onfocus

Here's another batch of links that have crossed my desk recently.

Last time I was talking about the news providing an excellent civics lesson, and yesterday was the day for an economics lesson. The New York Times had a couple of good articles about the current state of the economy:

• NYT: A New Kind of Bank Run Tests Old Safeguards. "...a new financial architecture emerged in the last decade — one that relied more on securities and less on banks as intermediaries. With the worth of those securities now being questioned — and no equivalent of deposit insurance — some who financed the securities want their money out, a fact that has created the 21st-century equivalent of a run on a bank."
• NYT: Keep Your Eyes on Adjustable-Rate Mortgages. "The peak month for the resetting of mortgages will come this October, according to Credit Suisse, when more than $50 billion in mortgages will switch to a new rate for the first time."
• Metafilter: great comment by bookie in a thread about stock analyst Jim Cramer melting down on MSNBC: "this morning we saw the london interbank market effectively cease to function. This is the marketplace where banks source their daily funding requirements for ongoing operations...What these banks were saying was, in effect, 'I don't trust any of these other banks enough to give them any cash at 4%pa overnight, because I'm not sure I'll get it back.'"
• For even more background on the subprime/credit squeeze, check out this post on Metafilter from last month: A world of Casey Serins. This post has a bunch of links to articles explaining how we got where we are, with some interesting discussion.

Color:

• Speak Up: Dark and Fleshy: The Color of Top Grossing Movies. Nice visualization of the dominant colors used in movie posters—broken down by film rating. As you'd expect: dark for adult movies, bright and colorful for kids.
• I've been having fun reading and playing with the techniques in Photoshop LAB Color by Dan Margulis. I hadn't played with the LAB color space in Photoshop too much before, but I like the results so far. Here's a photo of mine that I've processed three different ways:
  
  
  No Process
  
  
  My Standard RGB Process
  
  
  LAB Process
  
  I feel like I've been getting better colors out of my photos with the techniques in the book. (And sharpening in the Luminosity channel does seem better than sharpening in RGB.) I've been meaning to do a longer post about this with better examples.

Grab Bag:

• There once was a girl named Lenore, a fantastic spontaneous literary limerick-off at MeFi.
• Another good baby names resource: SSA Popular Baby Names. (Still no definitive name here yet.)
• Microsoft RDC for Mac 2.0 (Beta). Nice for those of us who manage Windows servers from a Mac. [via anil]
• I don't think I've mentioned here before that Wondermark is my favorite web comic right now. You might also want to check out xkcd, the perry bible fellowship, and bunt cake if you haven't already.

And finally, what link roundup would be complete without some iPhone news? A: none.

• cre.ations.net: Tether your iPhone: EDGE internet on your laptop. These hackers show how to get the iPhone working as an Edge network proxy for a laptop. I can't believe this isn't built into the iPhone already (my two previous phones acted as bluetooth modems). Well done.
• Interesting example of Amazon reviews + comments not working in favor of the product for sale: Don't buy this [Belkin iPhone adapter]. Though trimming didn't work for me, ruining an aux cable in the process. My kingdom for a stupid simple iPhone auxiliary adapter. Why did you go non-standard, Apple? Why?
• Leonard posted a cool screenshot of his hacked iPhone. I want to try out MobileTerminal and NES emulator, but instead I've been putting together this post. SSH out would be a killer app for me, wonder if MobileTerminal handles that yet.

Until I link-dump again, huzzah!