Steve's TumbleLog: Archive

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You Can't Really Get Smarter by Zapping Your Head... →

Interesting article about tDCS. It’s a fairly sterile description - follow some of the links to articles written by journalists who submitted to the treatment. Scientists have rediscovered a centuries-old procedure for supercharging your brain. Depending on how its used, it could improve anything from focus to motor control to mathematical or even moral reasoning. Its simple. Its...

May 4th

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circuits.io →

Alpha (untested) tDCS (trans-cranial direct current stimulation) circuit built on circuits.io. Great site for ee types. Should deliver switchable 1ma/2ma current. Yes, I’m going to shock my brain. Of course, 1-2ma is nothing and unlikely to cause any problems at all, but I’m going to be extra careful anyway.

May 4th

Apr 26th

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Watch

Got a Raspberry Pi and have been playing with the I/O. This was the second “project”, using python and four GPIO pins to sequence a series of LEDs. Beginner stuff, absolutely, but cool nonetheless. Subsequently got it to output text to a 16x4 LCD display. With shairport, a USB WiFi device, and a USB audio device, I got the RPi to catch Airplay audio from my iPhone and iPad. I think...

Mar 29th

Mar 31st

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I’m really digging instagram. I mean, I’ve got a DSLR, and most of the past images I’ve posted on this site were shot with thousands of dollars worth of equipment - and there’s still a place for that. OTOH, it’s been said that the best camera is the one you have with you, and I always have my iPhone with me. Filters and faux polaroids can be seen as derivative and...

Mar 30th

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Mar 28th

Mar 25th

Mar 24th

Mar 23rd

Long Time Away

Been a month since I posted here. I’ve been taking pictures - I can’t help doing it - I just haven’t gotten anything squared away for my blog. Work and Real Life have been keeping me from it. I’ll be back soon, though…

Jul 18th

Black and White?

I’ve always felt a little self-conscious converting color images to black-and-white ones, both in film and digital. Back in the day, it was usually pretty easy to spot the conversions, and we all sneered at them. They didn’t have the feel, the texture, the caché, the honesty of “real” black-and-white. Of course, this was largely an artifact of the difficulty of translating...

Jun 17th

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Sometimes You Get Lucky

I’ve always loved shooting pictures of insects, spiders, close up things that we can’t see with the unaided eye. Revealing details that are hidden by the sheer diminutive size of the subjects. I’ve got close-up lenses, macro lenses, extension tubes, you name it. I chase bugs with a virtual arsenal of optics and accoutrements. When you pursue images this way, you frequently get...

Jun 8th

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Tale of a Cheap Lens

So I read on a forum about the Russian Helios lenses and how they were copies of Zeiss designs - the 44 being a copy of the Zeiss Biotar. Being a recovering Zeiss junkie, I had to try it out… like optical methadone. Plus, in 35mm film, my favorite lens was the venerable 85mm f1.8; this 58mm f2 would be almost exactly 86mm on the APS-c “Crop Sensor” with 1.5 crop factor. The...

Jun 3rd

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Finished my day of shredding millions of life forms with high-speed machinery - including tool-using species of hymenoptera. Muahahahaha….

May 22nd

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Macro n Stuff

Been a while since I posted here - but I’ve been taking some pictures. I learned about a diffuser for on-camera flash that works really well for macro work. Here’s an image lit with it: I also got a 49mm reversing ring that lets me connect two lenses face-to-face. This results in a repeatable, calculable magnification ratio of L1/L2; so if I put my 100mm lens on my camera, and...

May 19th

I always wanted to be Helmut Newton when I grew up…

May 2nd

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K-5 + Bigma; More Backyard Birds

I have this problem. I’m looking for a great lens at crappy lens weights. I picked up a deal on a Tamron 70-300 ($69 on ebay) and took it out in the backyard. Result? Pure crap. It keeps back-focusing by ~4”, and it’s not very doggone sharp at 300mm. Now, to put this in perspective, here’s an image from it: Many people would say that’s pretty decent. But now...

Apr 30th

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Life is too short to watch Jay Leno. And that band… Did he lose a bet with Jimmy Fallon?

Apr 27th

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Birds

I’ve been chasing a pair of cardinals around my back yard for a couple of weeks, and they kept avoiding me, no matter what I did. Until a couple of days ago. Out walking around with Bigma looking for bird-photo-ops, the male landed ten, maybe fifteen feet from me. And he stayed. So I got this picture: He looks so fierce. Then his girlfriend came along, and they teased me for a while, but...

Apr 20th

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Focus Stacking

Spent a while playing with focus stacking. With the K-5 and Photoshop, it’s possible to do hand-held focus-stacked macros! However, this is not possible on a windy day :D Even photoshop becomes confused when the items it’s supposed to be aligning change shape between frames. When I get it going right, I’ll have some more macros to post!

Apr 16th

RT @amazonmp3: #FREEFOO: Get “I Should Have Known,” a new song by @foofighters free for a limited time: http://amzn.to/esE3Qb

Apr 15th

NYT on toxicity of Sugar - is it the proximate cause of many current health crises? http://t.co/3Qsu8Xb

Apr 14th

Raptors

I’ve always liked birds, but raptors hold a special fascination. They’re regal, intelligent, graceful and beautiful. I love photographing them This is a broad-winged hawk that’s convalescing at a local nature center. She’ll be released back into the wild when she’s all healed up.

Apr 12th

Apr 11th

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Apr 9th

Apr 6th

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Apr 5th

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Apr 4th

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SSD in Macbook Air 1,1

So the wife’s MacBook Air was dying a slow death - emphasis on “slow” - so I bought her a new one, and took the patient under my wing to see if I could salvage anything useful. Turns out the onboard sound is just D-E-D dead - but a CMedia USB dongle will take care of that. The HDD was dead, too, it just didn’t know it. Click on “Microsoft Word”, go get a cup of...

Apr 2nd

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Apr 2nd

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Apr 2nd

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Apr 2nd

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Apr 1st

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Flickr is full of win →

I sometimes fancy myself a photographer of some skill. Like many, I use flickr as a place on the web to put and share my images with friends and family - and the general public. Every now and again I go to the flickr explore page. I don’t go often, because it can suck me in and hold me for a long time. There are so many beautiful photographs on Flickr that you can lose yourself in hours of...

Mar 31st

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Mar 31st

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Mar 31st

just posted a pic: http://picplz.com/n8MB

Feb 13th

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Finally got the Verizon connection working in Ubuntu on my #CR48. I’m a happy man. This is an excellent piece of hardware. Google is the bomb.

Feb 11th

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Gotta love Apple. My iPhone 4 camera went all stupid - everything turned red at the edges - and they just looked at it, checked the pictures, and gave me a new phone.

Feb 11th

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Google CR-48

So I finally got the dual boot working flawlessly. Well, more or less; I can switch back to ChromeOS by flipping the developer switch, or by changing the partition priority. It’s kind of a pain - you have to wait each time you boot into ChromeOS while it erases the stateful partition. Still haven’t gotten Verizon working in Ubuntu though. It should be possible, but it’s been...

Feb 11th

Trillian for the web works surprisingly well on #ChromeOS #CR-48

Feb 4th

I’m #reading The End of Faith by Sam Harris http://bit.ly/9cr5um

Nov 15th

4 of 5 stars to The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris http://bit.ly/9D64qh

Nov 12th

4 of 5 stars to The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris http://bit.ly/c6LUCO

Nov 12th

4 of 5 stars to Animal Farm by George Orwell http://bit.ly/dkwpdR

Oct 28th

4 of 5 stars to The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald http://bit.ly/d7cPC5

Oct 28th