WirelessDoc

Video comments now enabled via Seesmic

Now, if I need to demonstrate something, I can use Seesmic for producing a video, or allow a commenter to upload a video reponse to a post.

Let's see if this works.

And it does.

Passphotoprint.com: quick way to DIY passport photos

Guess which photo costs $14 and which 31 cents?

I had the polaroid picture in the lower right taken at a Kinko's in Manhattan for $14. (The retake was even worse.)

Then, I found out about Passphotoprint.com. This Web site takes your 2x2 inch digital photo and gangs it up on a 4x6 inch print. I took a 15-minute walk to the nearest RiteAid drugstore, inserted the SD card into their Kodak printing machine, and they produced an excellent 4x6 print in minutes for 31 cents.

To take the photo I set my Nikon point & shoot S10 on a pile of books. I was facing the window in my bedroom and used the self timer and fill flash. I had a piece of white foamcore laying around that I propped up behind me for the background. I kept taking photos till I felt I got an acceptable shot.

They guy at Kinko's was discussing when he should take his break with his supervisor when he did my photo. That polaroid doesn't even meet the specs for a passport photo.

A most excellent optical illusion

Yes, I woke up early this morning, 6am-ish, and did my Web research on medical informatics. So now I'm taking a break, waiting for Fedex to deliver my Dragon NaturallySpeaking Medical software.

Here's a most excellent optical illusion created by a MIT professor, and served up on BoingBoing.net. Squares A and B are the same gray tone, despite what you're perceiving. I brought the image into Macromedia Fireworks (now Adobe), and sliced out a portion of the A square to bring it along side square B. Voila!:

Digital lifestyle: Amazon.com to Acquire Audible.com

From the Amazon PR Release:

"Audible.com offers the best customer experience, the widest content selection and the broadest device compatibility in the industry," said Steve Kessel, Amazon.com's senior vice president for worldwide digital media. "Working together, we can introduce more innovations and bring this format to an even wider audience."

They also plug the out of stock Kindle in the press release.

I've been using audiobooks to listen to John M. Barry's The Great Influenza (unabridged, just over 19 hours), Ian McEwan's Atonement, William Gibson's Pattern Recognition, Neil Gaiman's Fragile Things. It was a little difficult with Gibson's work because he's invents new cyberwords and sometimes writes in sentence fragments which makes comprehension difficult. I chose to download the ebook of Cormac McCarthy's The Road for this reason.

The good thing about audiobooks is that you can listen while during your entire commute without interruption, and it's great for a long walk in the city. The really bad thing is that you can't bookmark or navigate to a specific chapter. This works for fiction, but for a science book that you want to use for future reference, it's a real pain.

Mobipocket is great for reading ebooks on your smartphone. You can annotate, bookmark, even draw pictures with their free reader. I've even put chapters of Current Medical Diagnosis and Treatment 2008 on my Treo 700p using the desktop Mobipocket software. You lose the illustrations, charts and graphs, but having the text on hand that you can bookmark works for me. It also loads the texts onto the SD card, so can carry many books without clogging up the phone's internal memory.

Multitouch is spreading to more devices

Uncle Walt says so.

This is the interface introduced with the Apple iPhone, then carried over to the iPod Touch. If you're not a gadget person, you might not realize that this is not the traditional touch screen used on what we called PDAs in the olden times, but it's that feature where you can flick, swipe and squeeze your finger tips on screen to navigate or resize an image.

It's now appearing on the the touchpad of the MacBookAir, and according to Mossberg, another company, Synaptics will use something similar for the touchpads it produces for laptop manufacturers.

And, you have the companies such as HTC who are making cell phones with a Multitouch-like capability to  ride on the coattails of the iPhones popularity.

Western Digital My Passport Essential portable hard drive gets a makeover

There's a new announcement about a design change, but I don't see much difference from the one I now have. I'm happy with the one I have as far as size and convenience is concerned. It comes with software that automates the back up process, and I would consider something like this is truly an essential item.

Anyway the PR says that  the newly designed models have capacities of 160, 250 and 320GB, with the last one priced at a reasonable $200.

Digital lifestyle: leaked Nikon press releases mention D60 and new lenses

Supposedly these are items Nikon will be revealing at PMA 08:

Nikon D60 - a 10.7 megapixel DSLR with auto sensor dust reduction, retouch menu, and active d-lighting. No wow factor, though, especially with only a 0.8 magnification viewfinder. The D80 does it better, and the price has gone down. I don't see what all the fuss is about doing post processing in the camera. You can't the most out of a DSLR unless you're willing to use decent software on a PC to optimize the final image. Just my opinion.

Nikon PC-E Nikkor 24mm f/3.5D ED Tilt/Shift lens - Get your Scheimpflug on. A long needed wide angle lens for architectural or tabletop photography. It will be expensive (and probably extremely sharp), so it's not a lens that most photogs will buy.

Nikon AFS Micro 60mm Nikkor f/2.8G ED lens - an update of a classic. (I owned one once.) They're trying to say that it works as a portrait lens. This lens is so sharp it tends to show too much detail for portrait work. Most photogs who do macro use a longer focal length lens. With this lens, you wind up getting really close to get the magnification you want, so that you wind up either blocking the light or scaring the insect, if that's what you do. Not big news.

Nikon AF-S DX Nikkor 16-85mm f/3.5-5.6G ED VR - This lens should make the biggest splash. This could become the ultimate walk-around lens if image quality is noteworthy. With Nikon's 1.5 crop factor, it's basically a 24-128mm in 35mm SLR terms. You might not need VR at the wide end, and it's not a fast lens, but if you pair it with the superb high ISO performing D300, this is quite a setup. I would imagine that this lens is smaller than the very popular 18-200mm Nikkor VR, and could overtake it in sales. Could be a big winner for Nikon.

That is if these leaks are true.

Digital lifestyle: Some good deals from Dell

Here's the best one I've seen for a Dell notebook in a while. It's preconfigured, so you can't choose options in the notebook (I wish I could get Windows XP instead), but it also means that they can ship it faster:

Digital lifestyle: Need a better PowerPoint presentation? See how Steve Jobs does it

BusinessWeek columnist Carmine Gallo analyzes Steve Jobs' PowerPoint skills for his keynote at this last MacWorld and comes up with ten tips you might consider when you create your next presentation.

Garr Reynolds' blog Presentation Zen is a favorite of mine, and he looks at a Jobs presentation just over two years ago (Visual Simplicity: Steve Jobs does it again), but it's still relevant.

Digital lifestyle: courting the NY Times

It seems At&T has signed "an exclusive deal with The New York Times to link directly to the newspaper's mobile website from its operator portal."

There is also some speculation that Google might be looking to purchase it.

The NY Times mobile Web site plays a major role in demonstrating the capabilities of the Safari browser on the iPhone.