DVD Backup for OS X

DVD Capture

Some of our kid's DVDs are getting pretty beat up. I need to make new ones. Yeah, that's still legal -- despite the best efforts of our corrupt legislators.

What I should have bought for my firewire drive

LaCie - FireWire Hard Drives - Design by F.A. Porsche

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For what I paid in CompUSA for a cheap hard drive, plus the enclosure cost on OWC, I could have bought this drive from LaCie. Sigh.

Update: I've confrimed that the 160GB LaCie Porsche works beautifully with my iBook running 10.3.5. Sleep, awake, mount, dismount, no problem. I'm buying one.

MacDevCenter.com: The Missing Digital Photography Hacks - Interpreting camera histograms

MacDevCenter.com: The Missing Digital Photography Hacks

A good exposure will typically display information across the entire width of the graph. Shadow information is on the left side, highlights are on the right, and midtones are, well, in the middle. The particular shape of the graph depends on how the light is distributed throughout the picture.

What you want to be leery of is when the graph information bunches up on one side or another. A graph heavy to the left usually indicates underexposure with the image appearing dark (move exposure compensation to 1). If everything is scooted over to the right, that often indicates overexposure with blown highlights and washed out shadows and midtones (move exposure compensation to -1).

As you become experienced working with the histogram, you'll begin to correlate spikes in the graph with various intense tones in the actual picture. And when you open your shots in your favorite image editor, such as Photoshop Elements, you can adjust the photo's tones using the histogram display in the Levels dialog box (Enhance > Adjust Brightness/Contrast > Levels). Think of it as another way to look at your pictures.

Life in the dark ages -- of 1900 America

Marginal Revolution: Which countries face a medical cost crunch?

... the level in China would be comparable to that of the U.S. in about 1900. At that time the average American male suffered from six chronic medical conditions, and it was very likely that at least one of those six was debilitating, meaning the person could not work.

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Wealthy enough not to die, but lacking the technology to avoid exterme suffering. The average american back then was relatively young as well ...

An amazing quote. I wonder if it's true.

Microsoft Outlook Categories: Tips and References

Microsoft Outlook Categories

Rarely has a potentially useful feature been so incompetently implemented for so many years. Outlook categories belong in the Microsoft Hall of Shame -- dwarfed, of course, by Word Style Sheets.

Password generator: site specific passwords

Password generator

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This is bloody brilliant. Talk about a modest guy -- Nic doesn't put much on this plain page -- except a JavaScript tool that

will concatenate two fields and MD5 them. The idea is that you choose one master password to secure all your others, and then generate passwords for each site, server, router, &c. by putting a completely obvious name for that resource in the "Site name" field.

It doesn't work with IE, but IE's unsafe on the public net anyways. I love his comment on IE "... too long for Internet Explorer which I believe to have been written by trained otters" A harsh slur on otters though.

macosxhints - Use wildcards to build iPhoto smart albums

macosxhints - Use wildcards to build iPhoto smart albums

? and * are wild cards in smart albums
[] are escape characters to search on wildcards