Yamaha Bodibeat selects music to match your heartbeat

Now why didn’t I or anyone else think of this before?

As your workout progresses the Yamaha Bodibeat searches for songs to match your intensity.

I should invent the inverse player for blood pressure…

Starbucks Usability: Pour left, stir right?

Pet peeve I have with Starbucks coffee stations…

Not sure if it’s just me. I’m right-handed, so I stir my coffee with my right hand and pour with my left. Is that true for most right-handed people? If so, and since we out-number left-handed people 9:1 (sorry lefties), why does Starbucks keep their milk and cream on the right side?!?

Intellivision Memories

Interesting study:

Half Of 26-Year-Old’s Memories Nintendo-Related

BROOKLYN, NY—Nearly 50 percent of 26-year-old paralegal Philip Jenkins’ encoded long-term memories involve button combinations, game-playing experiences, and spatial-cognitive maps of various levels and worlds from Nintendo’s line of video-game consoles, a team of neuroscientists reported Tuesday.

It would be interesting to see how the commercial world is trying to relate and market to the video-gaming generation.

My first console was an Intellivision. As a 35 year old, my memories and spacial-cognitive maps are partially filled with crappier graphics (though considered “advanced” at the time) and less complex virtual worlds. Long hours of eye watering Astrosmash levels, and Tron Deadly Disks high scores ingrained in my head for decades. Wow.. there’s a page for that too? Wikipedia (authors) always seems to impress me.

Interesting. Could explain my addiction to my iPod video and why I mastered its controls so quickly.

What was I talking about?

Disappointing Nikon HDR Experience

As I stated in one of my earlier posts, I was eager to learn HDR photography now that I have my new DSLR.

Unfortunately I’ve run into a couple of disappointments while attempting to learn this technique.

First, with the camera. After discussing with a fellow hobby photographer at work, he suggested using the auto-bracketing mode to help with HDR shots. Funny, I don’t recall an auto-bracketing feature while I was playing with my camera. And sure enough, after searching online, I discover this feature is not available on the D40x :(

Disappointment number 2? Finally got Photoshop CS2 installed and was eager to try its Merge to HDR feature. Took a series of shots, without a tripod. Carefully adjusting the settings to get a good range. Uploaded the photos to my computer. File > Automate > Merge to HDR…

“Could not complete the Merge to HDR command because a command was not available.”???

Found a page on the Adobe site and followed the series of suggestions, but none of them solved the issue. I searched for a while on the Web until I ran into this post. Half way down you see the real issue:

“Bingo. CS2 can’t read D3 NEF files. You need the latest Adobe Camera Raw for that, and it only runs under CS3, not CS2.”

You’re kidding me?

RAW vs. JPEG

Was playing around with features on my SLR and left the image quality setting on RAW. The following day we attended an engagement and took quite a few pictures (and filled up most of my memory card) before I realized that I had forgotten the setting and switched it back to a JPEG setting.

The following day I was uploading photos to Flickr when I realized that I wasn’t allowed to upload RAW files, at least not with my account.

You would think the software that came with my Nikon camera, Picture Project, would have such a feature. But I was disappointed to find out it didn’t. Then started the quest to find a RAW-to-JPEG batch converter. In my particular case, I was in need of a NEF-to-JPEG converter. Eventually I found one and converted the 100 or so pictures to JPEG before uploading them to the Web.

I then decided to do some research on the 2 formats to see when RAW is necessary. Found a good thread in a Flickr photography group that allowed folks to share their opinions. Overall, if you have the need and time to do post-processing on the image use RAW, otherwise stick to JPEG. I’ll probably use RAW when I’m in an artistic mood, but will use JPEG for the quick-shot family event photos. Although you never know when you need to do post-processing, and there is the option to shoot RAW+JPEG on my Nikon… man, I need to buy a new monster external hard drive. :(

One other handy recommendation when using RAW files on the Windows platform, be sure to install the Windows RAW image viewer.

Saves me time while I’m browsing through images on my laptop.