Archive for the 'Tech' Category

Posts relating to techie things

Yahoo! Photos Really Sucks

My sister keeps her photos on Yahoo! Photos. This is unfortunate, because it's a bad photos service.

I don't know when Yahoo! lost its way (although my first guess would be when they got rid of me *  🙂, but they seem to spend their time now making things "flashy" instead of the "useful" and "intuitive" of the old days. Most recently, this manifested itself with a big screwup of their TV-listing sit.

With the current version of Y! Photos that debuted during the summer, they have perhaps added useful features, but in the process, made the site really inconvenient [...]
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NEF, Color Space Settings, and Embedded JPGs

This post is not likely of interest to regular readers of my blog ("Hi Mom"); I'm putting it here mostly for the search engines.

A Nikon D200 dSLR has two color-space settings: sRGB and Adobe RGB. People often ask which should be selected when shooting in raw mode, with the oft-provided answer that "it doesn't matter" because raw data has its own camera-specific raw-sensor-data color space, and sRGB vs. AdobeRGB comes in to play only when converting the raw sensor data to a different image format (e.g. JPEG).

Indeed, the color-space setting doesn't matter for the main picture, [...]
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Ordered a New Computer

Getting sort of sick of having to reboot my horribly flaky Windows system 10 times a day (I kid you not), I've finally succumbed to getting a new system.

Despite being a geek for the better part of 40 years, I didn't buy my first computer until I was 30 (and I still have it below my desk -- almost 10 years old, it's the machine with which I wrote my last two books). In the years since, I've bought two laptops, a system for Fumie while we were in America, and systems for both of us here.

I [...]
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Photoshop CS2 Calendar-Template-Building Script

We like to use a loose-leaf calendar to keep track of the family schedule. Yahoo! Calendars is still invaluable for things like remembering birthdays and when the property tax is due, but for what events are going on this week, we find it more convenient to use a loose-leaf calendar that we can write on and leave near the dinner table.

Very occasionally, I end up with a nice picture that might look good on a calendar, so I thought I'd make my own. The one shown above was made while testing (it's my sister-in-law becoming my sister-in-law... and [...]


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Photoshop’s “Darken” Blend Mode (and more fall-foliage desktops)

This post describes how I made the funky-color Kyoto fall leaves image from the other day.

I'd wanted to check out the vine growing through a bamboo fence again, in afternoon light (as opposed to the morning shade I'd seen it in before), so I went back on Wednesday afternoon. It was a productive visit, with a few shots of the fence that will certainly find their way here in the future. However, the subject of today's post is what I saw when I looked up.

Kyoto's impressive autumn colors are in full force now, but there are [...]


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