Why do so many people modify their photos to resemble an image taken by a poor quality camera? Here’s a sample of the filtered, post processed, “how ugly can I make this photo” results from Instagram, one of several popular photo defacement apps for the iPhone.
Here at The Ranch (and it is vast, almost 2.5 acres!) there are still a few Monarch butterfly stragglers. By rights, they should have headed north and east in search of milkweed which the female selects as the only plant where she lays her eggs.
For reasons that remain unclear to me, I stopped writing in this blog 16 months ago. Maybe I lost the password? Something mundane.
Steve Rubel writes about the virtues of correspondence. His post includes a picture of the machine Thomas Jefferson designed which copied his hand written letters as he wrote. Who knew.
I recently shared this funny item from Network World with a friend, who responded thusly:
My offer to write letters “Remember when people wrote letters?” has started to bear fruit. Not a LOT of fruit, mind you. I’ve written and mailed two letters so far, with five more names on my “letters to write” list.
Remember when people wrote letters, on paper, instead of sending email, instant messages or Tweets?
As an experiment, I will write a letter to anyone who asks. You will receive a letter composed for you, by me, about something or other that is not illegal or rude. It will be typed on a typewriter (Underwood Champion manual portable, circa 1950, or IBM Selectric III, circa 1981). It will bear an interesting postmark.
Graham Jones writes Use your pen for your blog, not the keyboard.
From an essay by Cory Doctorow: “…the market for facts has crashed. The Web has reduced the marginal cost of discovering a fact to $0.00. And that means that the two literatures how-to and fiction have effectively merged into one master story, the “plausible premise.”
This surprised me: My laptop is an HP DV4, with 4 GB of RAM. I am watching a DVD (Foyle’s War: The German Woman”) playing on Windows Media Player, running on Vista 64. At the same time VirtualBox 3 is running, and on VBox Ubunto 9.04 is running.
My $75 (used, on Craigslist) video camera works. I’ve shot a few (lame!) minutes of video, and have sucesffuly imported it into a computer via Firewire. That process was easy peasy.