Random Frames

I have been out of the PC hardware race for a long time now; since I bought my Dell P133 way back in my days of living in the dorm. At present I have a decent Toshiba Satellite laptop (P4, low- 1.xGhz, 1/2GB shared memory, 40GB hard-drive)that I use at home. For what I use it for at home (surfing web, blog, personal finance, etc) its plenty of PC. I don’t game anymore hence the reason I settled for the shared memory to get the lower price.

But now I am getting the itch for a smaller more portable system. The present Toshiba rarely leave the desk it sits on at home. I want a laptop on the scale of the 12 inch Apple G4 (yeah I have looked at the Apple don’t anyone fall off their chair, especially Andy). But to be honest I am completely overwhelmed by the number of options out there on the market. I like Toshiba I have owned two of them and they have both been tanks, both in weight and reliability. I want something lighter with wireless so I can surf easily when traveling. I am going to finally get a cable modem at home and while I am doing that I will put a wireless hub at home.

The iBook is appealing simply because of the fact that I know I am going to get good hardware and there are less options to dig through. I do worry a little about converting over to the OS X and how my poor XP brain will cope with it.

So if I would love to here your suggesting for a highly portable laptop. If you have a good link to reviews and/or some info to help narrow the field of choices down I would greatly appreciate it. And you MAC users please try to sell me on the G4.

Thanks
Homis

Ok, so I saw another link on BoingBoing to a photo gallery I thought people might be interested in.

Above is one of the pictures in the gallery. Now, what do you think you are looking at? It looks exactly like a scale model that someone created and painted realistically, right?

Well, if you thought that, you’d be wrong. The pictures in the gallery are pictures taken from a helicopter of actual places (the above picture is of an aquaduct in Rome). He uses a tilt-shift lens to create that effect.

I’ve never heard of a tilt-shift lens before, but I looked them up, and kind of have an idea of what they do now. What I still can’t really figure out is, what is it that makes a picture of a model look like a picture of a model and not a picture of the real thing?

Hey, guys. Anyone have any suggestions for a theme we can use for the next week?

One that I was thinking about proposing was Objects That Have Meaning to You. The idea would be that you would take a picture of something that has some special meaning to you, and then tell the story behind it.

I’m just not sure that people will be into it or not. So, what do you think? Or do you think a different theme would be better for the next week? Please let me know.

My apologies for helping turn this photoblog into one huge tech-support center…

I am having a problem in DOS, and was wondering if anyone could shed some light on this issue. I am running Windows XP Pro SP2. I have a program which ends up creating some files with various names. Occasionally, the program attempts to create a file with the same as a file that already exists. Fortunately, the program is intelligent and doesn’t overwrite the existing file. It appends a number to the file name. For example, if a file “Wheel.txt” already exists and it wants to create another file with the same name, it will create a “Wheel1.txt”. The next time this event happens, “Wheel2.txt” is created, etc. I have created a test directory with some dummy files and filenames to illustrate (see image below).

Usually, any file with a number at the end is one that can be deleted. Therefore, I wrote a .bat file that deletes these extra files. The command I used was

del *1.txt

This should have deleted just the files with filenames that end with a 1. Unfortunately, it deleted a lot more than that. In the below image, I have pulled up a directory listing for any files that have *1.txt in their filenames, and look at the output below:

Five files came up when I ran a “dir *1.txt”. Fuelcell1.txt and Wheel1.txt should have come up, because those are files I wanted to delete. However, Electrical.txt, Stationary.txt, and Switchable.txt came up, even though they do not have a “1″ in their filenames. Enclosing the *1.txt in double-quotes at the command prompt does not change the output (not that I really expected it to).

Does anyone have any ideas why this occurs?

If anyone would like to see the output for themselves on their own machine, you can download the files in a .zip [1.7KB].

So I bought the girl friend with two rings an iPod for Christmas. Its pretty cool and she has been having fun with it. What we want to do know is how to rip some DVD movies we already own and put them on the iPod. I have a copy of Quicktime Pro so if I can get it in AVI format (or any other format Quicktime can open) I can then convert it to the correct mp4 format that is compatable with the iPod. So do you guys know of a good DVD to AVI program? Perferably a freeware program but I would be a few bucks for a program I am certain will work. Any help would be greatly appriciated. -Homis

Check this out:

This is an audio CD that I saw on the shelves at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii. Hopefully, you’ll be able to read the label on the wrapper that says, “Will not play on PC/Mac”. What the?

So, is it safe to assume that it will play on *nix? I checked to make sure that it wasn’t produced by Sony. I almost wanted to buy it just to see what would happen when I tried to play it, but I didn’t feel like wasting $12.

Have any of you guys ever seen a CD like this?

It’s a little early, but I wanted to wish everyone Happy Holidays!

I’m leaving town soon and won’t be around all of next week (and most likely won’t have access to a computer), and Barry said that he would be gone for a big portion of it, so we decided against beginning a new thread before Christmas. I mean, we could have chosen a new theme, but I would have felt really badly about starting a new theme and then not participating in it. However, if you have a good idea for a new theme, please feel free to start any new threads that you would like to.

P.S. Brandon and I have started having problems with the RSS feed. For some reason, it’s not updating properly on our computers. I was convinced it wasn’t client-side until just now, when I realized that it *was* and I am an idiot (although I’m still not sure what the solution is). If anyone else has noticed the RSS feed isn’t being updated on your computer, please reply here.

So can you save a configuration of open tabs some way? I would love to be able to click on one bookmark link and have it load my two email accounts, my blog, the photoblog, and a few other website I like to check all at once. Is this possible?

Hey, how would you guys feel about shooting for “Pet Peeves” as the theme for next week?

All I would have to do is figure out how I am going to take a picture of the sun.

Speaking with Terence a few weeks ago, I suggested a new category of discussion for our fledgling photo blog that would allow you to ask me photography-related questions and allow me to share my advice, knowledge, and criticism with you. The alliterative name chosen for this new category is Ask Andy. My apologies in advance to the other members of this blog named “Andy” – I will try to uphold our good name.

Your questions can be on anything photography-related, including: how do I take a certain kind of photo, how was a particular image was created, how do I do this in Photoshop, how would you improve/change this photo, what is this feature on my camera for, what does this technical term mean, what settings do I use to do this, what is this photo-related gadget for, how do I choose a new camera, what software should I use, what makes a great photo, can you recommend any books/websites in this area, are you single and looking for a good time (Yes!), etc.

Please do not post your Ask Andy questions to the blog. Instead, email them to me (adh9 at case dot edu) with “Ask Andy” in the Subject line so that I may edit, clarify, and and follow-up, before I post my response to the blog. Email me as many questions as you like as often as you like. Be detailed and specific. Unfortunately, I cannot guarantee that I will answer every question or that I will be able to respond on a regular basis.

Terence has already generously provided me with a question for the first Ask Andy thread, which will follow shortly. Please use the comments of this thread to ask any logistical questions or to tell me what you think about this new category. I look forward to hearing from you. Thanks.