Category Archives: Tech Toys

Cropping Issues

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If you came here expecting a discussion of the corn used to make fine Kentucky whisky, move along. This is about photography.

A recent Miami Herald article about a West Palm Beach museum includes a shot of photographer annie leibovitzAnnie Leibovitz aiming a point-and-shoot camera at the reader. Kind of reminds us that a great photographer can take a magnificent picture with pretty much any box with a hole in one end.

But she still has to print it. That’s where I run into difficulty.

If Ms. Leibovitz printed her photos to fit in a standard frame with a pre-cut mat, (most) arts and crafts stores carry frames and mats with openings in only these sizes:

Frame Size Mat Opening Image Size Aspect Ratio
5″ x 7″ 3.5″ x 5.5″ 4″ x 6″ 1.5
8″ x 10″ 4.5″ x 6.5″ 5″ x 7″ 1.4
11″ x 14″ 7.5″ x 9.5″ 8″ x 10″ 1.25 (about 5:4)
16″ x 20″ 10.5″ x 13.5″ 11″ x 14″ 1.27
20″ x 24″ 15.5″ x 19.5″ 16″ x 20″ 1.25
24″ x 36″ 19.5″ x 29.5″ 20″ x 30″ 1.5 (exactly 3:2)
30″ x 40″ 21.5″ x 31.5″ 22″ x 32″ 1.45

(Frame and mat openings vary from manufacturer to manufacturer.)

Most digital point & shoot cameras had an aspect ratio of 1.33 (4:3), the same as analog television or early movies. However, a 35 mm picture’s aspect ratio is 1.5 (3:2). This means that the long side is 1.5 times as long as the short side. Several digital cameras take photos in either ratio, and nearly all digital SLRs take pictures in a 3:2 ratio, as most can use lenses designed for 35 mm film.

The Advanced Photo System (APS) film, a now-discontinued film format for still photography, has about a 7:4 aspect ratio, coincidentally almost perfect for HDTV except for how lousy an enlargement APS film yields. In 2005 Panasonic launched the first consumer digital camera with the very similar aspect ratio of 16:9; that matches HDTV and is the same as Ms. Leibovitz’ Canon G-15. 16:9 is the same as 1.77 which you might notice matches none of the standards in the table above.

Confused yet? Me, too.

I’ve taken thousands of photos with either a Kodak or Minolta digital. The Kodak has a 1/1.76″ (7.3 x 5.5 mm) CCD sensor, the Minolta a slightly larger 2/3″ (8.8 x 6.6 mm) sensor. Both are on the sweet spot 1.33 aspect ratio which means I had to throw away part of the picture for all their 8 x 10″ and 11 x 14″ prints in the gallery.

That’s one reason I changed to a full format digital for most shoots.

All these different aspect ratios is why everyone has cropping issues when printing photos. An aspect ratio of 4:3 translates to a print size of 4.5″ x 6.0″. This loses half an inch when printing on the “standard” of 4″ x 6″ with its aspect ratio of 3:2. Similar cropping occurs when printing on other sizes, i.e., 5″ x 7″, 8″ x 10″, or 11″ x 14″. In fact, the only two “standard” print sizes that capture all of the frame of a full frame digital or its 35mm uncle are 4″ x 6″ and 24″ x 30″.

There’s not much market for 4″ x 6″ or 24″ x 30″.

On the other hand, there’s a lot more market for 16″ x 20″ or 24 x 30″ than for a post card size print and I couldn’t reliably enlarge my early work to those sizes.

I want to compose in the viewfinder so I want to print what I saw. I’m homing in on 10″ x 15″ and 14″ x 21″ as the “usual” enlargements in my own gallery. The first is perfectly sized for the standard 16″ x 20″ mat; the latter for a 20″ x 28″ which is fairly large. Now all I need is a processor who can print them. And a mat cutter ditto.

Of course, every photographer has great photos in some odd-ball format, so I’ll print that palm tree with the sap bucket at 10:1 and frame it vertically. I’m working on an interesting 3:1 panorama that I will probably print on canvas and display as a loooooooooooooooog horizontal triptych.

I hope you’ll buy them anyway.


sugar beach

It’s All Super

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CBS started its Super Bowl coverage this morning at 11 a.m. Eastern time. The game starts at 6:25 or 7 p.m. or so.

“We really hope for an overtime game,” one of the reporters said.

safety equipmentLike 111 million other red blooded Americans, I’ll tune in, although I almost never watch football and I still think the Baltimore team should be the Colts.

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is addressing player safety including his plan to have an HGH testing program in place for the 2013 season, neurologists on the sidelines, and talks with NASCAR and others about equipment. From shoulder pads to the “Rooney Rule” to the low hit rule, football rules are ever evolving.

Racing Gets Safer
The Parisian magazine Le Petit Journal held the world’s first motoring competition in 1894; sixty-nine cars vied to start the 127 km course from Paris to Rouen but only 25 ran.

Attilio Caffaratti was the first reported fatality in racing. He crashed in the Brescia-Cremona-Mantova-Verona-Brescia in 1900. The French Gran Prix killed Antonio Ascari in 1925. Jim Clark died in a Formula 2 race in Hockenheimring in 1968 and Jerry Titus at Road America in 1970. Mark Donohue died practicing for the 1975 F1 race at Österreichring. The 2001 Daytona 500 claimed Dale Earnhardt. Dan Wheldon died in a 15-car IndyCar crash at Las Vegas in November. 56 drivers have died in major races at Indianapolis Motor Speedway, 48 at Nürburgring, 30 at Monza, and 24 each at Daytona and Le Mans.

State of the Art
Where better than auto racing to learn about safety equipment?

Racing safety equipment has mostly followed tragedy. Helmets, seatbelts, on-board fire extinguishers, fire proof driving suits, five-point safety harnesses, fuel cells, ever safer racing seats and HANS devices, “soft wall” technology, and more all came after head injuries, thrown drivers, fires, and crashes.

Safety didn’t come easily.

“Those early helmets were like wearing a flower pot on your head with leather straps,” NASCAR Champion driver Ned Jarrett said. “At the time, we felt like it was the state-of-the-art helmet because that was about all you could get.” Sort of like the helmets high school kids used for football when I was in school. It wasn’t until recently that oval track drivers were required to wear gloves.

The history of auto racing saw crash helmets arrive in the ’40s, roll bars in the ’50s, the roll cage in the ’60s. Sports Car Club of America recommended a roll cage (but required only a braced hoop toll bar) when I built my first A-Sedan Camaro in 1971; I installed a full cage similar to NASCAR’s full enclosure with door bars and a snoot hoop. That saved my bacon at Charlotte Motor Speedway.

Rules Changes
“The NFL changes the rules every year,” Mr. Goodell said innocently.

So do most motorsports groups. Football players keep getting bigger and racecars keep getting faster.

Cool.

OK, now it’s time for the important part of the day.


super bowl commercials

There is still time to sign the Declare the Monday Following the Super Bowl a National Holiday petition at whitehouse.gov.

The 55th annual Daytona 500 will begin at 1 p.m. on Sunday, February 24. That’s the day after the petition drive ends.

Toilet Color Coding

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If it’s clear, leave it here. If it’s brown, send it down.

Toilets are amazingly complex for such simple objects. In the end, so to speak, a toilet is simply a bucket of water you pour down a pipe but high-tech engineers with fancy titles have been tinkering with the design since Thomas Crapper owned the world’s first bath, toilet and sink showroom, in King’s Road. In fact, my alma mater built a five-story flushing facility quite appropriately on a Hudson River dock.

Head may express the force needed to lift a column of water those five stories but the head (or heads) on the other side of that dock is a ship’s toilet. The name derives from sailing ships in which the toilet area for the regular sailors was placed at the head or bow of the ship.

I’m not convinced my grandmother coined that phrase, but it was her watchword.

As far as I know, Nana never had to carry water in a bucket to flush an indoor toilet so I don’t know why she always saved water. My father grew up in a railroad station where his father, my grandfather, was station master. They had a sink and a bathtub inside but no toilet; they used the “private” side of the two-holer privy at the end of the station house lawn. The public side was on the platform side of the fence.

outhouse
Necessary and Sufficient. The Colonial Williamsburg Journal tells us, “If something is faintly not nice, humans retreat into a fog of euphemism that merely hints at meaning, as if the words themselves were at fault. Consider the privy, which in the eighteenth century was called the necessary house or, more simply, the necessary. This little structure — of brick or wood, painted or unpainted, of vernacular or high-style design — was also known as a bog, boghouse, boggard, or bog-shop; a temple, a convenience, or temple of convenience; a little house, house of office, or close stool; a privy or a garde-robe, terms that descend from the Middle Ages. Or a jakes, a sixteenth-century term. Williamsburg’s St. George Tucker once defined a jakes as a garden temple.”

Toilets are by far the main source of water use in the home, the EPA notes, accounting for nearly 30% of an average home’s indoor water consumption.

Replacing all of our older, inefficient toilets might save nearly 2 billion gallons per day across the country or some 11 gallons per toilet in your home every day, dear reader. Not in mine, though.

I can save my 11 gallons just by not flushing twice.

There’s a minor blockage in the waste line from one bathroom here. The shower drains fine. The bathroom sink is superb. A toilet flush sometimes backs up in the shower. I’ve snaked and roto-rooted the pipes. I’ve sent a camera down. I think there is a root intrusion under the concrete slab but we can’t find it. My friend Chester, a plumber in real life, suggested a new toilet because they use less water so there wouldn’t be as much to back up.

We’re not allowed to install necessary houses.

The “effective flush volume” of a high efficiency toilet shall not exceed 1.28 gallons. A single flush, tank-type gravity toilet uses up to five gallons to clear the bowl.

toiletOne manufacturer writes, “High Efficiency Toilets should be able to flush using at least 20% less water than is mandated by law and should not need to be flushed more than once to do their job. They should require minimal cleaning with environmentally unfriendly detergents.”

I agree.

If a toilet is supposedly highly virtuous, flushing twice to clear the contents isn’t exactly efficient. The Victorians who hung the tank from the ceiling had the right idea. More head means more power to clear the bowl, even with reduced water.

Chester is wrong, by the way. Sending less water per flush just means the solids don’t move well past the blockage.

I should hang the tank from the ceiling. Of course, water might geyser like Old Faithful out of the shower floor drain.

Nana was right. Cutting out a couple of flushes saves the world, too.

We Go Fast, Part I

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In a recent Comcast commercial from the Martin Agency, Dennis Farina looks straight at the camera and says “Xfinity has the fastest Internet and CenturyLink doesn’t.”


I had a little trouble with some downloads around the time the commercial aired. Many small podcasts took many big minutes. Skype kept telling us the connection was too slow for video (Skype asked if I had checked my dial-up service).

The following chart shows how long a file the size of that short podcast should take at advertised speeds. My !@#$%^ Comcast connection averaged 8 minutes.


download speeds
I ran an independent speed test.

speed test

Comcast provides a speed test that shows download speed, upload speed, and ping time. The Interweb fora are filled with reports that the Comcast results are, ah, less reliable than other testers.

(Just so’s you know, I showed the SPEEDTEST.NET results to a Comcast rep who said they were wrong, that I needed to use Comcast’s own servers to get a “valid” result.)

Alrighty then. Here are some more of !@#$%^ Comcast’s own servers, starting with the same date and time of the test above.


speed test

speed test

speed test

I understand what !@#$%^ Comcast does but did they have to make Dennis Farina do it for them?

For the record, it took only about 2.6 minutes for Mr. Farina’s 30-second spot to load and play over my fastest-in-the-nation Xfinity connection.


speed test

Predilection for Prediction

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It is indeed the official day for prognostication.

I predict it will not snow in the Keys again this year. It pretty much never snows here but we had the first ever sighting of razorbills in December, so you never know. They’re strange little North Atlantic seabirds that look like flying footballs. The global climate change-driven colder water up north could be the reason a few decided to be snowbirds here.

We will not see 99.9 cent gasoline again until TSHTF. I remember 29.9 cent gas but I was earning about a buck an hour at that time. On the other hand gasoline stayed under a buck from the 1920s until 1980 and had about a 26-year run below $2 that ended in about 2006.

!@#$%^ Comcast’s CEO Brian L Roberts says he has learned from Apple how to “make things fun.” The very fact that the head of the second most reviled company in America is even talking to Apple sent shivers through the tech world. (Mr. Roberts told Forbes that his company has lost subscribers throughout his tenure due to increased competition and the fact the company didn’t offer the “best suite of products.” It had nothing to do with the fact that they raise prices $1 each and every time a customer finds a better choice.)

I don’t think Apple will use Bombast to roll out AppleTV. Apple’s cash pile could hit $200 billion next year. Comcast’s market cap is about $97 billion. I predict Apple will BUY !@#$%^Comcast and make it AppleTV.

According to a new Pew Research study, 85% percent of U.S. adults own a mobile phone but only 56% have a smartphone. Worldwide, the total number of smartphones passed 1 billion last year. There are 6 billion cell phone subscribers on Earth. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer declined to comment on whether Microsoft would make its own smartphone but Microsoft is working with component suppliers in Asia to test its own smartphone designs. Since there are an astonishing 85 million adult cellphone users in the U.S. without a smartphone (and a corresponding 5 billion worldwide), Microsoft doesn’t need to think about early adopters. Microsoft doesn’t need to think about iSheep. Microsoft doesn’t need to think about Droids. I predict Microsoft can win the smartphone race if it simply gets most of the newbies.

gadgetsI further predict I will not get a smartphone in 2013.

I believe there will be a 2013 NHL season. I predict no one will notice.

I further predict that police will disarm samarai  sword-wielding naked men. But probably not in the District of Columbia.

The Belgian monks at St. Sixtus Abbey will give up the title of priciest beer when BJ’s discovers New Amsterdam Amber and prices it at $99.99 for six bottles.

Last year, the cash-strapped Ukraine charged Did Moroz (the local version of Father Christmas) impersonators an income tax. Florida will see that as a revenue stream and impose a tax on Santas.

The FBI will continue searching for Kenneth “D.B. Cooper” Conley, one of the convicted bank robbers who escaped from a Chicago high-rise jail and hailed a cab to make his getaway.

A new diet will sweep the cognoscenti with Twinkies and sugar free tonic water. I predict that I will not eat any of that.

Yesterday, I wrote, “Over the last couple of years, I’ve replaced or repaired most of the little things that plagued me and stole the time I needed to do all the fun stuff I wanted to do.” I predict I will sell the Honda and buy a pellet stove. I may buy an iPod dock but that’s iffy.

Stocks will rise. Bonds will fall. Investors will be late to the game.

Word enthusiasts will ban “fiscal cliff.”

Finally, (and this is the hardest crystal gazing I’ve done) America’s national politicians-for-life, will add more than another trillion dollars to our debt and “kick the can down” the road for another year. I predict that (a) the U.S. Congress approval rating will sink below 20%, (b) the U.S. Congress will form three committees to investigate the bankruptcy sale of Hostess Twinkies to Miguel Angel Treviño Morales, and (c) the U.S. Congress will declare a War on Guns.

Oh.

Wait.

Those were freebies, aren’t they?

OK, I foresee that the world did not end on December 21.