Sunday, January 30, 2011

DNG Support

For those of you who are looking for better RAW support, I suggest you consider installing Adobe's free DNG converter, and then using that to import your photos into Picasa. DNG is an excellent archive format anyway that is likely to stay around longer than your camera-of-the-year's proprietary format.

in reference to: RAW format images : Basics - Picasa Help (view on Google Sidewiki)

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 has AWFUL font rendering!

Wow. Just took FF beta 10 for a test-drive, and I have got to say, the font rendering is awful. Look at a screenshot of Chrome vs. Firefox:


Visual comparison of Chrome vs. Firefox 4

This may not look like a big deal in such a small sample, but trust me, after browsing for a few minutes, the eye strain was unbearable.

At this rate, I'm pretty sure that IE9 will regain market share after FF4 is released.

Tuesday, January 18, 2011

The efficiency of mass transit may surprise you...

Here is an interesting string of blogs that I picked up regarding the relative efficiency of various means of transportation:

- Discusses San Jose Light Rail versus automobile, and others, very clean graphics

- Illustrates that light rail in the United States is terribly underutilized and thus very inefficient

I was very surprised to see how much cars have improved, efficiency-wise. In the last 30 years, cars have become 30% more efficient!

Electric vehicles are the clear winner, however. Check out this graph from Coyote Blog:
energy graph

Even more interesting is that my bicycle is less efficient than an electric scooter. I wonder if this is due to regenerative braking? Maybe this is a mistake.

Friday, January 14, 2011

BLM Land Color Key

Everyone who camps a lot probably already knows this, but I had a hard time hunting down the information online.

Yellow - Bureau of Land Management (BLM),
Darker yellow-orange - Wilderness Study Areas within BLM lands
Purple - National Park Service
Green - National Forest
Dark Green - National Forest Wilderness Areas
Blue - state lands
Pink - Bankhead-Jones Land Use Land

Private lands are untinted.