wowzors


Daily Kos: State of the Nation

That speech today? The one that has pundits--from the liberal David Corn at The Nation ("This is as sophisticated a discussion of race as any American politician has sought to present to the public") to the conservative Charles Murray, of National Review Online ("it is just plain flat out brilliant—rhetorically, but also in capturing a lot of nuance about race in America. It is so far above the standard we're used to from our pols."), and those inbetween--noting the brilliance, sophistication, sincerity and candor of the words spoken by Obama? That speech? He wrote it himself.

Once more, with feeling:

He wrote it. Himself.

Barack Obama did. He wrote it.

A good breakdown on the credit crunch


Can’t Grasp Credit Crisis? Join the Club - New York Times

Raise your hand if you don’t quite understand this whole financial crisis. It has been going on for seven months now, and many people probably feel as if they should understand it. But they don’t, not really. The part about the housing crash seems simple enough. With banks whispering sweet encouragement, people bought homes they couldn’t afford, and now they are falling behind on their mortgages.

But the overwhelming majority of homeowners are doing just fine. So how is it that a mess concentrated in one part of the mortgage business — subprime loans — has frozen the credit markets, sent stock markets gyrating, caused the collapse of Bear Stearns, left the economy on the brink of the worst recession in a generation and forced the Federal Reserve to take its boldest action since the Depression?

I’m here to urge you not to feel sheepish. This may not be entirely comforting, but your confusion is shared by many people who are in the middle of the crisis.

Epson FYI


Epson America, Inc. - Support - Highlights

The following Epson drivers are for use with Apple Macintosh OS 10.5 - 10.5.x. These drivers are offered for public beta testing only, so Epson provides them "as is," without any warranty, support or liability of any kind. Final release of these drivers is expected to be Q1 of 2008. These Epson Leopard drivers are all new. They are being designed to take advantage of the latest technologies introduced with the Leopard OS. One major feature is the 16-bit printing path. We are designing the drivers to function so that if you are printing 16-bit files from 16-bit capable printing applications, the data remains untouched in native 16-bit form as it arrives into the Epson printer driver for color and screening processing.

LifePixel Digital Infrared Photography IR Conversion, Modification & Scratched Sensor Repair

With the advent of digital cameras it is now possible to photograph infrared light with your digital camera and greatly simplify the infrared photography process. The latest digital cameras are sensitive to infrared light, so much so that manufacturers place a hot mirror filter in front of the sensor to block infrared light to prevent infrared IR light from spoiling regular photographs. It is still possible to shoot digital infrared photography with an unmodified digital camera but the exposures become quite long and in most cases require a tripod, not to mention the need to place an infrared filter in front of the lens to block visible light. All this sure doesn't help the creative infrared photography process. With our digital infrared photography conversion it is now possible to photograph infrared images hand held at low ISO speeds and without the need for infrared filters. Since you no longer need to use an infrared filter in front of the lens it is much easier to change lenses, compose and focus.

Maybe I won't sell that old D20 after all......

Elinchrom Skyport Puts Control in Remote Triggering


Elinchrom Skyport Puts Control in Remote Triggering "The Elinchrom Skyport provides wireless triggering of any pc-corded flash and complete wireless control of Elinchrom RX units. Even non-Elinchrom strobes can be made to perform some new tricks, when used with the computer-controlled modules.

The Skyport is a new, miniaturized, ultra secure, high speed data transmission system providing hand held or computer wireless control of all Elinchrom RX power units. By connecting your camera, flash, or even your computer to the various modules, you can change what features are available. You can select from 4 basic modules: Transmitter, Universal Receiver, RX Receiver, Transceiver RX USB.

The Transceiver RX USB plugs into your computer’s USB port and can control all the modules in the system. The included software lets you store various configurations along with a diagram of the shooting layout."

Wow, nice. One method lets you ru nit from the trigger on cam and another lets you run the whole show from your computer with a USB dongle. It's around $200 for the kit with no lights. Not bad.

Time maching brings the buggy


time machine slow initial backup - fix - Mac Forums

My initial experiences with time machine were not great, glacially slow initial backup rate, left external HDD in unstable state that could not be repaired, stuck on "preparing" etc. The initial backup rate was minutes per Mb--unacceptable. here are some steps I took, based on watching this and apple support discussion groups--this may not work for all problems being experienced.

turn off time machine

Although TM doesnt require exclusive use of an external drive and will use HDs that have other data, you are placing those data at risk:

before you turn on TM backup anything you have on your intended time machine external disk, partition ( as GUID) first, then erase (format as HFS extended, journaled) and check/repair permissions. (dont let time machine format the disk)

exclude the external disk from spotlight indexing (or turn off spotlight altogether); certainly do not commence initial backup while spotlight is performing initial index after leopard install

turn off any virus checking!!

remove TM plist file from any previous attempts and erase and trash any previous backup files

exclude any large frequently updated database files (Entourage, Parallels) from time machine.

If you have multiple drives that you dont intend including in your routine backup, make sure you exclude them in TM

avoid daisy chained FW drives for the initial backup, time machine disk should be directly connected.

that's about it, Time Machine backed up a ~90G system from a 2.4Ghz SR MBP to a LaCie 500G d2 (FW800) in about 120 minutes and has continued with hourly backups since.

good luck!

This did the trick for me. Been using TM since Jan and just had it take a crap on me. Tried all sorts of stuff but this did it. Norton is what slows it down biiiig time.

OK, this is big....


Despite the Federal Reserve's efforts Wall Street fears a big US bank is in trouble - Times Online Global stock markets may have cheered the US Federal Reserve yesterday, but on Wall Street the Fed's unprecedented move to pump $280 billion (£140 billion) into global markets was seen as a sure sign that at least one financial institution was struggling to survive.

The name on most people's lips was Bear Stearns. Although the Fed billed the co-ordinated rescue as a way of improving liquidity across financial markets, economists and analysts said that the decision appeared to be driven by an urgent need to stave off the collapse of an American bank.

“The only reason the Fed would do this is if they knew one or more of their primary dealers actually wasn't flush with cash and needed funds in a hurry,” Simon Maughan, an analyst with MF Global in London, said.

Shit, meet fan.


Carlyle Fund's Assets Seized - washingtonpost.com

The high-profile downfall, part of the broad turmoil in credit markets worldwide, followed a week of frantic negotiations between the Carlyle Group and a number of lenders. Carlyle Group's three founders as recently as Monday were considering injecting cash into the fund as a way to usher it through the credit crisis. By yesterday the fund had defaulted on $16.6 billion of debt and said it expected to default soon on its remaining debt. The fund's $21.7 billion in assets were exclusively in AAA mortgage-backed securities issued by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, traditionally considered secure and conservative investments, which it was using as collateral against its loans.

Nerve-tapping neckband used in 'telepathic' chat

A neckband that translates thought into speech by picking up nerve signals has been used to demonstrate a "voiceless" phone call for the first time. With careful training a person can send nerve signals to their vocal cords without making a sound. These signals are picked up by the neckband and relayed wirelessly to a computer that converts them into words spoken by a computerised voice.

And then the gub-ment can tap it at will and use it in a interrogation. I'll take 2 please!

The Quote

"Photography is the last hope of the talentless." I can't remember where I read it and I can't seem to find it with the google. But it sure is funny.

Television

In late 1973 the trio reformed, calling themselves Television and soon recruiting Richard Lloyd as a second guitarist. They persuaded CBGB's owner Hilly Kristal to give the band a regular gig at his club which had just opened on the Bowery in New York. Television was the first rock group to perform at the club, which was to become, along with Max's Kansas City, the center of the burgeoning punk scene. The members of Television reportedly constructed the first stage at CBGB's where they quickly established a significant cult following.

Man....


HP -1 | MetaFilter Been working on a series of images of old pewter D&D figures..... This just kicked me in the ass to get something posted.

It's amazingly hard to to bring up how much of a influence this stuff had on my geeky, lost in my own head, teen self. And it's even more amazing how you don't think about it until something like this happens.

Does that define true cultural impact? When something is so pervasive one never stops to think about it till it's gone?

XP SP2 vs. Vista RTM vs. Vista SP1: Gaming benchmark

So I plan on upgrading to a new Intel mac soon and plan on installing Bootcamp on it for games ASAP. (BTW, Bootcamp now supports 64 bit!)

I used to have a gaming PC back in 2001-2003 and ran XP fine, but with Vista I wanted to see what I could dig up in the way of recent reviews and found a nice write up over at ZD net.

XP SP2 vs. Vista RTM vs. Vista SP1: Gaming benchmark | Hardware 2.0 | ZDNet.com

I wish it delved into the difference between 64 and 32 bit, but all in all Vista still looks like a dog.