It seems I for­got to reorder ink for my photo printer. Oops.

Fid­dling with my new Kin­dle 2.

Rollei­flex

Two peo­ple who were inter­ested in one of my older cam­eras requested that I take this photo. The cam­era is a mid-1950s Rollei­flex, with attached Rollei­flash. The cam­era cost $135 on eBay, and the flash was $1.50 at KEH.

When scanned with my Nikon LS-9000, a 6×6 photo pro­duces a file of approx­i­mately 75 megapix­els, and with a dynamic range greater than the newest and most expen­sive dig­i­tal cam­era can produce.

Pro­cess­ing 4×5 scans with my new Mac is much faster. Now it only takes 4.5 hours instead of all day.

Scan­ning a roll of medium for­mat film.

Apple launches iTunes Pass con­tent. Apple has intro­duced the con­cept of the iTunes Pass, a new shop­ping option in the music sec­tion of the iTunes Store. The Pass auto­mat­i­cally sub­scribes a per­son to all of the tracks and videos in a par­tic­u­lar col­lec­tion, down­load­ing exist­ing mate­r­ial and any­thing new as it becomes avail­able. Apple notes that all the mate­r­ial pro­vided in a Pass is DRM-free, and encoded with 256kbps AAC audio.… [The Mac­in­tosh News Net­work]

This seems like it could be good for inde­pen­dent musi­cians. More than once I’ve heard about a CD release being held up because the artist needed to save up money to pay for art­work or man­u­fac­tur­ing, and with some­thing like this maybe they’d be able to cover those expenses from “Pass” orders.

From an arti­cle on the Rea­son website:

…the gifted Los Ange­les Times colum­nist who com­pen­sates for his indif­fer­ent rea­son­ing skills with a heart as big as West Hollywood…

For those not famil­iar with the LA area, West Hol­ly­wood isn’t all that big.

Sam­ple photo using Ektar 100.

I tried a roll of Kodak’s new Ektar 100 film. As adver­tised, it has very fine grain. How­ever, it suf­fers from the same prob­lem that all C41 films have–you’ll def­i­nitely get some color, but any resem­blance between the color you get out of the film and the color that was there in real­ity is purely coin­ci­den­tal. I do have a sec­ond roll to try out, but I think I’ll be stick­ing to Kodachrome.

Birds in the water at Santa Mon­ica Beach.

Recently I’ve been shoot­ing more Kodachrome.

No, It Isn’t.

Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), post­ing on Twitter:

“11 hours to review a 1000+ page spend­ing bill that spends nearly a tril­lion dol­lars? This is not Con­gress’ finest hour.”

Looks like Obama will also again be break­ing his pledge to post every bill on the web for the pub­lic to review for five days before sign­ing it. And this on the biggest and (by his mea­sure) most impor­tant bill he’s likely to sign in his presidency.

[The Agi­ta­tor]

Here we see the dif­fer­ence between a pres­i­dent who’s stu­pid and evil and one who’s smart and evil. It took Bush until Sep­tem­ber of his first year in office to get away with the “Patriot” Act, while Obama has pulled off his own ver­sion in February.