Canon lenses: a nice review

I'm nerving myself to buy a Digital Rebel XT for myself for "christmas". This is neat review: Photo.net: Review of lenses for the Canon EOS 300D and EOS 10D. The one I really like is the f1.8 50mm for $70. The XT sensor is smaller than the 10D so this would be 'zoomy', but it's a pro lens for an amazing price. The key reason I want the XT is to be able to do available light photography, and the equivalent of a 60-70mm 35mm lens would be not bad at all.

Jon Udell likes this anti-SAD sunlight desk lamp

BlueMax Desk Lamps

iPod over all -- 10/10 on Amazon

Amazon.com: Early Adopters - computers list has an iPod in each of the top 10 slots. That's astonishing.

Replicate the experience of 19th century phone service

Thanks to the miracle of modern technology, one can combine Skype VOIP, a modern laptop, a wireless LAN and a USB full duplex speakerphone to recreate the turn of the (prior) century experience of yelling "HELLLLOOOO, CAN YOU HEAR ME??".

Pretty bloody awful really. Must be the negative energy field I project. In any case, it'll be handy for picking up my voice mail from my parent's home in Montreal.

Greenspun stuff to checkout

Philip Greenspun's Weblog:

Some interesting things that I learned about at the Hacker's Conference that either are or have Web sites:

• http://www.googleguide.com/advanced_operators_reference.html and http://www.googleguide.com/help/calculator.html
  [jf: these are really superb!]
  
• http://www.nw.com/nw/projects/cubatron/
• http://www.dataplace.org/
• ...
  
• * http://mappoint.msn.com/directionsfind.aspx (select the "LineDrive" format and watch in awe as Microsoft draws you a schematic map to your destination, with the uninteresting long freeway sections compressed and the complex local neighborhood sections in detail, all black and white for easy printing, proof that not everything interesting is happening at Google)

Flickr now supports printing -- at least in the US!

At last. Flickr now supports print ordering - at least for US custoemrs. It will be interesting to see how well they do it. Aeons ago I tried to get various vendors to understand what they needed to do to make print ordering grandma-friendly. You'd think they'd understand that I was suggesting, free of charge, a way for them to print money. Alas, nobody got it.

I'll see if Flickr gets it.

I've used Shutterfly and Smugmug and a few others. I liked Smugmug's service but not their limited Mac support. Flickr has a good iPhoto uploader -- but don't integrate your Flickr and Yahoo accounts just yet -- that breaks most of the uploaders.

Now that Flickr offers printing, and since Smugmug's Mac support is weak, I think Flickr may be my business.

OX apps for blogging

Cool OSX Apps lists some OS X apps for blogging. I was quite surprised to find I use none of these! They sound very interesting and I'll have to try each one. Highly recommended! I'm particularly interested in the SubEthaEdit and Cyberduck combo for working on my non-blog server based HTML files.