I remember that before I started photography on a serious level, I had some understanding of shutter speed, but none of aperture and focal length. Even when I read what they meant, I still couldn’t ‘picture’ it, had no feeling for the numbers. Let’s leave ‘aperture’ for another time and just concentrate for now on the concept of “focal length”
First of all, the focal length of a lens is not the same as the actual physical length of the lens. Yes, 200mm and 300mm lenses (telephoto lenses) tend to be longer, but they’re not exactly 200mm and 300mm long. For instance, the Sigma 55-200mm F4-5.6 DC HSM is 85mm (3.3″) long, while the 70-200mm F2.8 II EX DG lens is 184mm (7.2″). Same maximal focal length, but more than twice as long.
So what is focal length? I could explain that it is “the distance from the center of the lens to the principal foci (or focal points) of the lens“, but that wouldn’t make it more comprehensible, would it? Well, I read through the theory, with tangens of the viewing angle and stuff, and I think I understand it (I’m an engineer, I actually like trigoniometry). A 200mm lens gives a viewing angle of 12° on the diagonal. Still not clear? That’s when I thought: let’s invent something more tangible: the “portrait distance“. Say you need a surface of about 72cm x 48cm (28″ x 18″) to make a portrait of a person (not just a headshot, but with some torso on it too). See some examples below:
Well, the distance between the camera and the person you’re making the portrait of, will be +- 20 times the focal length.
At the Pixagogo reunion dinner the other evening, I was reminded by one of my ex-colleagues Steven (‘Beukie‘) that back in 2003 I was having some fun with remixes/mashups. More specifically, I took some vocals of the Belgian “Idool 2003″ preselections, and added music to them. To make the exercise more fun, I took samples from the ones that were really musically challenged.
So I went back in my archives and here are the three that I found:
“I will you in the night” Marnik had translated a Flemish song, into his own ‘impoverisation’, as he proudly announces. Unfortunately, the Dutch “Ik wil je” (I want you) does not normally translate into the English “I will you“.
I also found back the original clip on Youtube (via partybrigade):
“But if I let you go” This ‘Pieter’ was officially called the worst candidate by the jury, and that decision is not impossible to understand. He had no tone, no rhythm and bad English. “There snow one like you!” He needed a lot of input of Madonna to make it bearable.
“Killing me softly” She was not that bad a singer, but her timing was awful. I remember having to cut and trim a lot to align her words to a steady beat. I made it a slow jazzy version with a lot of echo.
Out of that edition of Idool came Hadise, Brahim and Natalia, so it wasn’t all that bad. Still, there was also the girl with the wobbly hands:
In one corner of my apartment: my fixed telephone line. In another my printer/scanner/fax device. Challenge: run a wire from one to the other, every time you rearrange the furniture.
Recently I investigated web fax services like eFax, WebFax, RingCentral but for a low volume user like me they’re too expensive. You pay a lot of money for having a dedicated phone number for you, regardless of the number of faxes you send/receive. But I already have a dedicated telephone number, only it is completely disconnected from my ‘normal’ workflow: email, web, news reader. I would like to receive my faxes in my Gmail, because I never delete mails. With 7GB+ email storage, I don’t need to.
So what I would like to have, and what I don’t think exists yet: a Fax 2.0 device at home, let’s call it the FaxaPorta. It needs power and a phone connection, and … that’s all. So let’s make it look like this (not uninfluenced by the Apple Airport Express):
Here’s how it works:
You plug the Faxaporta in a power outlet and connect to the phone plug.
The device has built-in wifi and will connect to the internet in that way.
You associate the device with your account on the Faxaporta website.
Now you can configure how it is supposed to work:
Incoming fax: send it to an email address as a PDF file, print it (you can connect a printer to the USB port)
Incoming voice call: take a voice mail and send it to an email address as a MP3 file, forward the call via Skype
Outgoing fax: behave like a network printer, or you upload a PDF file to the Faxaporta web site (it is then downloaded by your own Faxaporta device and sent over your own phone line).
But because your fax is now part of your web-connected world you can do cool stuff like:
When you get a fax/voice call, the Caller ID (phone number of the sender) is being matched with your Google contacts to add name, company and email of the sender.
The faxes your receive pass through Faxaportas service and are OCR’ed so that you can copy/paste the text on it (cf. the ScanR service).
The voicemails are run through a speech recognition service so that you get a text transcript together with the MP3 file. (Google Voice has this)
The whole configuring of the fax/voice service is no longer done on a silly small screen on the fax machine with 15 cryptic buttons, but online, from anywhere you want. New response message? Upload the MP3 file! New front sheet for outgoing faxes? Create it in a WYSIWYG editor!
You have an RSS feed for your incoming fax messages, one for your incoming voicemails.
You could even make a ‘better’ (more expensive) service for companies:
try to route a fax to the right person (depending on who sent it, on names that were OCR’ed in the document)
set up a Interactive Voice Response system through the browser (“For Sales, press 1”).
Via hackerfactor I came across this gem: a 7-episode dissection of just how bad the 1999 Star Wars: Phantom Menace was. The guy who made it has a very specific style, insightful, funny but sometimes quite disturbing.
When Rupert Murdoch announced that he would remove his sites from Google (in order to make a deal with Microsoft, so that only Bing would have the NewsCorp pages, as we now assume), he apparently wasn’t kidding. Although all Google web sites still indicate that e.g. MySpace has 179 million pages in the index, the Google API is currently returning another number for that: only 7 million. The total number of NewsCorp pages (a sum of MySpace, IGN, RottenTomatoes, …) has dropped from 192 million to 12 million.
Let me give you some of his ‘big’ sites and how their # indexed pages have dropped:
Myspace: from 179 mio to 7 mio
RottenTomatoes: from 4 mio to 100.000
IGN: from 4 mio to 300.000
Stats.com: from 2.4 mio to 50.000
News.com.au: from 1.2 mio to 70.000
Sky.com: from 1.4 mio to 85.000
I suspect the Fox, National Geographic, Daily Telegraph, and other sites will soon follow.
Did he send in the robots?
I checked to see if NewsCorp finally started using the robots.txt file, because that’s the way you’re supposed to remove content from Google, not with press conferences.
Myspace:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
RottenTomatoes:
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
And the answer there is “no”. So I’m not sure how they tell the Google crawler to stay out.
— UPDATE —
Source of the data:
The numbers come from http://tools.forret.com/newscorp/, which uses the Google Search API. I double-checked the replies from the API: for MySpace.com I get "estimatedResultCount": "6950000" so 7 million, not 179 million. If there’s an error, it’s in the Googleplex.
I did a bandwidth test the other day with the iPhone SpeedTest tool. I wanted to compare the speed using (standard) GPRS, using 3G and my own Wifi. The results were all a power of ten apart:
iPhone on Proximus GPRS: 35 kbps (download & upload)
iPhone on Proximus 3G: 350 kbps (download & upload)
iPhone via Wifi: 3500 kbps (download – upload is +- 300 kbps)
The real reason is that I wanted to see how fast I would wear out my Proximus data plan (200MB per month). The answer: with GPRS I would need more than 12 hours of continuous downloading, with 3G I could do it in less than 2 hours. So GPRS is pretty safe, it’s also easier on your battery, but you have to live with slow, pre-1996 modem-like performance. The latency – the time it takes to get your first byte after requesting a URL - is easily 10 to 50 seconds. Not milliseconds, seconds!
As a side note: do not take a time-based data subscription, certainly not with the iPhone. My first post-iPhone Proximus invoice was 800,- euro, which is more than the price of my iPhone! When I contacted them about that, they immediately offered to reimburse it and advised me to switch to a size-based plan. I guess I was not the first one …
I was using my iPhone to read my Twitter feed (Twitterrific) and Facebook and when comparing the two, I liked one thing about Facebook that Twitter/Twitterific does not have: when some one posts a URL, you get a preview icon and a short text. This way you can have a rough idea of what the link is about, and whether or not you’re interested to click it. In Twitter it is even worse, since the service uses URL shorteners (bitly, …) so that you don’t even have the original URL to guess what the link is about, like e.g. youtube.com/watch?… => it’s a video!
So imagine that there is a service that accepts a URL as input and comes back with
a destination URL (the actual URL you end up on)
a summary text (short text) about this page
a preview (small image) of this page
So for a YouTube video, it comes back with a video screenshot and the video comments, for a blog post that includes a video/image, it comes back with a thumbnail for that and the start of the blog post text.
Most importantly, for shortened URLs, it comes back with a preview of the ‘real’, original URL.
A Twitter client like Twitterific, Tweetie, Tweetdeck, … could use this service every time it encounters a (shortened) URL in a tweet, and add the thumbnail next to it, and maybe the summary text as a mouse-over window.
Coming up with the metadata
Creating a summary text: either based on the web page itself, the META description, if it’s a blog, the first X words of the RSS item in its feed that points to this page.
Creating a preview thumbnail: for YouTube, DailyMotion, Vimeo: a video screenshot, for Flickr, Picasaweb: an image thumbnail, for Wikipedia: an image that is used in the article or just the Wikipedia favicon, for a corporate site: the web site thumbnail as created by e.g. thumbalizr.
Extend it with even more metadata
This might be an interesting service to run for Google: they could add some indicator of importance or trustworthiness (Pagerank, incoming links), or warn for shady URLs.
I was downloading a free iPhone app at noon, and I thought: some of these applications have no good alternative in the browser world. Imagine everyone could start using/buying the Apple iPhone/iPod Touch applications right in their browser. You give your Apple ID, you purchase an app like ColorSplash and off you go. Some of the multi-touch interface would be hard to emulate, but still. It would have to be an Apple application that does it: like e.g. iTunes. It’s got your Apple ID anyway. Why not run a virtual iPod Touch in there?
The advantages:
some applications for iPhone/iPod just have no worthy counterpart in the ‘normal’ world.
an application would run immediately on Apple MacOSX as well as Windows XP/Vista/7
the iPhone developers wouldn’t be looking anymore at a potential audience of some X million iPhone owners, but at all iTunes owners.
Research analyst Sam Bhavnani, of the market research firm Current Analysis, says that iTunes has 200 million users. Research analyst Shaw Wu, of the market research firm American Technology Research, gives a figure of 100 million. Oddly, Apple itself gives a much lower number: 10 million. Google Answers
![04112009175905[1]](http://blog.forret.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/041120091759051.jpg "04112009175905[1]")
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