows Mobile as much as it is Cingular's problem for customizing their OS poorly. Additionally, the Cingular tools do not uninstall properly. I tried their email software, then removed it shortly thereafter because it didn't work properly, then every five minutes or so I'd get a popup that told me it couldn't launch the email executable because it couldn't find it. In order to make this problem go away I had to install it again, but cancel halfway through the email setup. Moreover, the BlackJack only has 64 MB of memory, hardly suitable for loading any music. Sure, there is the MicroSD slot, but why should I have to go buy additional memory cards?

The iPhone comes with 4 or 8 GB of memory, larger display, longer talk time, higher resolution camera, comes preloaded with Google Maps, can play YouTube videos...what's not to like? About the only two downsides I can think of are a) it's very expensive and b) I'm not quite sure how well the touchscreen will work for texting, emailing, etc. Oh, and I would have really loved it if they had added a GPS receiver, although I'm sure the battery life would have been significantly impacted.

At the very least, the bar has been raised...significantly. And, we're one step closer to the day when your phone is your entire music store, web browser, email client, navigation system, camera...oh, and a decent phone, as well.

Posted by at 6:55 PM | Permalink

There is nothing more beautiful than the laughter or smile of a child. I had the great pleasure of finally getting to meet Asheráh, the little girl that my friend Larry and his wife Sonia adopted. I spent a few hours with them last weekend. As we were getting ready to head out for a late lunch, Sonia brought out the car seat for Asheráh. Immediately upon seeing this, she let out a shriek of delight, a moment I was fortunate enough to capture right as it happened.

Congratulations, Larry and Sonia, you have a wonderful little girl and I look forward to seeing you all again soon.

Posted by at 12:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Safari is now available for Windows platforms. You can download it here. Quite frankly, I don't expect it to do very well in this area. Windows users mostly use IE because that's all they know. Developers, and others who actually care about things like standards, are already using Firefox. About the only good thing I can think of as a result of this is that developers will now be able to test their web applications on Safari without having to buy a Mac. As usual, the announcement by Steve Jobs was full of useless rhetoric. The "most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world"? Oh, really? Based on what. Terms like "most innovative" are so ambiguous that they shouldn't even be used without some sort of qualification. As for "the most powerful browser in the world", I'd like to see some actual metrics. How about talking about standards, where Safari is probably even worse than IE. Or maybe Apple doesn't think it's an important criterion.

More here.

Posted by at 12:55 PM | Permalink

Wanted to give a shout out to my friend Jeremy from back in my EverQuest days, who just launched a fantasy book review site. I'm looking forward to reading his reviews and recommendations, as long as I've known him he's been an avid fantasy reader.

Congrats on the new site.

Posted by at 8:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Thought I'd plug Party Politics since I just did a shoot for them this past Thursday night. They had a couple of very interesting speakers: Ruben Martinez, author of "Crossing Over", and Supervisory Border Patrol Agent Robert Harvey. The topic was the immigration bill currently before Congress, as well as other immigration issues, in general. A very interesting discussion.

The pictures are actually pretty bad, I totally blew it and accidentally left my camera on ISO 1600 (ugh) when I was playing around with it the night before. But, at least they don't look so bad when you see them in smaller size. You can find them in the photo gallery.

Update: The follow up meeting was 6/21...much better photos.

Posted by at 9:18 AM | Permalink

If you're a regular on the I Can Has Cheezburger? site, you're going to love this.

Posted by at 9:46 PM | Permalink