Concern

Hey, lazyweb. What kind of pocket camera do you like?

I’ve sold my Canon, and since I have a digital SLR, I’d like to have a little point-and-shoot digital camera, something small so I can carry it with me most everywhere. As I understand it, there are quite a lot of different choices for portable cameras that take pretty good pictures, in this modern world of ours.

I’m thinking right now about either a Canon, Casio, or Pentax; what’s your opinion? Size is the big decider, here: I’d like to get something small, and thin (the, er, z-axis) is more attractive than the x/y size. I’d like something that takes good quality pictures, and which doesn’t have a long shutter delay. Mac OS X compatibility is needed (as is no dependency on some craptastic camera-maker’s software), GNU/Linux compatibility is a nice-to-have.

Update: Canon PowerShot SD1000 Digital Elph. Tiny!

A really annoying thing about Mac OS X is that it saves some things you drag-and-drop to Finder (for example, the cover art in iTunes) as “clipping” files, like “pictClipping” for picture files. People long ago figured out that pictClipping files kept the actual image stashed in the resource fork, which file identifies as a “ms-windows icon resource.”

I haven’t had any luck finding some simple way to batch convert these “icon” files into real images, but as it turns out, these files seem to mostly be real image files, like TIFF, JPEG, or PNG, with some weird header. Someone figured out how to convert these to TIFF, if the image in the pictClipping is a TIFF, and so I used this to write some Automator actions that convert pictClipping images to TIFF, JPEG, or PNG. You can save these workflows as Finder plugins, meaning that you can right-click on any pictClipping file, and try to convert that file to some format.

The workflows:

• Convert pictClipping to JPEG.workflow
• Convert pictClipping to PNG.workflow
• Convert pictClipping to TIFF.workflow

These are a little sucky, because you have to experiment with each one until one of them works (it should be easy enough to write a little meta-workflow that handles all three, but I’m too lazy right now).

Once again, I am drunk, and am composing something. Something far less full of self-pity this time:

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You can check out my depressing workplace in street-level detail.

I’m not certain, but they may have captured me as I was walking through the lobby.

I just started watching this show, and went through the first season in a week and a half (or so) time span. I did this, I admit, largely because a number of people had recommended it recently, and I’m bored with life as it were.

I like it. The fact that a lot of the show is an excuse to go into the deep, and sometimes surprising, back-stories of the characters is fine with me — the world these people inhabit certainly feels rich and unpredictable enough to be real. Now, the rest of the show seems to be nothing more than a long series of MacGuffins, lots of things that don’t make much sense, but are compelling enough to make you want to know just WTF is going on.

It’s rather a lot like Twin Peaks, except instead of Laura Palmer’s murderer it’s a bunch of maybe-supernatural, maybe-technological, creepy and dangerous things going on. I guess the writers of this show will eventually start bringing answers to questions, which killed TP, but I have hopes that the characters will remain interesting.

Anyway, I dig deep back-stories and character development, and slight-of-hand what-did-I-just-see (and mistakes with nitroglycerin) is fun too.