Just learned that my friend and colleague Alec Muffett was in a motorcycle accident in France. At this moment he’s in intensive care in Lille. Updates are being posted as comments to the most recent crypticide blog entry, and also at Chris Samuel’s blog. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
Herewith a picture of Alec demonstrating his recumbent tricycle to me. I took it back on March 2nd, just after we’d had dinner. (That’s why we were indoors – it was too dark outside, and my Treo doesn’t have a flash anyway.)
Now they tell us… (even if some of us knew all along)
Unsurprising news via the BBC: “Security threats to PCs with Microsoft Windows have increased so much that computer users should consider using a Mac, says a leading security firm [Sophos].” I think the appropriate response is a Homer Simpson-like “Doh!”
Fixing pixel defects on my Kodak P850 camera
I just ran into a problem with my new Kodak P850 camera, and eventually managed to resolve it. I’m posting about it in the hope that it may be useful for others.
I was using the Kodak EasyShare software that came with my P850 to review a number of digital pictures for inclusion in my last blog entry (about Tommy). In several of the pictures, I noticed a white blob in the same place in each shot. At first I thought it was a stuck pixel on my laptop (no), then that it might be a bug in the EasyShare software (no). I opened one of the most obviously affected images in Photoshop Elements and verified the existence of the defect.
I was puzzled. Had the problem always been there? I looked back through my library. The early pictures were just fine. The problem showed up as a single white pixel in a picture taken on April 10, and over time grew to affect a small cluster of pixels. It was hard to see except with a solid dark background, but once you knew where to look it was present in everything. (For an example, look at the hi-res version of the picture of Tommy in the preceding blog entry. Look at the middle of his left ear and scan right towards the edge of the cushion.)
At this point, I wasn’t sure what to do. Was this a CCD defect, like a dead pixel in an LCD screen? What was the warranty position on such things? I surfed over to the Kodak web site and drilled down through consumer cameras, P series, P850. I wasn’t even sure what terminology I should be using. The web site offered an interactive troubleshooter, but none of the questions seemed to address my symptoms.
Eventually I found the FAQ. I didn’t know what question to ask, so I had to scan through the whole thing, 10 entries at a time. On the last screenful, the question
What are pixel defects and amplified digital noise?
appeared. This looked about right. The symptoms matched what I was seeing.
The solution was to upgrade the camera firmware from version 1.00 to 1.01, then use the Calibrate Imager function to, er, calibrate the imager. The firmware download was easy, but installation was fiddly: it doesn’t seem to work with a dock. Instead you have to use a USB cable, remove your SD card, copy the new firmware file to a suitable location*, transfer the firmware to the camera using EasyShare, restart the camera in order to update the firmware, restart the camera again, and reinstall the SD card. Then, and only then, I was able to run Calibrate Imager from the camera’s maintenance menu.
The final test was to take a few uniformly dark images to see if any pixel defects were lurking. So far it appears that answer is no – but I’ll be checking regularly. After all, this pixel defect just crept up on me….
Meanwhile, as the FAQ points out:
NOTE: Using the Calibrate Imager feature to reset the imager on the camera will not fix pixel defects in pictures you have already taken. You may be able to edit existing pictures with image-editing software on your computer.
Doh!
—
* I had to put it on my Desktop under Mac OS 10.4.7; the EasyShare application wouldn’t allow me to select the mounted DMG image.
Tommy staying with us
Our grandson Tommy is staying with us for a few days. I picked up up from his home in Lynn on Monday morning, and he stayed overnight with us last night. This morning I took him back to Lynn for the Fourth of July block party on the street where he lives. The original plan was that I should leave him there and pick him up again tomorrow, but after a last-minute replan we decided that I should bring him back to Brookline for a few more days.
For a one year old, he has an impressive attention span. His favourite toy (here) is a shape-sorter box, and he’ll happily play with it for almost an hour without getting distracted.
There’s a quirky little game I’ve been playing with Tommy ever since… well, practically ever since he was born. Whenever he and I are together, I make a point of reciting Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky to him at least once a day. We’re probably up to 50 repetitions by now. At first there was no particular reaction; just what you’d expect when an infant hears a rhythmic chant in a bass register. Gradually he started to recognize and respond, and by the time he was eight or nine months old the almost-whispered poem would cause him to enter a near-trance state. (Hypnosis? Who knows. Not intentional, that’s for sure.)
Today I have only to begin “‘Twas brillig”, and he stops whatever he’s doing and gazes at me with a conspiratorial smile, anticipating the drama of “One, two! One, two! And through and through, the vorpal blade went snicker-snack!”, and the big hug that accompanies “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”.
I wonder what he’ll make of it in a few years….
Random 10
I must confess that I made iTunes “re-roll the dice” today. I use a “smart playlist” to generate these Random 10 selections, and today it came up with a list that included five tracks by one artist and two “anonymous” tracks (from CDs that I’ve ripped but haven’t entered the tracklists for). So I kept my favourite track from the first artist and tried again….
- “Jumbo” by Underworld (from Underworld Live: Everything, Everything)
- “Isis Veiled” by the Tear Garden (from The Last Man To Fly)
- “London” by the Pet Shop Boys (from Release)
- “She Moves Through The Fair” by Fairport Convention (from What We Did On Our Holidays)
- “Love Child” by the Supremes (from The Ultimate Collection)
- “Things I Want To Tell You” by No-Man (from Together We’re Stranger)
- “Fadeaway” by Porcupine Tree (from Up The Downstair)
- “Rope Ladder To The Moon (live)” by Colosseum (from Anthology)
- “Underground” by Men At Work (from Men At Work ’81-’85)
- “Funeral In His Heart” by October Project (from the Rochester, NY CD-R)
That’s better.
Escaping from the Baghdad death squads
Here’s a chilling account by a London Sunday Times journalist of escaping from Baghdad after being targeted for assassination:
“You have been named as a target — there is a specific danger,” my contact had told me, warning me not to go outside.
Unfortunately, there was no official body to turn to amid the chaos of Iraq. I felt angry, vulnerable and helpless. In short, I suddenly knew what it was to be an Iraqi.
[…]
I had interviewed people on the run but never once did I imagine that I too might be marked out for murder simply for doing my job.
Ever Tried; Ever Failed
I watched the England-Portugal match yesterday. It was a timeless contest, the kind that leaves you surprised when all of a sudden 45 minutes are up, and you have to wait for the next half. And after the disappointing conclusion, I wondered whether to try to blog about it. Andrew Sullivan’s piece put it nicely in context in a way I’d like to have done, so I’ll defer to him. But unlike me, he couldn’t bring himself to watch:
I couldn’t watch yesterday either. At least it was against Portugal, a wonderful little country, with old friendship with England. Losing to France and Germany is existentially far worse. But all the classic elements were there: the endless tension, the injury of the good player, the explosion of the hothead, the injustice of being clearly the better team but without the ability to score, the over-time, the penalty kicks, and then the inevitable emotional collapse; and the consumption of enormous amounts of warm beer to dull the pain. The hangovers in England today are probably epic even by that island’s exacting standards.
In my case, the analgesic was a stiff gin and tonic….
Dragon flies
Taken at the Broadmoor Audubon reservation yesterday.
( I love the colours of the eyes in the first one – check out the 2592×1944 version.)
A happy ending… but even so
From Pharyngula:
There was a weird court case [in Oklahoma] recently. Well, maybe not so weird, unfortunately – I could see it happening here. To make it short, an atheist girl in high school was kicked off a sports team because she wouldn’t join in team prayers; abuse ensued; school officials lied; the principal assaulted the father; police and principal perjured themselves to press charges against him; threats were made to try and drive the family out of the state.
Read the whole thing. Amazing. Simply amazing. (And depressing.)
Watching the planes from Constitution Beach
I’ve just posted a photo library of airliner pictures that I took yesterday from Constitution Beach. (Take the Blue Line, get off at Orient Heights, walk 5 minutes. Easy.) This is mostly of interest to aviation geeks; sensible people are unlikely to care about the fact that the equipment on the afternoon BOS-FRA Lufthansa flight was A340-313X, registration D-AIFA. However I did manage to get a couple of tasty shots, including this one:
