Brian @ Wongside

This morning, Apple.com was sporting the iPhone 3G:

Now, they’re sporting the new iPod Touch and iPod Nano:

Very cool.

Today is Apple’s Let’s Rock event up in San Francisco. I have no idea what they’ll be releasing, but the pundits seem to think it’ll be an iPod event. I’m inclined to agree. Ars Technica will have live-blogging of the event, so be sure to check that out around 10:00AM.  I know I will be.

As I mentioned last week, Tilden Fang, the Young Adult Pastor at Abundant Life will be speaking to CCF at their Summer Training Program tonight. I’ve got the privledge of accompanying him and introducing him to the group. He’ll be speaking on Quiet Times.

I’m really looking forward to it as I’ve never heard him give an extended sermon before.  And an extended session this will be–they’ve asked him to speak for 90 minutes on this topic. I think the most I’ve heard from him have been the short sermonettes he gives at Real World before Bible study.

Dell introduced the Inspiron Mini 9 to the world a few days ago. It’s a tiny 8.9″ screen, 2.3 lbs, Atom powered “netbook.”  It’s target audience is people looking for a second laptop to do e-mail and web surfing. The specs aren’t beefy, but the thing is pretty compact and portable. I think I want one.

To me the interesting thing is that they’re selling the one with Windows for $50 more than the one that has Linux ($399 vs $349), but if you customize them, whether they have Linux or Windows becomes irrelevant, as they’ll both cost $424. So in essense, you could get Windows for free:

I also find it interesting that the models denoted above aren’t Mini 9, they’re Inspiron 910 and 910u (presumably for Ubuntu Linux).

In addition to the previously mentioned articles on B&H, they also have a great new article on Adobe Lightroom 2. Lightroom is Adobe’s “digital darkroom” software. It has some of the functionality of the venerable Photoshop, but has been reduced to the essentials that professionals use when editing their photos.  I’ve never used the software (I’ve got Photoshop and Bridge), but I know some photography professionals swear by it.

Well, it’s official. Canon has announced the Canon EOS 50D. Frankly, I don’t see it as a very compelling buy right now.  That’s not to say it doesn’t have some nifty features, but just that I don’t see them as necessary, or aligned with my current priorities.  It does have more megapixels (15.1), and the new Digic 4 processor.  Apparently, the ISO is expandable to 12,800 but that’s only compelling if the quality doesn’t suck.  In a first for Canon, they have a full 3″ VGA screen with 920,000 pixels (compared to the 40D’s 3″ with 230,000 pixels). That’s impressive, but is full VGA really valuable on a 3″ screen?  Back in the old days, it was enough to fill a 13″ or 15″ monitor.

B&H has some nice coverage of the 50D as well as it’s new rival the D90.

B&H Photo had some great articles this week talking about a number of photography subjects.  The first one I want to share is about underwater photography particularly at night. The article has some great tips on underwater photography as well as some pretty spectacular slideshows.

I was looking for some camera gear today, and I typed in “17th street photo” into the Google Search Box. I tried clicking on the first link, and I was taken to this page:

I thought this was very curious because though it gives me written permission to contine by saying “Or you can continue to http://www.17photo.com at your own risk.” it does not actually give me a way to continue to the site. As you can see from the screen shot, the only links are to return, and to go to various Google websites.

The only way I was able to get to the site was by actually entering the URL into the address bar manually. I guess either Google wants to make it as hard as possible to get there, or this is just really poor design. I suppose the conspiracy theorists out there surmise that it’s censorship. I’m inclined to believe it’s just bad design.

This blog posting was pretty helpful in getting me on the right track to adding Adsense to my website. If you’re thinking about adding it, maybe it will be helpful to you as well.

Just keep in mind that it was written for WordPress 2.5, so some of the screenshots might look a little different, especially if you’re running the latest version (2.6.1 as of today)

Google released their own, open source web browser, Google Chrome today. I downloaded it this evening, so I’ll play with it and see what all the fuss is about.

Those Google guys always have a lot of fun, and for this release, they’ve written and illustrated a Google Comic Book detailing the how and why they decided to build their own web browswer. It was very interesting and informative, but not for the faint of heart as it is pretty technical. (Mind you, it took me about 20 minutes to read, and I’m a pretty fast reader.  It’s 38 comic book pages that are packed with information.)

Ars Technica has a review I haven’t yet read. One cool feature they mentioned in the comic book was that it always opens up to a customized, user-specific, page that has the nine most visited sites and a list of recently searched terms. The idea is that the browser should make it quick and easy for the user to get where he’s going. Nifty idea. It’s basically a browser-based portal or home page in that it’s generated client side rather than server side.