While 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.

I have installed and tried more than 40 different camera apps, and here are my favorites. The list that follows is a purely subjective one, geared towards those apps that I’ve tried and which I still use on a regular basis.

6×6 by Michael Hardaker is a $0.99 app that allows you to shoot in square format (meaning that you don’t have to rotate the camera to get a good view). It has a toggle that lets you shoot in B&W. It does not allow you to preview the image in B&W, but it does have an instant post-view that shows you the B&W image after it’s taken. The B&W quality is adequate, not great, and can often need some contrast adjustment after taking the image to achieve the best quality. I presume that it tries to achieve an “optimal” exposure (capturing the most information) rather than getting the “best” image. If you like the square format (and it’s definitely not for every situation), it’s a very handy app.

Hardaker has several other apps; I haven’t tried all of them, but his 645 PRO is highly recommended by friends who have used it. It does allow B&W preview, and actually multiple film emulation modes so that you can choose the default quality. In addition, it bills itself as the “professional photographer’s photography app,” and will save images in TIFF, the iOS equivalent of RAW, I suppose. It also lets you select various formats from 6×6 (square) to a 6×17 panoramic.

Vint B&W is a curiously simple app that hasn’t been updated since 2009. It does one thing, and it does it very well indeed. It takes a picture and saves it in B&W format (no B&W preview). It does it quickly, with no fuss, and the images are generally superb—sharp and contrasty, and usually requiring no post-processing. At times, the extra contrast added by the app cause the loss of some detail in the shadows or highlights, but the image quality is more frequently usable than any other app I’ve used.

What about you? Do you shoot B&W? Do you have a preferred mobile app for that?

But last Tuesday, I managed to topple all my personal records.

That’s correct: 27,000+ steps and 500+ stairs. How in the world did I accomplish this? You might think that I was running in a marathon (a marathon with lots of stairs). In fact, however, I was asleep in the back of an RV (recreational vehicle).

After last week’s OpenStack design summit and conference in San Francisco, I accompanied a team of fellow “Rackers” (Rackspace employees) on a trip, via RV, from San Francisco to Los Angeles to Boulder, CO, to Dallas, and finally to Austin and home. On that particular Tuesday, we had given a presentation to a number of people interested in OpenStack in Los Angeles. Around 10pm, we boarded the RV and drove through the night to Boulder.

The first section of the day, from midnight until around 6am, I was either driving or riding shotgun in the front of the RV. The next section, from roughly 6am until noon, is where all the major action happened. At that point, I was asleep (ok, trying to sleep) in a bed in the back of the RV, where all of the RV’s vibrations and jiggling were greatly amplified. After noon, I was back up in the front until 6pm, when we arrived in Boulder. The rather sedate-looking time from 6pm until 10pm is when we were giving our presentation to the OpenStack attendees in Boulder, and then I was back in the RV for the haul to Dallas, Texas.

Louis Gray points out that the badges and awards given by Fitbit can be very motivational. And, in the normal course of things, this is probably true. In my case, however, I think it’s unlikely that I will ever again win another badge via Fitbit, since I won a dozen or more of them on that single day.

Is there a way to do a reset?

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:

Their site has some excellent plans as well as some, um, “interesting” ideas.

Check’em out.

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.

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.

The action is similar to the government discovering that a criminal is using the local post-office box store for transferring stolen goods. The feds swoop down; instead of locking that P.O. Box, then instead shut down the entire chain. Now, there’s tends of thousands of people across the country who cannot access their (perfectly legitimate) mail.

Of course, in the real world, it probably wouldn’t happen that way. The feds would target the criminals, and non-criminal users wouldn’t be affected. But let’s take this analogy one step further: the people who own and operate the chain know that their post offices are being used by criminals to transfer stolen goods. Moreover, the government prosecutors have clear and indisputable evidence that this is the case. Would a judge in this situation issue an order to shut down the entire business, seizing not only the illegal good but actually taking people’s perfectly legal property along with it? It’s possible, I suppose, but there would almost certainly be a period where, after the government has gotten the evidence it needs, the shops would be re-opened and people would be permitted to retrieve their mail. Will that happen in this case? I think it unlikely, but we’ll see.

Is this a reason to avoid storing your valuable files “in the cloud?” I think it is; certainly, the cloud offers an inexpensive way to backup your data, but I’m not sure that I would rely upon it as the primary repository of data.

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

DNAinfo.com has more details on the event as well as the limelight that Jessica suddenly found herself in.

The NY Times has a story on how more and more people are taking music lessons over the Internet, usually via Skype or Google Hangouts. It’s a trend that I’ve noticed. For example, Rob Michael, the lead guitarist for the jazzy Atmos Trio, started offering online lessons last year. Matt Dahlberg, one of my favorite modern ukulele performers, also offers lessons via Skype (and he prefers Paypal for payments).

The one major downside of doing lessons online is that the instructor cannot physically place your fingers in the right positions. This may not be a terrible thing except in rare instances.

I’m curious to know if any of my readers has taken online lessons: what do you think? Was it better than IRL lessons? Worse? Why?

Maybe this person should start looking online.

To say that 2011 was eventful is a bit of an understatement. I began the year in an apartment in San Antonio, Texas, a scant month or so after starting a new job with Rackspace Hosting. I traveled back and forth to Beaumont and Houston more times than I can count to be with my parents in the hospital and, ultimately, to attend their funerals. I lost my brother quite suddenly to an aortic aneurysm, and my sister-in-law to complications from surgery. And I lost two dear aunts on separate sides of the family.

Given all that, the fact that my alma mater won a bowl game and had its first Heisman trophy winner in the school’s history doesn’t seem like such a big deal. And, in the grand scheme of things, it certainly isn’t (but I will definitely lord it over everyone else for the next year).

I remain, as ever, full of hope, however. I suppose I have reason to complain, but life has its ups and downs and its our job to handle what we’re given.

All the best to you and yours in 2012, and may God give you the strength to handle whatever challenges come your way.

Very cool (at least if you use Instagram).

Let me know if you have any questions.

First, as many others have noted, this is not really intended to be a generic tablet device aimed at toppling the iPad’s dominance of the market. It really is an upgraded Kindle with enhanced abilities to consume Amazon’s content: books, music, and video. It performs those tasks extremely well. Moreover, you can install selected apps from the Amazon App Store, so I can also view my Netflix movies in addition to the Amazon ones. Should I need to, I can check my email, though it must be said that the setup and usage is a sad disappointment to those of us who are familiar with Apple’s flawless execution in that department.

Let me expand on that point a bit: Apple’s iOS does things so well, users come to expect it. My primary email is on Google Apps; when I set it up in iOS, I specify “Gmail” as the provider, give it my email address and password, and voila! everything is set up perfectly. On the Kindle, I have to fill out an entire page of information, supplying the IMAP and SMTP server names and choosing authentication methods (Plain? CRAM_MD5?). Once set up, however, it worked fine.

I hesitate to blame some of the disappointments on Android, because I honestly don’t know if the issue is with Android or with the Amazon implementation, but there are many instances where the behavior is just a teensy bit poorer than on iOS. For example, the autocorrect suggestions are often incorrect on the Fire, whereas, I’ve come to rely upon them on iOS. When you double-tap the screen in the iOS Safari browser, the current

Nothing will happen for 10-15 seconds, which makes me wonder if I actually missed it, and then, suddenly, the app will load.

Games are great on the Fire, however. Going back to the iPhone after using the 7″ screen on the Fire seems like a huge reduction in usable space. The screen on the Fire is really beautiful, and the textured surface on the back makes it easy to hold. It is a bit heavy, so I tend to rest it on something—this is unfortunate, because the power button is on the bottom, and if you rest it on something, you can accidentally turn it off. The lack of an external volume control doesn’t bother me, as it has some users, but the lack of volume does. The iPhone is much louder (when playing music through its external speakers) than then Fire is; I can’t hear a movie, for example, when the dishwasher is running.

I have no complaints about the battery life so far.

Is it worth the $199? If you understand that you’re getting a media-consumption device and not a general-purpose tablet, then, yes, I think it’s worth it. You can get three Kindle Fires for the price of a 32G iPad, but they’re not as flexible. But music, movies, games, and ebooks are excellent.

As he says, “This instrument is made to order. And i do have a waiting list. Please contact me for info about time of completion.”

Click here for complete details.

Christmas Songs

It’s got a nice mixture of pop tunes as well as the old standards. Enjoy!

Shimabukuro’s playing is no longer limited to small cafes and Central Park. He will be zigzagging the United States, with performances kicking off on Oct. 22 in Honolulu and then taking him coast to coast and back several times, all the way through the spring.

He lands in New York City on Nov. 15 at the Highline Ballroom. The talented musician will play songs from his recent release, “Peace Love Ukulele.” He has performed on television shows such as “The Late Show With Conan O’Brien” and “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” and at the TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Conference.

You can find a full list of his upcoming shows on his website.

The Berkshire Eagle has more information:

The fluke was born about 13 years ago.

Dale Webb said it was difficult to find high-quality ukuleles. This fact frustrated his brother-in-law, Jim Beloff, who had recently become captivated by the instrument and had authored several songbooks for it.

Beloff encouraged Webb, whose background is in engineering and product design, to see if he could produce an affordable, high-quality ukulele.

Click through for the entire story.

Click here for the full guide.

Oh, the pictures they use don’t exactly fill me with confidence, either.

For some time, the uke was being treated as a toy or a novelty, not as real tool for making music. Today, the sweet mellow sound of the ukulele shows up in all kinds of music from pop hits, to folk, to rock and the instrument is in high demand.

If that’s true, then why include paisley ukuleles?

IBM may have made the “personal computer,” but it was Steve Jobs who made the computer personal. Personally, I cannot imagine how the world would be different without the effect his singular vision has had on how computers and machines interact with each other. He was perpetually pushing us to “think different” and to do things better than we ever imagined. The list of his successful products are being listed all over the web.

But I’m also interested in his failures; if ever there was a person who learned from his mistakes, it was Steve Jobs. Do you recall the “Cube,” the beautiful but feeble Macintosh? He learned that beauty was not enough to make a good product; it also had to have performance.

The original “iPod Phone,” made in conjunction with Motorola, was a joke. With a crappy user interface and limited to only holding 100 songs (can you imagine?), this worst seller forced Jobs to confront the real problems in the phone business, resulting, ultimately, in the iPhone, the “smart phone” that changed the entire industry.

The Apple TV was, and still is, one of those “little projects” that Apple still plays with. It has its enthusiasts, but it’s never really caught on in the wider populace. Yet Apple keeps tinkering with it, convinced that there’s “something there.” Will Apple ever get it right?

So much product development consists of tiny, incremental changes. Much of it is based upon user feedback; this is good, but users don’t think outside the box. They don’t imagine things in a vastly different way than they already exist. When all personal computers had a command line and a 24×80 character display, Jobs envisioned (with the help of Xerox PARC) a fully graphical user interface in the hands of every single computer user. While the iPod wasn’t the first music player with a hard disk, it was the first to offer an online store, with the full participation of record labels, where users could simply purchase and download music as opposed to ripping MP3′s from their CDs. When every computer “had” to have a floppy disk drive, Jobs sold the iMac without one. (Side note: when my wife and I got our MacBook Airs, she insisted on getting the plug-in CD drive. We’ve never used it.)

The world is a better place because of you, Steve, and we will miss you.

He also has other stringed instruments in his catalog.