Paris Panorama

This amazing panoramic shot of Paris was shot directly above the Eiffel Tower by photographer Giles Vidal. His other panoramas are equally impressive and his photography is also amazing.

[via Scott James]

The sculptor Tom Sachs on plywood, his medium of choice.

[via core77]

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet

This is quite a good article on both the history of flickr and how Yahoo has killed it over time. Worth reading for flickr users but also for anyone interesting in the history of these types of sites on the web.

Had they not sold flickr to Yahoo it would be interesting to know what Stewart Butterfield and Catarina Fake would have done with flickr over the years since.

[via Michaela Hackner]

Nice hike today. This was the only picture I took. Just enjoyed being outside, forgot about cameras.

Brilliant TED talk by book designer Chip Kidd.

[via Gary Sharp]

Dan Miller, editor at Macworld demonstrates some extremely useful iPad keyboard tricks. He’s also provided a transcript in the post so you can read about them.

I knew some of these but not all of them. Best to use them a lot to get them internalized.

[via Jon Moss]

This remains one of my favorite BASE jumping videos. The high frame rate slow motion makes it accessible. Zoom it out for best effect.

[via Coudal Partners]

The Afghan Box Camera Project provides a record of the kamra-e-faoree (instant camera) which as a living form of photography is on the brink of disappearing in Afghanistan.

In this video, Qalam Nabi, one of the last two remaining box camera photographers in Kabul demonstrates how to use his camera.

Pinhole photography in a single box. Fantastic.

The Giant Marionettes of Royal de Luxe

Based in Nantes, France, the street theatre company Royal de Luxe performs around the world, primarily using gigantic, elaborate marionettes to tell stories that take place over several days and wind through entire cities. Puppeteers maneuver the huge marionettes — some as tall as 12 meters (40 ft) — through streets, parks, and waterways, performing their story along the way. Gathered here are images of several recent Royal de Luxe performances, from Belgium, Mexico, Germany, Chile, and England.

Absolutely incredible and great photography too. I must see this live at some time in my life. Wow.

Royal de Luxe on Wikipedia

An excellent documentary directed and shot by Malcolm Murray on the dying art of commercial sign painting commissioned by Stella Artois. Zoom it out for a sense of scale.

[via Zapong]

Young Indian Royal Portraits, 1862-1930

Incredible collection. A wormhole into another culture and time.

My wife Anne and I have had new iPads (3rd gen) for almost a month now and I thought I’d report on our experience with them so far.

Anne
Anne had been using my original iPad (trickle down) and loved it. She used it primarily for reading and while she tried the Kindle app she prefers iBooks and continues to use that as her primary reading tool. The lack of speed of the original iPad limited her use of it as a computer replacement because much of her computer use is on the web. She does have an iPhone, a MacBook Pro (an old computer of mine) and an iCloud account and has them all working together.

The new iPad is fast enough so that she’s now doing pretty much everything on it: email, web browsing and a bit more. Reading remains her primary use of the iPad and she’s loving the extra resolution on the new iPad screen. Anne says that this iPad is very close to the step that could allow her to go computer-less.

Richard (me)
I was going to skip the new iPad (3) because my iPad 2 was doing the job for me. When Anne’s new iPad came I had my iPad 2 to compare to it side by side. While the screen on the new iPad is spectacular, the thing that tipped me was dictation.

I use both Siri and dictation on my iPhone 4S and find both quite useful (when they work) and one of the things that has always bothered me about the iPad is the on-screen keyboard. I’ve refused to buy a bluetooth keyboard for my iPad because while I appreciate the difference between Mac OS and iOS, I have a computer with an excellent keyboard and I don’t see a reason to recreate that in the iPad world. One of the things that makes the iPad so amazing it’s its small size and weight and simplicity. Adding a keyboard pulls it back into the computer world.

So, I found a buyer for my iPad 2 and ordered the new iPad.

Dictation on the new iPad is a dream and I’m a very fast typist, both on a hardware QWERTY keyboard and on the iPad screen. But, even with that, I find dictation quite useful and I like having it in addition to a keypad. I can’t wait until it’s part of Mac OS.

Recently I cut the tip of one of my fingers off cutting potatoes of all things. It did not require stitches and there was no way to reattach it so I’ve been changing dressings and keeping it covered and it’s healing nicely. However, during the past week and a half, my keyboarding has been compromised by the bandage on my finger and so, out comes the iPad with dictation and it’s a godsend.

Editing text in iOS is still in its infancy and feels crude by comparison to editing text on a computer. This video by Daniel Hooper is a nice demonstration of a possible solution to multi-touch text selection on the iPad. It’s great and I hope Apple is considering this issue.

As iOS gets better text editing it will push me further along the path of using the iPad to replace things on this computer.

Aside from dictation, which was the feature that tipped me I’m finding the new iPad a bit faster than the iPad 2 and this small speed increase is enough to get me to use it more to replace this computer. I still use this computer the most of all of my devices but the new iPad is eating into some of that time.

While the screen is great for reading and looking at images, for me it was not the most important factor in doing the upgrade and even now that I’ve had the iPad for a few weeks and love the screen, I think the maturation of iOS, dictation, and the small speed upgrade makes the new iPad a revolutionary evolutionary version of an already great tool.

I have little doubt that the new iPad is eating away at Apple’s low end computer sales and this in turn affects how they position and market MacBook Airs and MacBook Pros.

Apps that push me to iPad use
I was going to avoid listing all of my iOs apps but in fact, some of these have helped push me into more iPad use so it’s important to list them as part of a general discussion of the evolution of the iPad as a computer replacement. iOS is a very different environment than Mac OS and because of this and the fact that everything runs full screen by default, some tasks done with the right apps are more pleasant for me to do on an iPad than on a Mac.

Each of these is a cloud-based application: each uses the cloud to connect to itself running on another device and so, I use these on my computer, my iPad, and my iPhone along with an iCloud account to keep my contacts, calendar and bookmarks in sync.

RSS
Reeder for iPad is a newsreader client for a Google Reader account. It is so well designed and such a pleasure to use I can’t imagine using anything else. Given that RSS feeds are the center of my web life I spend a lot of time in this app on the Mac, iPad and even iPhone. Because it’s cloud (Google Reader) based Reeder syncs all of my devices seamlessly. Reeder for me is the equivalent of iBooks for my wife; I spend more time reading in it than anything else.

Twitter
I’ve had a Twitter account for a while but rarely used it on anything but my Mac because tracking numerous feeds on multiple devices without any native way to keep the feeds in sync proved less than wonderful for me. Once I got used to using RSS as a way of scanning information I could not tolerate Twitter’s lack of cloud based syncing on multiple devices. I still think this is a severe weakness of the native Twitter platform.

However, once I found out about Tweet Marker I started getting more serious about using Twitter because I could keep my iPhone, my iPad, and my Mac in sync. So, I started using the native Twitter app on the iPhone and iPad for a while and found it awful and eventually got two clients that are better.

Tweetbot is the current “Reeder” of Twitter clients and it’s simple, beautiful and is the hip Twitter client of choice to use. It can and does make use of Tweet Marker and I would not use a client that didn’t.

While Twitterrific is less hip it’s what I use on my Mac so I decided to give it a go on the iOS side as well. It too makes use of Tweet Marker so all of my various Twitter clients are in sync with one another.

Reading Later
Imagine that you start reading a long article on your computer’s web browser and don’t finish it before you have to rush off for a doctor’s appointment. It would be nice if you could take the article with you to finish reading it. If you knew your doctor had public wifi in his or her office you’d be all set, or, if you had an iPad or iPhone and a cellular signal you could get back online and finish. But, if you’ll be off the grid (so to speak) what do you do?

Instapaper was made for situations like this (and others). You click a “Reader Later” button on your browser and it uploads the link to your Instapaper account. Before you leave your house, run the Instapaper app on your iPad and/or iPhone and update your account. The article you were reading will be loaded and cached in its entirety.

Now when you get to the doctor’s office you can run Instapaper on your iPad and continue reading the article in a very clean, iBooks-like reading environment without being connected to the internet. Works on planes, or anywhere.

Instapaper is such a great reading environment I use it in the house to read things on my iPad that I’d rather not read on this computer.

Shared Writing
I know many people use more capable and complex apps like Evernote as their writing and collecting environment on the Mac and iOS devices but as one who likes extremely simple and spare software tools I’ve stuck (so far) with Simplenote. It has continued to work well for me for quite some time and with the addition of dictation on the iPad I use it more than ever. The one change I’ve made since starting to use it is that I’m using nvALT (Notational Velocity Alternative) on the Mac as my Simplenote client. It works quite well and supports the Simplenote API while being a decent text editor on its own for the Macintosh.

Make a shopping list in nvALT on your computer and go to the store with your iPhone (or iPad or iPod Touch) and there it is.

iPad as computer?
I have dozens of other apps on my iPad, many of which I use daily but the ones listed here coupled with iCloud make the new iPad a serious alternative to a portable computer. I don’t mean to sound defensive of what might otherwise seem like an expensive upgrade just to keep up with everyone else (can’t let my wife have a later iPad than me, right?) but the new iPad pushes the iPad into the world of computing and may well be the only tool many people need to do the types of things only done with a computer just a few years ago.

Knowledge Navigator, here we come.

Daniel Pink is an author, speaker and frequent traveler and he’s put together an entertaining series of videos that offer excellent tips for travelers.

You can find the entire collection of travel tip videos and more in Daniel Pink’s Videos on Vimeo.

Note: I use saline nose spray on airplane flights, in hotels, and at home to combat germs and dryness that comes from sealed airplanes and hotels and from winter heating with a woodstove. Between that and a yearly flu shot I haven’t been sick in ten years. Something must be working. Dan’s advice is good too although my variation is cheaper.

[via Boing Boing]

Flickr member Nate has taken a great image of the elevated train tracks in Chicago with the Canon Powershot S100.

Wouter Brandsma

Wouter Brandsma lives in the Netherlands, is a Ricoh compact camera fanatic and is an excellent photographer.

This was posted in 2009 but I’ve been following Wouter for a while and I’m bumping it up (changing it’s posting date) so those of you who don’t know his photography can take a look.

He’s one of the finest photographers of of the many I follow and he does all of his brilliant work with compact Ricoh cameras. There is no doubt that Wouter could make great images with any camera but I find it fascinating that a photographer of his caliber chooses these cameras, which by the way are’t all that popular except they do have a cult following among serious street photographers and photojournalists.

This is the Swedish band, Dirty Loops covering the Adele song “Rolling in the Deep.”

This band is so tight and this cover is so good it’s mind blowing. Zoom it out, turn it up (or plug in the good speakers).

Here’s another one, a cover of Britney Spears’ song Circus:

Dang!

[via wimp.com]

My god, I remember this and it seems just as exceptional and funny now as it did then.

Wenceslao Moreno was Señor Wences, an exceptional Spanish ventriloquist who many of us saw regularly on the Ed Sullivan show. He died in 1999 at age 103.

[via The Kid Should See This]

Salisbury, Connecticut. The newly leafed canopy looked great against a cloudy sky this morning. When we got on top of Bear Mountain we were enveloped in a fog/mist and the view was completely gone.

Patagonia’s Founder Is America’s Most Unlikely Business Guru

This is a great piece on the history of the clothing company Patagonia and a mini-biography of its founder Yvon Chouinard.

I happen to have a few original Chouinard pitons I bought from him in the Camp 4 parking lot in Yosemite Valley in the 1970′s. I’ve followed his climbing and mountaineering career as well as his business career and I must say, he’s done well with alms everything he’s touched.

[via Dale Allyn]

Student Wins Copyright Skirmish Over Falling Bear Photo

Last week a black bear was wandering around the Colorado University campus and ended up in a small tree. A student called 911 and they came and darted the bear, padded his fall from the tree with a foam pad, and took him away. A student captured the bear in mid-fall and the image made its way into the school newspaper which sold the image which then went viral.

It’s an interesting situation and commenter Bob Cooley has the most fair minded commentary about it (in comment thread).

Then there’s Taras Dzedzey’s link to a Russian site with Photoshopped variants that made me laugh pretty hard.