Scott Novis

There are a bunch of great resources on the web for what stuff means.  I ran into a bunch of heady explanations for the word lumens, however the one that made the most sense to me came from lightsandknives.com.

In a nutshell, if you’re going to measure something, you need a frame of reference. So people use the candle. Also, we know that light gets dimmer the farther away you go, so to measure how “bright” something is you need to factor in distance. Finally, “brightness” can be effected by the shape of the light. Basically how much light is cast over an area. It makes sense that a beam is more “intense” than a naked candle flame. If you’ve ever had one of those Ever ready lantern / flashlights you know exactly what I’m talking about. In flashlight mode you can’t stand to look at it, but in lantern mode it is comfortable to stare at the naked bulb.

So the three components of measuring how bright a light is are the intensity of the source, how far away you are and how much area is being illuminated. The metric standard is to measure one candle, from one meter away and see how much light is cast on a 1 meter area.

A 60 Watt bulb casts 800 lumens if that gives you an idea.

Scott

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When I first got my iPad, I was very impressed with the media capabilities. Watching Videos with NetFlix, Reading the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today and Epicurious is just gorgeous. It replaced my kindle the day I got it. And the games are decent, but there are still limits to what you can do with a touch screen (compared to a controller ) but the visual quality is outstanding.

Still, the one big draw back was creating content. Keyboard support is spotty, and there’s no easy way to flip between apps when you want to clip something from a website to put into a Pages document. Even creating emails felt like an iPhone app and not something you would expect to find on a useful computer with a screen this big. And don’t get me started about pen based input. It’s still a joke.

So I figured that the iPad would be mostly a reader or browser, until I saw Photosplash.

The first real program I used to create anything meaningful on my iPad was MaxJournal. During our vacation I kept a daily journal of what we did and attaching photos to it was cool. The iPad is still a nightmare to get photos on for me because I tied it to the iPhoto library on my home machine. Once you’re out on the road, getting photos onto it was not trivial. I had to upload them to a web page with another computer and copy them down. I know why Apple didn’t put an SD card reader on the iPad. There’s open, and then there’s open. Apple believes in open with their permission. But like Jobs wrote in multiple emails, if you don’t like it buy something else.

However, back to Photosplash. This is a very, very clever application that allows you to selectively color photographs. And for the first time, it’s a creative program that feels way more natural on the iPad than any other platform I could image. The gist of it, is that they made coloring with the tip of your finger feel intuitive, and natural. Like coloring with charcoal, or finger paints. The ability to zoom in – even beyond pixel depth, to smoothly trace a region or a line is just amazing.

In just a few minutes I was able to create these images, photos that would have taken me hours to do in Photoshop, mostly because I’d still have to figure out how to do it.

And for the cost of the program? It was well worth it. Now that I’ve seen it, it seems like it is possible – I can’t wait to see what else they come up with.

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I have been using PDA’s forever. Going all the way back to the original Palm. Along the way, I was always obsessed with having a real keyboard. So I have a bizarre collection of foldable portable keyboards. Perhaps even more bizarre is that I kept them all. Well one of those turns out to be a Bluetooth keyboard manufactured by Think Outside (now iGo.com).   After a little googling, I found the PDF guide for the keyboard and learned that

<Ctrl> <Left Fn> <Right Fn>

When held together will put the keyboard in discovery mode and low and behold the iPad will actually work with this keyboard!  In fact, it works quite well.  The Windows key acts like the Mac Command button, and the arrow keys and all the other function keys seem to work normally.

That has to be the first time ever that holding onto something for 10 years proved to be useful!

And the included Stand holds the iPad pretty well.

– Scott

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There’s so many things to learn, it’s hard to keep track of them all.  I found this one on Lifehacker.

I think like most people, I just don’t have the time to go through all my stuff.  I often wonder who does have the time to tag every picture with faces, or to correctly label all your music.  I’m sure it’s a wonderful thing if you do it, but my music collection has been a mess for… oh… 10 years?  When did I go digital?  Heck I don’t even remember.  I do remember seeing my first iPod way back in 99.  So it had to be shortly after that.

So I got a decade of crud built up in my collection and no amount of purging, murging or (what rhymes with *ging?) crying?  pounding?  well you get the idea.  Nothing has really made it better.  So we live in an uneasy truce.  My iTunes library holds yet another project I will never get to.

But today I found a very clever hack with smart playlists that lets me enjoy my music without cleaning it up.  Here’s the gist of it.  A lot like using SQL queries to get lists of information that you then run new queries against (called sub-queries or views) you can create a smart playlist, then use ANOTHER smart play list to filter it.  Essentially, you create 3 playlists, each that filters your music by quality and how recently it was played.  Then you create a master list that combines those three.  Songs you like a lot get mixed in more often.  Using shuffle, it’s every bit as good as Pandora.

For mine, I had to weed out Spoken Word, Children’s, and about a dozen other non-music related genres.  Then I created a list called “Banned” and anything that gets dumped in there gets excluded from my smart play list.  Over time I can go back and decide if I want to keep any of that junk.

Give it a whirl.  The only thing that confused me is that iTunes will change what options you have available depending upon what you are filtering against.  For example, select “Author” and you get one set of options.  Select Last Played and you get a different set of options.  Just play around to see which song attributes have which options.  Ultimately by combining different lists (rather than creating one UBER list) you can make some very powerful song combinations.  I’ve been listening to mine all afternoon and nearly all the things it’s playing are awesome, including some music I haven’t heard for a long time.

So give it a whirl.  It’s cool.

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