the bad news: Every digital camera (save one) and every digital video camera (under $100,000) uses what's called a Bayer pattern for it's CMOS or CCD sensor.
Sigma's SD14 is the digicam that doesn't, and high end HD/digi-film cameras such as the Sony F23, Thomson Viper, and Panavision Genesis, which are all out of your price range so forget about it.
but anyway, what is a bayer pattern and why should anyone care?
Because, in effect, every camera company is lying to you with your megapixel ratings. Your 14 megapixel camera is actually giving you something that's up-scaled by a factor of three, give or take.
let's take the RED camera, everyone's favorite boner-maker. RED is a 4k camera. This means that each horizontal line of an image that it makes is 4096 dots or long. Now, in a digital image, each dot, much like each dot on a TV, is made up of Red, Green and Blue. The whole issue comes about because in the case of digital camera sensors, each dot is not Red, Green and Blue.
Each dot is Red, Green, OR Blue. In a bayer pattern, the first line goes
G, B, G, B.....
and the second line goes
R, G, R, G........
then there's software on your camera that takes that upper quadrant of one Red, one Blue and Two green and it mashes it together to make four RGB dots.
That is complete fucking bullshit, and I'm pissed.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Monday, March 30, 2009
Your Facebook Correspondence Sucks
When I was younger and an idiot, I would occasionally find myself having an interesting conversation in a bar that I was pretty sure some of the nearby patrons would really enjoy. I would not be so brash as to turn to them and go "can you believe this?" Instead I would talk a bit louder, angle my body a bit to lure them in, and you know what?
It never worked!
you know what else?
You're doing it too! Only instead of being 22 and drunk you're 29 and sober. And everyone around you is sober, and Facebook is going to leave those messages up so long Andre the Giant stickers will get jealous.
We don't care, none of us, the people who are close enough to you to accept your digital friendship. Instead of publicly shouting your insincere hellos back and forth, why don't you construct an actual message of thought?
I suppose that would be too hard. Take too much effort when all you wanted to say was, "I had the kale salad at M de Chaya and it was off today, how are you?"
It never worked!
you know what else?
You're doing it too! Only instead of being 22 and drunk you're 29 and sober. And everyone around you is sober, and Facebook is going to leave those messages up so long Andre the Giant stickers will get jealous.
We don't care, none of us, the people who are close enough to you to accept your digital friendship. Instead of publicly shouting your insincere hellos back and forth, why don't you construct an actual message of thought?
I suppose that would be too hard. Take too much effort when all you wanted to say was, "I had the kale salad at M de Chaya and it was off today, how are you?"
Your Reply to All Sucks
I know that Facebook and Twitter have you under the impression that people care about your day to day thoughts and activities, but sending a message meant for one person to 27 of us is uncouth.
It's very likely we are not friends. I know this because anyone one of my friends who "replies to all" on an email with something to the extent of "congratulations" or "yeah, I'll be there" has been scrubbed from my personal friendship records.
So you're happy our mutual email acquaintance graduated. I don't care. Write back to the one person who wrote to you, not the other 26 of us who happened to receive it. I do not care about your sentiment or availability. I did not ask.
What's your side project? Keeping up correspondences on myspace via the comments section?
It's very likely we are not friends. I know this because anyone one of my friends who "replies to all" on an email with something to the extent of "congratulations" or "yeah, I'll be there" has been scrubbed from my personal friendship records.
So you're happy our mutual email acquaintance graduated. I don't care. Write back to the one person who wrote to you, not the other 26 of us who happened to receive it. I do not care about your sentiment or availability. I did not ask.
What's your side project? Keeping up correspondences on myspace via the comments section?
Sunday, March 15, 2009
The App Store Stucks
I read about the game "Go" and instead of swimming through the misery that is the iphone games selection on my phone, I go to the App Store via itunes. After twenty minutes of searching (itunes is not much better at searching and sorting than the phone) I find an app I want and buy it. It's reasonably expensive at $10.
The app downloads to my local itunes and goes wherever it goes. I don't immediately hook my phone up to it. I go over to my other mac and plug in my phone. Despite being connected to the same itunes account (a .mac account no less), my desktop and the itunes store has no idea I ever downloaded or purchased the app, so I can't install it via my desktop.
I come back to my laptop to install the game. It's not immediately obvious how to do so, but eventually I find the "Sync Applications" panel, telling itunes to sync all applications.
Itunes then proceeds to delete every application I've downloaded (free and paid) off my phone, then it installs the one.
I swear to god Apple has three smart people and they all quit sometime before the iphone came out.
As a bonus, just to show you they are ignorant douchebags, when I synch my addressbook, it asks if I want to merge or replace my contact list. Wow guys. Wow.
The app downloads to my local itunes and goes wherever it goes. I don't immediately hook my phone up to it. I go over to my other mac and plug in my phone. Despite being connected to the same itunes account (a .mac account no less), my desktop and the itunes store has no idea I ever downloaded or purchased the app, so I can't install it via my desktop.
I come back to my laptop to install the game. It's not immediately obvious how to do so, but eventually I find the "Sync Applications" panel, telling itunes to sync all applications.
Itunes then proceeds to delete every application I've downloaded (free and paid) off my phone, then it installs the one.
I swear to god Apple has three smart people and they all quit sometime before the iphone came out.
As a bonus, just to show you they are ignorant douchebags, when I synch my addressbook, it asks if I want to merge or replace my contact list. Wow guys. Wow.
Tuesday, March 3, 2009
Maya for OSX Sucks
It's not that Maya on a mac is godawful. It doesn't crash much and does what it should, basically. The problem stems from the fact that whoever ported it must have been blind and relied on a series of diagnostic tests to see that all the functions were working.
I can guarantee they never once opened it up and saw the fonts hanging over their baselines, the ramps that disappear if you scroll up or down, and they certainly didn't try to scrub in the channel boxes while footage was playing. This is after their "service pack 1" to fix issues like those.
Again, it works, it just doesn't work nearly as well or snappily as the windows version. It costs the same. Thanks Autodesk.
I can guarantee they never once opened it up and saw the fonts hanging over their baselines, the ramps that disappear if you scroll up or down, and they certainly didn't try to scrub in the channel boxes while footage was playing. This is after their "service pack 1" to fix issues like those.
Again, it works, it just doesn't work nearly as well or snappily as the windows version. It costs the same. Thanks Autodesk.
That Song, Umbrella, Sucks
Since I'm on the topic of choruses, the one in "Umbrella" is fantastic. The problem is that after hearing the chorus so many times on so many montages, award shows, youtube anime videos and whatever else, I finally heard the real song.
My first thought was it's a b-side remix. B-side remixes always suck. Someone gets the great idea to pair down the song to some random beat and just keeps the vocals. Only in this case, it's the A-side.
She should have collaborated with Lil Wayne or T Pain instead of Jay Z.
Now imagine you're Thomas Jefferson, it's the late 1700s and you read that last sentence, from the future. Right?
My first thought was it's a b-side remix. B-side remixes always suck. Someone gets the great idea to pair down the song to some random beat and just keeps the vocals. Only in this case, it's the A-side.
She should have collaborated with Lil Wayne or T Pain instead of Jay Z.
Now imagine you're Thomas Jefferson, it's the late 1700s and you read that last sentence, from the future. Right?
Katy Perry's Grammar Sucks
I kissed a girl and I liked it
The taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it
I hope my boyfriend don't mind it
lines 1,3 and 4 are complete thoughts.
line 2 is not.
Outside of the very catchy chorus the song's forgettable, and outside of the song the album is a batch of Hilary Duff b-sides. All there is is that chorus, but what the fuck?
Why the sentence fragment?
The taste of her cherry chapstick what? You liked the taste? I'm guessing so, cos this song is all about (I'm not gay) kissing other girls (I'm not gay) and liking it. Complete your boring and obvious thought Katy Perry, whatever it is.
Thursday, February 19, 2009
The Dock Sucks
Even at it's smallest, the stupid thing is taking up 5% of my laptop's vertical real estate. Thanks Apple for taking something that was really nice in Windows 2000, making it shiny, animated (magnification---oooooh!!) and bigger. Do I really want to look at all the horrid icons applications have? Maybe.
BUT MAYBE NOT!
People crap on Windows a lot. A lot of it's deserved, but at least with XP (I can't speak for Vista) I could make it look like Win2000, change all the colors around and customize it reasonably extensively. Recolor the OS down to the application level, change all the fonts. Its' really nice. My copy of Ubuntu isn't even as easy to muck around with, so I applaud Windows (XP)
Things I can customize in Apple's OS-X:
That's right. There is no number two.
For all their "it just works" and "It's for people not robots" attitude, the choices in OS-X are nil. You get gray and white and more white and more white and a little more gray and some colored gumdrops. And you know what? You're gonna fucking like it!
I'm well aware that the reason Apple's popular is the same reason the Nazis were fashionable: fetishistic attention to detail and complete and utter uniformity. But I'm a "mac"; I'm your guy from the movie Dodgeball, with my comfortable clothes and desire to get high and make beats in garage band. I am an individual, and your operating system is not letting me shine.
Truth be told, I could give two shits about changing the font. Whatever they've got going on works well enough (except in Maya--are you reading this Autodesk?). I want two things:
1. As a working professional in the digital arts, I'd like to be able to make my OS a dark-ish gray so I'm not blinded by the mandatory bar across the top of my screen when I'm working on dark imagery. I don't need to "theme" color my os, but the ability to darken it down (and not that garish "cmd+opt+ctrl+8" nega screen).
2. The ability to not have the dock, but instead a drop down menu on the mandatory top bar where I could put my aliases instead. (Where have I seen this before.....?) Then, when I didn't need them (which is most of the time--and that is true for everyone) all my dock application icons aren't annoyingly in my way or popping up to say "hey" every time my cursor goes to the bottom of the screen.
Admit you screwed up. Admit the dock, like your shiny screens may impress the type of people who are more into shinyness than functionality, admit the dock is a bad design choice.
All I'm asking for is the option. I'd even be happy if it was command line only, I don't care how hard you have to bury it, but I want it.
BUT MAYBE NOT!
People crap on Windows a lot. A lot of it's deserved, but at least with XP (I can't speak for Vista) I could make it look like Win2000, change all the colors around and customize it reasonably extensively. Recolor the OS down to the application level, change all the fonts. Its' really nice. My copy of Ubuntu isn't even as easy to muck around with, so I applaud Windows (XP)
Things I can customize in Apple's OS-X:
1. The color of the minimize/maximize/close gumdrops on each window
2.
That's right. There is no number two.
For all their "it just works" and "It's for people not robots" attitude, the choices in OS-X are nil. You get gray and white and more white and more white and a little more gray and some colored gumdrops. And you know what? You're gonna fucking like it!
I'm well aware that the reason Apple's popular is the same reason the Nazis were fashionable: fetishistic attention to detail and complete and utter uniformity. But I'm a "mac"; I'm your guy from the movie Dodgeball, with my comfortable clothes and desire to get high and make beats in garage band. I am an individual, and your operating system is not letting me shine.
Truth be told, I could give two shits about changing the font. Whatever they've got going on works well enough (except in Maya--are you reading this Autodesk?). I want two things:
1. As a working professional in the digital arts, I'd like to be able to make my OS a dark-ish gray so I'm not blinded by the mandatory bar across the top of my screen when I'm working on dark imagery. I don't need to "theme" color my os, but the ability to darken it down (and not that garish "cmd+opt+ctrl+8" nega screen).
2. The ability to not have the dock, but instead a drop down menu on the mandatory top bar where I could put my aliases instead. (Where have I seen this before.....?) Then, when I didn't need them (which is most of the time--and that is true for everyone) all my dock application icons aren't annoyingly in my way or popping up to say "hey" every time my cursor goes to the bottom of the screen.
Admit you screwed up. Admit the dock, like your shiny screens may impress the type of people who are more into shinyness than functionality, admit the dock is a bad design choice.
All I'm asking for is the option. I'd even be happy if it was command line only, I don't care how hard you have to bury it, but I want it.
Monday, February 2, 2009
Seriously, Whoever does Claire Bennet's Makeup Sucks
Holy good Jon Benet, why?
Painting the face of a tramp on a little kid only makes you a closet pedophile, so knock it off. Ever since that makeup commercial I know she doesn't have to look like a pederast's concubine. Please, for my ability to keep watching this new "rebooted" Heroes, stop it with the whore's makeup on Claire.
Painting the face of a tramp on a little kid only makes you a closet pedophile, so knock it off. Ever since that makeup commercial I know she doesn't have to look like a pederast's concubine. Please, for my ability to keep watching this new "rebooted" Heroes, stop it with the whore's makeup on Claire.
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