onfocus

I test drove Beyond TV for PVRblog: A PC PVR for Mortals. The bottom line: I'm not ready to replace TiVo with it, but it's nice to know there are viable alternatives out there.

My late discovery of Camera Raw format continues. I picked up Camera Raw with Photoshop, and I'm learning quite a bit about how to adjust raw files. As a bonus, I'm learning about how digital cameras work. (I'm going to call my camera a photon recorder from now on, because it sounds like something from Star Trek.) I learned early in my digital photography experience to underexpose everything, and bump up the midtones later in Photoshop. I could almost always salvage an underexposed photo, but if highlights were blown out there was no saving the photo. Camera Raw works differently, though. Completely blown highlights are still trouble, but if you expose the shot toward the right-end of the histogram, you can bring the exposure down in Photoshop and get more detail in the photo. So far I've learned that getting correct exposure when I take the photo is even more critical with raw, but that erring on the overexposed side can have good results. Even learning that the human eye sees shadow-detail better than highlights has me thinking about exposing for shadow-tones as I take photos. (Instead of thinking that the shadows will be all or mostly black in the final photo.)

This book has already taught me a lot about reading histograms, white balance, and color balance. It's written for people who know their way around Photoshop, but I think novices will pick up quite a bit of digital darkroom theory. Reading this has been like watching over the shoulder of a Camera Raw pro as they fine-tune their photos, while they explain why they're making each adjustment, step by step.

I did some updating at ORblogs today. The site needed a new design for winter, and the new layout should allow further changes down the road. ORblogs currently has 490 weblogs listed, and it seems like there are two or three added every day. The post excerpt list is getting tough to follow without several visits/day. I added some text to explain what's happening on the front page because I can imagine people are overwhelmed by all of the text when they visit for the first time. (Though the notes are click-vanishing if you have cookies enabled in your browser.)

I've been thinking about this New Science article on weblogs—The 'blog' revolution sweeps across China—and differing approaches to censorship. (Spotted on Joho the Blog: Bo ke.) This part about blogs being good at finding euphamisms is great:

But the net police found it much harder to purge discussion of Yitahutu's closure in the blogosphere. Bloggers are quick to find euphemisms so that they can continue conversation despite keyword filtering.

Keyword filtering and banning seems like a quaint way to control language. If Lakoff, Luntz, and Orwell have taught us anything it's that the power is in redefining words. I think about this whenever I hear the phrase activist judges. If you want to take power away from the judicial branch of the government, one way to do it is to make the word judge itself into a slur. (It worked with the word liberal.) And hey, why not take down the word activist while you're at it? That's so much more effective than trying to stop the use of the words judge or activist. People have to use these words to communicate, and by attaching negative meanings to them you force people to think negatively about the concepts these words represent. Philip K. Dick also nailed this idea:

The basic tool for manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you can control the meaning of words, you can control the people who must use the words.

Chinese bloggers are practicing the new style of word-manipulation to route around an old style of control.

Hey Oregon amateur photographers, you may be interested in this photo contest: Photo of the Year. There's a $15 submission fee that goes directly to the Multnomah Outdoor School.

After reading this article about the RAW image format—Raw Advantage (click this title on the lefthand menu)—I decided to try shooting some photos in RAW instead of JPEG. After playing around with it, I feel like I have a new camera. When you bring up a RAW file in Photoshop, you get a RAW import dialog that lets you make level/color adjustments:



The adjustments here seem much more flexible than the standard levels dialog. One drawback is a much larger file size—RAW files on my camera take up around 5MB per photo instead of the 1-2MB JPEGs. Another is that the built-in thumbnail viewer in XP doesn't understand RAW files, so if I make the switch I'll have to go with a 3rd party thumbnail viewer. This article at Microsoft, Managing Your Digital Camera's RAW Files, recommends IMatch so I'm trying it out now. I don't necessarily need all of the image-catalog stuff that goes along with it. Any other good (hopefully free) RAW thumbnail-viewing programs out there? And, of course, going through this import with each photo will add more time to the whole process, but it seems like it'll be worth it.

Sweet! Alf over at HubLog, hooked up Amazon.com Citations and Touchgraph: TouchGraph browser for Amazon Citations. He set it up as a bookmark, so you can launch it from any Amazon page. He also has an example set up using the book I mentioned: TouchGraph citations for Moral Animal. Since the data isn't available via the API, he must be scraping the HTML.

The coolest part: double-clicking a book reference brings that book up in the graph, and you can see which citations the books have in common.

Talk about the LazyWeb in action—thanks for the fun, Alf!

Update: Looks like the citations feature may be in flux at Amazon, so the HubLog TouchGraph browser isn't working at the moment. (It was fun while it lasted!)

Cool new Amazon feature: Amazon.com Citations.

Amazon scans every book in the Search Inside the Book program looking for phrases that match the names of books in our catalog. We make a note of these "citations" and display them to you...

For example, a book I'm currently reading—Moral Animal—contains references to 96 other books. This feature can help situate books within a larger context than the Customers who bought this item also bought-list can. I hope they make this data available through the API so we can see some Touchgraph maps of book-citation connections.

And they should start scraping the URLs mentioned within books too. And while I'm wishing, how about citing weblogs that cite books? ;)

I talked with UO Journalism student Tony Lucero a few days ago, and he included some of our conversation in an article about weblogs in the University paper: Web logs transform expression methods. (Though I call them weblogs.) He mentioned that he's been following Blogger since I was working there, and we talked a bit about that time. I was surprised at how much he knew about the company, but I guess we did have a webcam on every desk back then.

Jesse James Garret resurrected his blog: jjg blog!

onfocus.com turned six sometime last week. Adding thoughts and photos to this space has been a part of my life for a long time. I don't see an end in sight.

Thanks to the Internet Archive, here's a look at what this site has looked like over the years—

Matt's placing some blame on himself for TiVo-ad backlash posts like mine. The PVRblog post that I linked to was picked up and syndicated across many blogs, and Matt feels like he could have kept the negative reaction from happening: Behind the website: when you're at the helm of a shitstorm. Even having a more detailed view of the feature now, I still feel the same way. Will the genuine concerns of weblog authors be dismissed as irrational or reactionary every time they're voiced against a bad business practice? I hope not. (Though maybe I'm just being reactionary to the reactionary label?)