More Vimeo love

I had Erwin take a video during practice last tuesday using my Lumix. I wanted to see just how good the quality of the video was given the specs of the camera. So basically when shooting on a 16:9 ratio, the Lumix gives you hi-def resolution (1280×720) Although with extremely lousy audio compared to the Cybershot. Here’s a sample:

The video is available in its full resolution as well. Unfortunately, playing it in HD requires you to visit the video’s “official page” for it to work. Which is a bummer since I wanted to be able to have people view the HD content straight from the embed.

There’s also some footage of me driving through the storm that night; should give you an idea how it the video does in low light conditions.

September 5, 2008February 11, 2017

My New Toy: Panasonic Lumix LX3

Noise profiles for PictureCode’s Noise Ninja
are now available for download here

Classy Retro Feel!

I just got my Lumix LX3 a few days ago and I’m lovin’ it! Having just purchased a Sony W120 a few weeks before, I’m sure you can think of a bunch of questions; Why upgrade? Why Panasonic? etc. etc. I’ll be discussing that as well as talk about my experience with the LX3 thus far. Read More

August 31, 2008

Fast, clean and reliable iPhone backups

As iPhone users know, iTunes’ backup facility is sketchy at best; It can corrupt backups, it can be ridiculously slow, and on a personal note; I don’t like the idea of “trace files” creeping into a newly restored device.

So I’ve decided to outline a “workflow” I personally use whenever I’m up for a restore session. Everything here assumes a jailbroken device of course.

How it was before

On a 2.x device, the way you could get your AppStore apps’ settings restored was by using iTunes’ backup images – buggy as it is. There’s also the issue of bugs during normal usage; there have been cases of legitimate apps randomly crashing – and the only “cure” was to erase the app and reinstall it. This would’ve been fine, only they forgot to mention that when you erase/uninstall an app, that’s exactly what you’ve done – along with all its data.

August 27, 2008

Color Management in Firefox

Firefox disables color management by default. This means it won’t honor a color profile embedded in a digital image – which annoys photographers who post pictures online to no end.

Here’s how to fix it; in Firefox’s addressbar, type in: about:config

Then search/scroll the list of options till you see the following option:

gfx.color_management.enabled         user set        boolean      false

Double click on it to toggle its state to true then restart Firefox 😉

There you have it OSX users, no more reason to stick with Safari for the sole purpose of “proper color management”

August 25, 2008

E-mail Optimization Tips

Here’s another one of the more useful posts I’ll be doing. Partly so that I can remind myself the steps needed to perform this somewhat convoluted approach to getting the best “setup” for iPhone and desktop mail use.

Why GMail Rocks

The best thing about GMail is the free IMAP support it has. For the uninitiated, make sure you read the advantages of IMAP over POP3 (referred to as POP from now on) in their respective wiki pages.

Of course GMail, just like any other competent email service, supports POP as well as the ability to retrieve mail from external accounts (via POP) as well. Not sure if it’s the same for other services, but this feature is free as well.

Couple that with IMAP accessibility, and lets not forget the gigabytes of space – and you basically have a powerful tool of accessing practically all your email in one place.

Refining it Further

Given the tools at your disposal, let me describe how I’ve setup my “mail workflow” – hopefully you can also find it useful in your situation.