Category: Culture

Best B&W Photo Apps for iOS

I am an unashamed fan of black and white photography. Probably because of my background (I was introduced to serious photography by a college professor who worked in large format and told me about Ansel Adams), I find it easier to visualize shapes and forms in monochrome than I do to anticipate how to handle color.

PuppehWhile I own several cameras (a Contax G1 and a Canon G12 among them), the one camera that’s always with me is the one that’s built into my iPhone. There are tons of great camera apps available for iOS, but relatively few that are geared towards B&W photography. Many apps have a “filter” for B&W, but they don’t actually let you shoot in B&W by default. And most of those filters do things beyond simply converting the image to B&W. Smugmug’s Camera Awesome, for example, has default filters, but they add textures and vignetting that seriously detract from the image. Any app that requires post-processing to achieve B&W didn’t make my list.

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The Futulele is coming

All the Internet (it seems) is abuzz with the news that Amidio will be releasing the Futulele in April. The Futulele consists of a hardware device that connects an iPhone and an iPad along with apps that run on both devices to simulate the body of the ukulele (on the iPad) and the fretboard (on the iPhone).

It’s a cute trick, and I’m sure it will be fun for the folks that happen to have both devices, but I can’t help to think that, for the combined price of the iPad ($499) and iPhone ($199), you could actually purchase one hell of a hand-made, real Koa ukulele. Here’s their promotional video:

The Taylor Uke

Yes, Taylor Guitars is getting into the ukulele business. Taylor, whose guitars are well-known for their great sound and beautiful looks (as well as their, um, “ample” prices), is offering a limited edition of 30 matched sets that contain a special Koa “Grand Symphony” guitar (with solid KOA lining) and a matched Koa tenor ukulele. This is called their Builder’s Reserve, Series IV, and 15 sets will be available in the USA, while the remaining 15 are targeted for international distribution.

Prices are rumored to be around $8,000.00 for the set.

Taylor has been saving koa wood pieces for years; whenever they’d end up with cuttings that were too small to use in a guitar, they would set them aside, and it’s these pieces that are being used for the ukulele.

Click on the contact form if you need my address to send me one.

Collateral Damage

The US Government yesterday shut down popular file storage site Megaupload (I can’t link to it because the site is down). The Feds have a very well written, 72-page indictment indicating the illegal activity that was going on there and the fact that the stuff pretty well knew that they were making their millions by selling files they didn’t own. That aspect of the case will be covered in court, and, whether or not you agree with the circumstances, it’s not what I want to cover here.

The problem is, of course, that there are tens of thousands, perhaps millions, of users who used Megaupload for perfectly legitimate, legal storage of files. As of yesterday, all their access to those files is gone. Work documents that groups were collaborating on, family photo albums, insurance records, and other valuable documents, now completely unavailable.

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Stop PIPA and SOPA

I have the regrettable honor to live in the congressional district of Lamar Smith, sponsor of the more regrettable SOPA and PIPA bills. Here is the letter I sent him this morning:

Dear Sir,

SOPA and PIPA are bad laws that fundamentally affect the freedoms enjoyed by Americans. I do not want to see the USA using the same techniques as China and Iran to control our citizens. Moreover, I have worked in the Internet industry—previously, as an engineering manager for Yahoo!, and currently as a software architect for Rackspace hosting—and I can tell you that these laws, if passed, would create huge burdens on providers while actually doing very little to stop piracy.

I encourage you to drop your support for these laws. No businesses have ever been successful in the long term by using the legal system to repress competition, and these acts will simply NOT stop the mechanisms used, nor the motivations for, sharing illegal content. The solution to intellectual property infringement is NOT to place a huge burden on businesses to enforce someone else’s rights, and I, for one, am appalled as the loss of freedoms that have occurred in the USA to such an extent that such laws could even be conceived.

Yours sincerely,
Glen Campbell