Another shot from my morning at Crissy Field a few weeks back. This time though it is not the bridge or the Palace of Fine Arts; instead it is a plant. I don’t know what it is exactly. There were a number of them growing in the sandy area along the edge of the restored marsh land region.
Late one afternoon, after a light rain shower, I ventured out to the parking lot/car wash area here at my apartment complex and captured some shots of the various rose flowers around the edges of it. The colour of this one attracted my attention more than any of the others as I had never seen anything quite like it before. While the others were conventional reds, pinks and whites, this was more of a pale purple colour.
This was taken during a recent visit to Angel Island. While the weather was great for a picnic and hiking, the summer haze ruined any chance of bridge or cityscape photos. The haze has no effect on shots like this one though. The trails were still very green following the late spring showers we’d had in the few days before the trip, and there were plenty of these prickly plants waiting to attack the unwary hiker in shorts (most of us!).
I’ve had both the Tiger and the new iLife ’05 on my PowerBook G4 for a few weeks now. Mostly I’m impressed with 10.4, less so with the changes to iPhoto (which is pretty much all I am using from the iLife bundle at the moment).
I was upgrading from Jaguar (10.2), so I had all the new features of the Panther (10.3) release to get used to as well. The upgrade itself was painless. I chose to reinstall clean on the hard drive and then use the migration support software to pull applications and data from my firewire backup drive.
The biggest annoyance I had with 10.2 seems to have gone too: whenever the system became very busy under 10.2 the mouse pointer movement would become unpredictable making it very hard to do anything at all. I was told that this was not a problem with 10.3, so I was expecting it to go away when I upgraded. Still nice to see it did 🙂
Dashboard is great. I tried Konfabulator early on, but was annoyed by its resource consumption (I frequently had to kill it just to be able to move my mouse pointer smoothly again!). It was also difficult to work out which of the stacking planes to associate the applets with. Dashboard’s approach seems much cleaner (and has impressed every Windows user I’ve shown it to!).
My experience with the new iPhoto however is not so good. I have a lot of photos now (almost 14,000 photos, or about 50 GB), but that is only just over half the number it is supposed to cope with. I either need a lot more memory (which might be true), or this software needs some serious reworking! I would also like to see some support in there for multiple photo libraries. That way I could keep some of my older photos on an external hard drive and only open them when I want to (rarely), but keep my commonly used photos on the laptop HD. I have download the iPhoto Library Manager, but haven’t had a chance to try it (expect an update when I do!).
Would I recommend the upgrades? Tiger is a definite yes. iLife is a definite maybe! The reason I upgraded was to get full support for my Canon EOS 20D camera (I could upload the JPEG versions of the photos using iPhoto 4 by setting the camera to PTP mode, but I couldn’t get the RAW images). For that it is useful, but I think that there remains a lot of work to do before this application is really useful.
The Roku Labs M2000 Soundbridge is a streaming audio player. Connect it to your stereo system on one end, and your home network on the other end (or use the optional Wi-Fi card) and you can play songs stored on your Windows PC(s) and/or Apple Mac(s). That’s pretty cool, but I actually don’t have that much of my music on either my Sony PC or my PowerBook. Additionally, the PC is hardly ever switched on these days. [I have to admit that I am thinking about a Mac Mini and a large firewire drive to act as a physically small file sharing system for my photos and music, but I don’t have that yet.]
What is very cool about the Soundbridge products though is that they can also stream internet radio stations, without having any other computers on the network. This is a feature I love. Most of my use of iTunes has been to listen to internet radio stations, so being able to have a very cool aluminium tube with a bright green vacuum fluorescent display connected to my stereo and listen to streaming internet feeds is amazing.
Not so cool is setting up a hex WEP key using the remote control. The sooner there is a standard for getting this stuff set up automagically the better. Once set though it was able to join my WEP wireless network in static WEP mode. Shame it does not have support for WPA-PSK, but maybe that will come in a future firmware update [Roku Labs: if you are reading this and would like help getting WPA and/or WPA2 working on your systems email me – I know some people who can help! We can probably also get you support for an 802.11g USB card on the HD1000 box.]
Gizmodo has a pointer to a review of the Sharp SL-C3000 PDA. I have been playing with the very similar SL-C1000. The main difference between them, apart from the price, is that the SL-C1000 exchanges the hard disc for some flash memory.
What’s hot? Well, the screen is stunning. A 640×480 screen, but in a PDA size. It also swivels so you can use it as a regular PDA or as a very, very small laptop. Running the terminal application (not included, but easy to find online) really shows how good the screen is; the text is tiny, but still very clear.
The keyboard is also surprisingly good for its size. Having played with the thumb-board on the older SL-5500 units a bit, which was a last resort thing, the SL-C1000 one is a joy to use. Sure, you’re not going to want to write a book using it (or even a long email), but for the kinds of thing you might find yourself doing with a PDA it is great.
Oh, and it is Linux based of course, with Trolltech‘s Qtopia graphical environment. This is great for those of us that write our own apps, or want to use open source apps. You can even upgrade the kernel. There is information on Sharp’s website explaining how to rebuild the kernel image [Google translation] and then program it onto the unit safely.
On the not so hot side is the lack of built in Wi-Fi. I don’t care so much about Bluetooth being missing, though I suspect I might if I had more things that supported it (currently only my PowerBook has Bluetooth support). Wi-Fi though I do think is essential, especially in something that is so close to being a laptop! To compensate a little, it does support my Linksys WCF12 card, so I have wireless, albeit external.
The other big down side is that Sharp are not selling it here in the US, so it defaults to Japanese. Most of the conversion back to English is simple, but I still have a few things left over in Japanese. I would love this to be a fully supported platform over here too.
The first of a number of gadget updates, this is a quick look at the Tom Tom GO 300 that I have on loan. This little gem (and it is pretty small) has a sense of direction and a pleasant voice to provide directional hints while driving, but that’s not the cool part. It displays, live, a 3D representation of the map as you drive. It is not perfect (I have confused it briefly a few times), but it is a very cool toy. The only real problem with it is that it might be quite distracting at first; watching the map is not a safe driving style, but damn is it hard not to keep an eye on it. There is some more in depth information about this unit, and its bigger sister, on Linux Devices.
I would still love to see the Sony NV-XYZ in the flesh, but the Tom Tom is a much more likely unit to find its way into my car on a permanent basis; great for finding my way around in the city which is something that I would still find exceptionally useful.
At California and Market in San Francisco is one end of a cable car line. Less popular with tourists than the Powell Street to Fisherman’s Wharf line, you can usually hop on this one without any wait.
Read more about the history of the cable cars, check the current routes or check out the photos of the barn.
Another black and white shot; this time of the San Francisco Bay Bridge, taken on a busy Sunday afternoon: it was a game day, and the SF Giants were playing the Oakland A’s at SBC Park. This shot has none of that though. Even the bay looks quiet, although a fire boat, a large military ship with an entourage of tug boats and numerous yachts passed through this area while I was there.
I also liked the remains of a pier being in the foreground. My best guess is that they are from the old pier 14 – the new pier 14, a little closer to the ferry building. They seem to add something to this shot that seemed to be missing from most of the other shots of the bay bridge I took. It also seems to work better in black & white (I might post the colour version later in the week).
Taken last Saturday as part of my walk around the Crissy Field area, this is part of the Palace of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Originally built in 1915 for the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the buildings, rebuilt in the 1960s, now form a quiet park area and are surrounded by some of the nicest homes in the city (at least in my opinion). It is also home to the Exploratorium. You can read more about its history on their website (be sure to follow the Next links to get the full story).