If you watch closely Best Buy has been selling new Nikon D200’s for $599.00 plus tax and shipping. They list their sale on or about the 15th of the month for the last . They only run it for 48 hours. I caught the last one and bought it. The D200 is a great camera for that price point. I had my eye on a D90 but it still $900 and does not have a sealed body. Plus they say the video capabilities are just about worthless. If you set you home page to DealMac.com it will tell you when this deal comes back around plus of course lots of other great deals. I have also found many compact flash memory card deals.

Adobe has a problem with Flash version 10 that is included in CS4. Its a major problem and they know about it but have yet to release a fix for it. The problem is that the application will run really slow if your scene has a lot of key frames in it. I have had to go back to using flash version 9 that came with my CS3 to develop any flash movies with any complexity to them. I have run Flash CS4 on both Dual G5 and on Dual intel chips sets. Both have lots of RAM. The intel is a bit faster but still too slow to use in a professional manor. Its quite unprofessional in my opinion to have this product out for more than 6 months and not have a fix for this problem. Here is a thread on Flash Kit if you are interested in reading more about it.

If you find a good camera deal online then know some of these pitfalls. The digital SLR camera deals that are too good to be true work like this. First of all they are going to sell you a Non-USA model of camera. This is not so bad but Nikon or Canon USA will not repair it under warranty. So if you choose this route then do get a third party warranty. I personally like SquareTrade Ok but we are not done yet. These “gray market” dealers will only be selling you the body alone. They will pull out the battery, the charger, and even the camera strap. They then will try to sell you these back at a very high price. The good news is you can buy them off of ebay for much less. If you tell them this then they most likely will tell you the camera is not in stock and not complete the sale. Also be carefull of buying from a place that does not show you their address and phone number. I have heard of people getting burned from filling out an order form online and having their card charged and never recieve a camera.

If you change your custom keys in photoshop CS4 for “Save for Web” then it will give you an annoying popup messages asking if you want to erase your preferences. Its a bit disconcerting. I have heard of other complaining about this also. I hope Adobe will address this minor issue so that those of us who use photoshop primarily for web work can save the time it takes us to click thru this truely annoying popup window.

If you have less than a 100 feedback score on ebay and try to sell an electronic item they will automatically put the payment into escrow until the package is confirmed as delivered or until the buyer leaves feedback. This is a good measure I think but 100 is a bit too high. Maybe 75 and Ebay should explain to you why they are holding your money. Its troubling to have to search for why they are doing it on google.

About 20% of my screen at the top will not respond to my touch. It will let me slide to the next page, but I can not hit the top two rows of application icons. I also can not hit the 123 buttons. I found this solution on the web and it helped but did not solve the problem completely. Here is the fix: connect your iphone to the internet then with the cydia app install the WinterBoard and the Supreme Preference apps, then you go to the WinterBoard icon and check the supreme preference and then you will have more features to adjust the touch sesitivity. After you install them go to settings - general - touch and adjust the touch around 0.0 to 0.5 and it might help your problem.

I was all excited about having the new version of adobe bridge running on my machine. I enjoyed the last version quite a bit. However it was running painfully slow. I tried changing the cache and some other setting to no avail. I have the latest update from adobe. So I did some research and found a single reference to someone with my same problem. It turns out if you have two monitors Bridge requires that each one have 64meg of Vram available. Well I am still running a dual G5 with the ATI 9600 video card and it has 64meg total V-ram. They mentioned you could run in thousands of colors mode or go into the preference and turn on software acceleration.

I now have a downloadable pdf version of the Mitsubishi 3000gt Factory Service and Repair Manual 1992 through 1996. It covers all models. This should cover most anything in 1991 also. It includes the chassis and Body plus the Electrical Systems manual. it has Multiple Diagrams, Servicing Information, Diagnostics, Maintenance & Repair Techniques, Diagrams, Charts, Schematics plus much more makes this an excellent reference & can be used by ANYONE regardless, If your a complete novice or an expert Auto Mechanic!

This version is a scan of the original manuals saved in pdf format. The download “zip” file is 94 Megabytes. If you need another manual you can probably find it on Ebay. Expect to pay around $15 and wait for it to ship You can get the 3000GT  Repair manual here.

I have officially launched my new 360 Degree Quicktime VR Panoramic Photos website. I have had an amazingy fun time shooting and building these Panoramic Photos. I use my Nikon D200 with a Nikkor 10.5mm lens and shoot 10 HDR, high dynamic range, photos of a scene. I have shot both interior and exterior locations. I have a special nodal point tripod head that rotates the camera directly over the center of the tripod. I also take a shot directly up and one directly down. I then take these shots and blend them in a program called Brackateer that makes the HDR file from my three RAW files of each angle. I then take the HDR files into a program called PTGui.

PtGui will align and build the equirectangular image and form it into a
continue reading "360 Degree Panoramic Photos"

Does Steve have cancer again? After seeing photos of Steve Jobs at WWDC I am not the only one who wondered whether Mr. Jobs is sick again. I have stood next to him in the Apple cafeteria line, he is definitely a larger than life figure. You may say this is not really business news. In Apple’s case many billions of dollars of market value rests on Steve’s remaining healthy and at the reigns of Apple for many years. So his health is a very material business concern.

Can you imagine if Apple made a non cool blunder with the iPod or the iPhone, or heaven forbid with the computer line? Steve was the one who tied technology into fashion statements. I certainly hope his cancer has not returned, but I would think someone could emerge from the Apple ranks who has his pulse on “Apple Cool.” Maybe Apple should search among its fans to see who can design the next cool Apple tech item. Its too bad Douglas Adams and Gary Gygax are gone, I am sure they could have come up with “cool” Who knows maybe the next idea generator is an 8 year old kid who is at this moment eating glue off his school desk.