CrunchGear |  |
- CrunchGear PSA: Tech tax deductions
- CrunchDeals: Get an ioSafe Solo for $229.99
- Behold the Clicker: the ultimate lazy man device
- The GigaPan Epic Pro is now shipping to eager photographers
- A cornucopia of Apple lawsuits
- Review: Aperture 3
- Who still buys iPod docks in 2010?
- CrunchDeals: Buy a Roku HD Player, get $20 Amazon on Demand credit
- The Twist Alarm Clock forces you to activate your brain in the morning
- Mosquitos of the future may vaccinate against malaria, instead of spread it
- Warren Lich concept trailer
- UMG to lower U.S. CD prices
- Dear Square Enix: Just remake Final Fantasy VII already
- IT in a box: the ClearBOX
- At long last, Windows Mobile 6.5 is available for the Sprint Touch Pro2
- New packaging concept helps lazy shoppers find fresh produce
- Hacked Windows Phone 7 emulator demoed on video
- Henry Morgan wants the word ‘pirate’ back
- Video: This is easily the coolest thing I’ve seen an iPhone do this week.
- Of course there’s a leather couch with an iPod dock
| CrunchGear PSA: Tech tax deductions Posted: 19 Mar 2010 08:00 PM PDT
I’m not going to go into all the grisly details, I’ll leave that to the person who actually wrote the article at PCWorld, but the gist of it is this: be careful what you deduct, and how you deduct it. And yes, you can deduct your internet connection (at least part of it) if you are a blogger. Be careful not to write off 100% value on items like computers or phones, as the IRS won’t believe you that you use those things strictly for business purposes.
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| CrunchDeals: Get an ioSafe Solo for $229.99 Posted: 19 Mar 2010 07:00 PM PDT
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| Behold the Clicker: the ultimate lazy man device Posted: 19 Mar 2010 06:30 PM PDT
The Clicker is a 9-function learning remote with one important difference. It has a built in bottle opener. Now, after you train your dog to go and get you a beer out of the fridge, you no longer have to fumble in your pocket, or on the side table for an opener. You’ll know exactly where it is. Unfortunately you can’t be lazy if you want to order one though, as the website doesn’t have an electronic store. There isn’t even a price listed, just a phone number. You can download the instructions on how to program your new remote/bottle opener though.
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| The GigaPan Epic Pro is now shipping to eager photographers Posted: 19 Mar 2010 05:59 PM PDT
Too bad the somewhat high, but understandable, $895 price didn’t change. Probably more than a few photographers would have rather seen a bit shaved off that rather than the shipping date.
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| A cornucopia of Apple lawsuits Posted: 19 Mar 2010 05:00 PM PDT
Apple doesn’t like HTC, not one bit. In fact, Apple recently filed a lawsuit against the Taiwan-based company, alleging that it has infringed 20 iPhone-related patents. This has already been discussed to death, but it gives us an opportunity to look at some of Apple’s other forays into the world of lawsuits. It’s terribly exciting. So yeah, CNET did the hard work, and I’m merely highling the items that caught my eye. • Psystar. This is probably the most famous lawsuit in the past few years. Pretty much a flawless victory for Apple. • Nokia. Oh, Apple on the other end of a lawsuit? Hmm. Nokia says Apple infringed a number of its patents with the iPhone. Nokia sues Apple which then sues HTC. Mind = blown. • Microsoft and HP. Oh dear, it’s a battle royale over user graphical user interfaces. Apple basically got its teeth kicked in on this one.
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2010 04:15 PM PDT
As long as I’ve been using Aperture, I’ve considered it a processing application. Its photo management was troublesome here and there, and iPhoto had the best ways of showing off your shots, but I dealt with it since maintaining two separate libraries of the same photos would be disk space suicide. I’ve only used Lightroom a little bit (and a version or two back) but all my friends say that it just has a better workflow for serious photo work — importing a couple hundred shots, scrubbing through them, doing the necessary adjustments, and outputting to the necessary format. Not that I have trouble doing that in Aperture, but apparently it’s faster and better in Lightroom. Confronted with such a fearsome opponent, Apple decided that it would be better to flank than to risk a frontal assault. Hence the expansion of Aperture’s incorporation of iPhoto features Faces and Places. I question their relevance in a photo processing application, but given Apple’s tendency towards coalescing functionality, I’m guessing that iPhoto will eventually be Aperture: Gimped Edition, and the only real choice for organizing and messing with large numbers of photos will be Aperture. There are some kinks to be worked out. Faces plainly doesn’t work. After it spent literally five hours going through my photos (about 1000 per hour), this is what it has come up with:
No, it didn’t have a lot to go on (I hadn’t “trained” it much yet) but really now. After giving it a few more pointers on what I looked like, it still mistook a three-year-old tow-headed girl, my friend Monica (who is Indian, and in a wedding dress), some E3 booth babes, and Casio president Kazuo Kashio for pale, bearded, Devin Coldewey. The cork board background is jarring and the interface for going through your shots is terrible. I realize this is a technology still being perfected, and that is why I am wondering: what is it doing in my RAW editing program?
It’s a mistake to judge Faces and Places by simply saying “well we were fine before them,” because it may just be that we found ways of working in the old system of organization (Project>Folder>Album) that approximated what these new features do. But I don’t think it’s wrong to say they just don’t really do much, and feel out of place to boot. You have to work at them, or shoot for them, in order for them to really be worthwhile. Still I have to give credit where credit’s due: if you just consider Faces and Places new columns to organize by (like rating or date) then they’re worth their salt. As flagship features, though, they’re duds. Lastly, the slide show thing. It’s like finding a trout in the milk. Not that it doesn’t work — it works as well as iPhoto’s thing, and I suppose it’s better to have than not. It’s just a little weird to have a sort of… aftermarket feature popped in there next to the serious editing tools. Its little presets are, like in most Apple programs, 25% solid, 75% fluff. Who in the name of all that is holy is going to pick “Shatter” as their slide show transition? It’s ghastly.
The new features are very well explained in little videos accessible through the “Welcome” screen, which will be handy for new users — if they can find the screen after they close it (it’s in Help>Welcome to Aperture). The good stuff So if the iPhoto features are icing, the actual cake is the RAW editing, adjustment tools, and user interface. Let’s start with what I would say is the best new feature: Brushes. You can see a pretty thorough overview of the feature at Apple’s site, but the gist is that it allows you to apply certain effects in limited areas using a brush of adjustable size and intensity. That’s great! I can’t count the number of times I’ve vacillated between two versions of a photo where an adjustment necessary for one part ended up blowing out another, or I just wanted to bring out the color in the eyes but not in the background. A lot of fiddling could usually approximate the effect I wanted, but it would be so much easier to just use a brush. I’ll be using the hell out of this feature, and it’s perhaps the only real step Apple took against Adobe in this update.
The brushes are non-destructive, like any of the dials and curves you can play with in the adjustments panel, so you can feel free to experiment, layer, and try out different effects. One thing I often have to do when shooting review shots is emphasize the color of LEDs, but if the subject is well-lit, the LEDs are going to be barely visible. No problem; make a little brush, add in a little contrast right there, bump the saturation just in the one area, and boom, it sticks out like a sore thumb. Brushes are useful for lots of little things like that. The new full-screen browser is handy but not really a revolution. They’ve added the ability to get around your library a little more, which is nice, but it’s not as streamlined as the regular browser, which is always accessible by a single keystroke. The fullscreen presentation has definitely been improved, however, and when showing off photos to friends or clients, it’s a better option than either the plain editing window or a slide show.
The preset adjustments, I think we can agree, are being blown way out of proportion; Apple’s breathless description sets them up to be quite the killer feature. Unfortunately, these are the same kind of “professional adjustments” that you have been able to apply on cheap point-and-shoots since the beginning of time. There are a few quick adjust things like high-contrast black-and-white or exposure +1 that are nice to have previews for (the live preview window is handy), but let’s be honest, these are just filters. I’d like to be able to say that they’re carefully adjusted so you won’t see weird color effects, blackouts, or blowouts, but the fact is every one I tried looked cheap and overdone. The others, like white balance and so on, seem pretty redundant considering the actual controls for adjusting those aspects are mere pixels away in the same window.
Click to see it larger. You can’t really tell here, since this photo isn’t very high contrast, but in several of the other shots I tried this on, the vintage look was really purple, cross-processing was really green, and toy camera pushed the contrast way too far. Subtle adjustments these are not. The good news is that people new to the program might try a couple, see that they were created by dragging curves and color bars around, and then make their own. I’ve had my own “base” adjustment for years now, which was just as easily accessible and just as customizable, though limited to a single adjustment category. Putting together a “look” for a shoot using this feature might be easier now than before, but it’s still just a toy at this point. The ability to have multiple libraries is nice; splitting work and personal stuff would be my move, so that if a meteor crashed into TC HQ (or, more likely, I’m fired for insubordination), I could free up a couple gigs in one clean sweep. It’s also convenient for backing up and sharing; “here’s my whole ‘wedding’ library, feel free to do what you like with it” rather than “here’s a folder full of RAW files.” A quick note
Just a PSA: installation of Aperture 3 took ages. Plan on losing at least a working day to 100% processor usage as it converts your library, searches for Faces, and reprocesses your RAW files with the new profile. I’m not holding this against Apple (it’s a LOT of data to sift through) but it’s just something to be aware of. Conclusion Aperture is still a great program, in my opinion, and the budding photographer would be a lot better off with this than with iPhoto if they’re planning on doing anything more than collecting snapshots. I’ve gotten used to Aperture’s workflow and they haven’t changed it much in 3, in fact they’ve provided a couple serious improvements with Brushes and potentially Places and Faces — you know, if you’re into that kind of thing. The trouble I see is that Aperture, once a rather single-minded program, is being diluted with features that have nothing to do with its core functionality. Why not have a new program, called “Collection” or something, that hooks into all your libraries, allows for creating robust slide shows, exporting directly to Facebook, and all that sort of thing? Putting all this junk into Aperture is doing to it what Apple has done to iTunes: once a sleek and straightforward program, it has now grown bloated beyond comprehension; it’s a bit like seeing a once-great fighter gone to seed. I have more of an attachment to Aperture than to iTunes, but if Aperture 4 continues along the vector indicated by Aperture 3, you can consider me a Lightroom conversion. Give Aperture 3 a 30-day trial for free here. $199 to buy, $99 to upgrade. Update: I completely neglected to mention that Aperture 3 also now has full 64-bit support. This means newer macs sporting Snow Leopard and adequate hardware should get a sweet performance boost.
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| Who still buys iPod docks in 2010? Posted: 19 Mar 2010 04:00 PM PDT
The year 2004 called, and it wants its iPod dock back. (Yes, I know it works with the iPhone, too.) Seriously, do people still buy these things? Inquiring minds want to know.
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| CrunchDeals: Buy a Roku HD Player, get $20 Amazon on Demand credit Posted: 19 Mar 2010 03:30 PM PDT
That’s a pretty good deal, considering that a movie like The Hurt Locker rents for $3.99, or you can rent a TV show for about $3 an episode (watch Human Target, seriously). You’ll give $99 for the Roku HD or $129.99 for the Roku HD-XR, and then Amazon will credit your account so you can start renting as soon as you get the box hooked up. Better hurry though, because the deal is only good until the 31st.
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| The Twist Alarm Clock forces you to activate your brain in the morning Posted: 19 Mar 2010 03:21 PM PDT
Japan and its alarm clocks. Most of these devices force you to wake up through an extra-annoying noise (or by moving away from you), but this new one, the so-called Twist Alarm Clock [JP], makes you solve (simple) math problems.
The way it works is that when the alarm starts ringing in the morning, the clock uses its two displays and two rotatable parts to create a math problem, for example 8+2=?. It won’t stop ringing until you give it the right answer. 5-4=2, as seen in the picture above, won’t work. Maker D-Forme says the main idea behind their clock is to force buyers to activate their brains in the morning.
Sized at 13.5×6.3×7cm, the Twist Alarm clock is available only in Japan (price: $30). If you’re interested, I'd suggest contacting import/export specialists like Japan Trend Shop, Geek Stuff 4 U or Rinkya.
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| Mosquitos of the future may vaccinate against malaria, instead of spread it Posted: 19 Mar 2010 03:00 PM PDT
Associate Professor Shigeto Yoshida and his research team “successfully generated a transgenic mosquito expressing the Leishmania vaccine within its saliva. Bites from the insect succeeded in raising antibodies, indicating successful immunization with the Leishmania vaccine through blood feeding.” Of course, this vaccination idea isn’t perfect, since you’ll still have one or more mosquito bites to scratch at, but at least you won’t have malaria. Maybe I’m alarmist, but I can’t help but think that this kind of approach throws the natural order of things seriously out of whack. As I read the story, I kept hearing Jeff Goldblum from Jurassic Park in my mind, saying “life, uh … finds a way.”
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2010 02:30 PM PDT Loyal readers, I give you a Steampunk Sin City concept made on 1000 Euros. Now if one of you could kindly tell me what in the world is going on in it? via [Dvorak Uncensored]
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2010 02:00 PM PDT
The new structure plans to keep a 25% wholesale profit margin. So an album you pay $10 for, wholesellers will get for $7.50. We’ll see if that’s enough to get everyone on board with the move. People already behind it include Newbury Comics CEO Mike Dreese and Trans World Entertainment CEO Bob Higgins. The rest of the music industry doesn’t seem too excited though. But they’d better do something if they want to get CD sales out of their current nosedive. 2008 saw 360.6 million units, barely over half of the numbers in 2000. iTunes and other retailers seem to have set 10 bucks as the magic number people will buy albums at. Granted, if people are willing to shell out $10 for a digital album, a little more isn’t so unreasonable for a physical copy. With art, liner notes, and all the rest. Universal’s move here seems to show the music industry is finally starting to look into some longer term solutions that just suing everybody left and right. We’ll have to wait and see if any of the other big labels make similar moves.
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| Dear Square Enix: Just remake Final Fantasy VII already Posted: 19 Mar 2010 01:30 PM PDT
I’ll just point you in the direction of this weird rant… thing about Final Fantasy. It sorta explains the differences between Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy XIII. Something about honor and inns and whatnot. Yeah. More importantly, let’s discuss the possibility of Square Enix remaking Final Fantasy VII, because that hasn’t been done before on the Internet. The latest bit of news, if you can even call it that, is that the director of Final Fantasy XIII, Motomu Toriyama, has admitted that he’d “really want to remake FFVII” if he had the manpower, and if the remake could live up to FFXIII’s high standards. I really don’t understand what the hold up is. Square Enix surely must know that, even if it were to spend a nice chunk of change remaking the game—and not just the obvious graphical overhaul, but fleshing out the script, hiring voice actors who can read at an 8th grade level (i.e. not American~!), etc.—it would still make $UNLIMITED at retail. What PS3 owner wouldn’t buy the game? How many people would buy a PS3 specifically to play the game? It would be a gigantic success, guaranteed. Like, it could be total garbage and people would still lap it up. The only reason I could see Square Enix not remaking the game is because they’d feel it was an admission that every Final Fantasy since FFVII was a failure in some capacity. That’s completely not true, but perhaps that’s the fear? via Kotaku
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| Posted: 19 Mar 2010 01:00 PM PDT
The hardware specs on the ClearBOX look adequate enough for most small businesses with simple IT needs:
The ClearBOX comes with ClearOS, “a powerful network and server gateway designed for small organizations and distributed environments.” It’s open source, so I’m guessing it’s a Linux distribution of some sort, but it’s not clear to me whether they’ve rolled their own distro from the ground up, or if they’re springboarding off an existing distribution. The ClearBOX and ClearOS look like a neat offering, but I’ve seen way too many of these all-in-one “IT in a box” systems come and go through the years to have any expectations that this one will last.
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| At long last, Windows Mobile 6.5 is available for the Sprint Touch Pro2 Posted: 19 Mar 2010 12:45 PM PDT
Here it is, folks! Its been a few long months for Sprint fans toting Touch Pro2’s, given that the same device on all of the other carriers saw upgrades to Windows Mobile 6.5 months ago while their own Pro2s stayed back at WinMo 6.1. We knew the update was coming sometime in March, and then we pinned the date down to some more specific: today.
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| New packaging concept helps lazy shoppers find fresh produce Posted: 19 Mar 2010 12:30 PM PDT
This is still a design concept, and not actual product packaging yet. One the one hand this seems like a nice idea for the agriculturally challenged population, but on the other hand it seems like a gigantic wasted effort. If you’re really interested in fresh produce, and not just “preservative enhanced” freshness, you should seriously consider community-supported agriculture. I’ve been using Wayward Seed Farms and have been amazed at the flavor of vegetables I thought I knew, as well as being introduced to a whole lot of vegetables I’d never have thought to buy at the supermarket. Hat tip TreeHugger.
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| Hacked Windows Phone 7 emulator demoed on video Posted: 19 Mar 2010 12:15 PM PDT
Earlier this morning, the Windows Phone 7 emulator was “unlocked” (so to speak), granting anyone with a few spare minutes and basic tinkering abilities an opportunity to get a look at a bunch of stuff Microsoft didn’t originally include. Not everyone is prepped and ready to get their hack on, though. Maybe you’re on a Mac. Maybe it’s Friday and you just don’t feel like doing anything. Understandable. Fortunately for you, a couple of videos demonstrating all the hacked ROM have been flying around the Intertubes.
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| Henry Morgan wants the word ‘pirate’ back Posted: 19 Mar 2010 12:00 PM PDT
Hollywood (the movie studios, the record labels, etc.) sure does have a knack for causing its own problems. You’ll recall that it’s en vogue to call copyright infringers “pirates,” which is an insult to legitimate pirates like William Kidd and Henry Morgan. Just because you can fire up uTorrent doesn’t mean you can take on a Spanish Armada. But, whatever, it’s simply easier for Hollywood and its acolytes to call you kids “pirates” than it is to have an adult discussion about the subject. The word is nothing but trouble. Using it is akin to calling someone “Hitler” or a “Nazi” in a debate: it’s basically an intellectual shortcut to a ready-made conclusion. Those guys? Bad. Us? We’re good. Or in fancier verbiage:
Said by “noted copyright scholar” William Patry. Now, had Hollywood, when the likes of Napster and Kazaa first came out, taken the time to explain the difference between wholesale theft and copyright infringement, rather than rushing to sue everybody, throwing around meaningless terms like “piracy” and “stealing,” well, this is the consequence. Show me one 16-year-old who has a problem with downloading Lady Whatshername and I’ll finish this stupid sentence.
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| Video: This is easily the coolest thing I’ve seen an iPhone do this week. Posted: 19 Mar 2010 11:45 AM PDT
You hear that sound? That’s the sound of my mind being blown. When the folks over in Cupertino strapped a little speaker to the bottom of the iPhone and released an SDK, do you think that any of them thought “Oh, people are totally going to use this to make apps that can push little Styrofoam balls around a fake soccer field.” Yeah, probably not. But sure enough, people have. Read the rest at MobileCrunch >>
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| Of course there’s a leather couch with an iPod dock Posted: 19 Mar 2010 11:30 AM PDT
[Danish Inspirations via LuxuryLaunches]
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I did my taxes recently, and this is the first year that I actually bothered to deduct for all those things that I buy over the year for my job. It was confusing frankly, and I wish I’d read this article before I did it. Hopefully you’ll read this in time to do your deductions correctly, and not make the same mistakes I did (which caused me to miss out on several things I could have claimed). 
ioSafe is running a great deal with Costco right now, you can buy their ioSafe Solo (which 
It’s fairly easy to find exactly when most Americans started to get fat. All you have to do is go back to the 1950’s. Some would say this is due to our fast food lifestyle, people spending too much time in front of the TV instead of running from animals, or even possibly a plot by Colonel Sanders. I think it’s directly related to the invention of the remote control. Now, there’s even less reason to get up off the couch thanks to the latest invention: The Clicker.
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