sangsara.net

  • Advancements in sandwich technology

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    Science is ready to build a robotic girlfriend. We have the technology.

    Believe it or not, the sandwiches from vending machines like this aren’t half bad. I found this in the carpark of Mount Elizabeth Hospital tonight. The only other time I’ve seen a similar machine was in the lobby of Thomson Medical Center. Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. It’s only attractive in the presence of bad hospital food? But no, not half bad.

    Two choices are available, and I’m told these are cycled every few days. The new sandwiches are delivered fresh daily, so with any luck, you’ll eat something newer than what’s on the shelf of your local 7-Eleven. I had a Sichuan Pepper Chicken Sandwich ($2.80), but the other choice was Chicken & Cheese ($2.30). You can also buy both for $4.50, but I was out of change.

    Once ordered, it takes about 90 seconds to toast the sandwich (which stays wrapped in a paper bag), and then you toss it around from hand to hand for a minute. It seems there are only 20 of these machines nationwide, and they are operated by a company called HotBake.

    — Posted from my iPhone with BlogPress

  • 27 words

    20090426-IMG_0377, originally uploaded by sangsara.

    Hopefully this rainy Sunday we’re having is a sign that the heatwave is over. 32ºC indoors has not been conducive to anything.

  • Bintan vacation wrap-up

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    I haven’t been very good about uploading the rest of my holiday photos since the last post, but finally got around to it this afternoon. Here are some of my favorite non-people ones.
    Resort Leisure Center Panorama
    Pool Villa Panorama
    (The above panorama was stitched together from about 20 photos; the two edges of the pool you see on the left and right were part of the same straight line. I have no idea what an equivalent wide-angle lens would be.)
    Black & White
    20090328-P1000957
    20090328-P1010016
    20090326-P1000879
    Ocean
    Martinis by the pool
    Dragon cloud 20090328-P1000965

  • Couch surfing 2.0

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    This past weekend saw my girlfriend and I buying a couch for my bedroom – I’ve wanted a comfortable reading and napping platform in there for ages, but always thought an armchair would be enough – and looking silly in the IKEA parking lot trying to get the flat-packed-for-our-convenience boxes into the back of her car. Assembly only took an hour, and it has to be said that Lady Gaga’s album “The Fame” is ideal for such brainless activity, if nothing else. Certainly it can be good for nothing else.

    Apart from looking very out of place, this couch (I hereby name it Karl Lagerfeld) has changed the two-point dynamic of my bedroom space. Before, I was either in bed or sitting at the computer. This meant that I’d be online most of the day, either working or wasting time on the internet. Often, there was nothing to separate the two.

    But now, a third place for my ass exists, and that has changed everything. No longer confined to this desk, strapped down by continuous IM messages and the climbing number of Unread Items in my feedreader, I’m finding it possible to finally sprawl out and read a good book or watch a DVD. Nobody enjoys a film from a computer chair.

    It was all good going already, and then last night I rediscovered Boxee.

    An earlier alpha version, tried out during the pre-Karl days, didn’t really appeal to me. For those who don’t know, Boxee is “media center” software that gives you a big, simplified interface for accessing your media from across the room with a remote control. Very much like Apple’s built-in Front Row, or the one that comes with some versions of Windows. So when I was seated right in front of the computer, there was no need for it. From the couch though, it’s incredible.

    With just the simple old 6-button Apple Remote that comes with almost every Mac, Boxee not only gives me access to locally stored video files (if you rip your own DVDs [or even download films] or TV shows, it downloads cover art and synopses from the internet to accompany them, very slick), it also plays content from providers like Joost and Hulu (US-only), as well as video podcasts like BoingBoing.TV and Rocketboom.

    Another alternative is Plex (Mac OSX only), which I’m about to try out today. Both programs sprang from the open-source Xbox Media Center (XBMC) project.

    It’s got me thinking that one day, I won’t even want a traditional desktop in my home. A large, wall-mounted high-definition TV with a wireless keyboard/mouse on the couch can simplify things to just a single location: workspace, reading area, and bed. Kinda like this guy.

  • Night for Day

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    Night for Day

    There’s a thing they do in the movie business (far more in the past, when technical limitations mandated it) where night scenes are shot in daylight through a special filter that darkens the scene. It’s called day for night photography; watch any old noir film and you’ll see it, the darkness that doesn’t look quite right. We roll with such tricks the same way we do hokey CGI effects in modern story-driven films (bonus points if you can name any) – we’re willing to suspend our disbelief.

    On holiday in Bintan recently, I took a couple of photos like the one above. It was pitch black and near midnight, but setting my camera to keep its shutter open for a full minute, it was possible to gather up all the faint light that normally eludes the human eye, getting a photo that looks very much like day but not quite. The stars are one telltale sign. Who knew that the sun’s orange rays continue to creep past the horizon long after we consider night to have fallen?

    For working people, one of the joys of being on holiday in the middle of the week is imagining what you’d be doing if you weren’t, and knowing that your office and colleagues continue to toil in your absence, maybe even suffering because of it. You know the feeling I mean. When it’s Thursday afternoon and you’re lying on a beach somewhere, the mind experiences a strange sensation, a pleasurable disorientation, as it tries to reconcile the information it has. You’re not in a meeting. You’re on a beach. It’s Thursday, but not quite.

    I used to wonder if it was possible to get that feeling of freedom on demand, as easily as pulling a filter over a lens. Having a tough day at work? Maybe project a few months into the future, where you have a new job or whatever, and confuse yourself into thinking that that world was running in parallel with the present.

    Now that I’m not traditionally employed, I find myself having to take the reverse approach on holidays. For my travel companions, the four days burnt brightly with a sharp peak, followed by a treacherous comedown back into working routine. Not having to feel the pinch of expending precious leave days or returning to deal with crises left my experience curve shallower. I didn’t dread the end as much, so one might say I enjoyed myself less. The solution was a perverse one. I had to imagine a time when this self-employed life was no longer viable. It’s a state that continues to feel temporary, like an illusion made possible by warped optics. Having a job but not quite.

    Anyway, I have a nice tan now. Nobody can believe it’s me.

    — Posted from my iPhone with BlogPress

  • Is it the little things that count?

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    Awhile ago, a friend working overseas who I don’t get a chance to meet very often told me that he checks in on this blog every now and then when he wants to know what I’m up to, and usually comes away disappointed. I think he specifically said that he doesn’t care about what gadgets I’m after, what I thought about films I’ve seen, or what I find interesting, etc. Now, this is not the kind of talk many friends get away with, but because I only have to be insulted once every 18 months or so, I let it go.

    But the thought that someone might be more interested in reading narratives on the minutiae of everyday lives – months after the fact! – rather than the critical choices that express our personalities, continues to strike me as strange even now, several weeks on, in the middle of the night.

    There’s always Twitter and Facebook if one wants status updates, but that can’t be what he meant. Who would want to trawl through half a year’s worth of anyone’s Twitter stream? Microblogging, like the worst supermarket sandwiches, is generally worthless and meant for immediate consumption. Unless you’re a fake celebrity account with carefully crafted witticisms (see @CWalken), chances are your lifestream’s value as entertainment is virtually null after 48 hours.

    Before I started thinking about this, my view was that Twitter presents microscopic detail from which a more complete picture of a life can be fabricated. In this story, blog posts are overviews; providing structure. Also, keep in mind that the two accounts of time spent (the descriptive report and the vocalized introspection) will coincide at some point. For example, if you hear a lot about my activities, you’d be able to discern a pattern that indicated my tastes. Conversely, if I told you how I felt about theatre, you would know not to look for me in a Sunday matinee.

    I wonder if the opposite is true. Twitter and status updates are not detail, they’re noisy overviews. The most coherent image one can put together will still be a best guess estimate. Real detail resides in thought and writing. The way most of us use Twitter, with truncated phrases and inhibited rhythms, it’s no substitute for going without a word limit. In much of today’s communications, you can’t be sure whether it’s the voice or the format you’re hearing. It’s the reason why I can skim a friend’s blog posts from years ago and remember how they used to be. It’s also the reason I keep my own.

    After having tried to keep my different interests in separate blogs, and failed, it’s come back to this. I’m grateful now for having one single place that periodically captures the things I’d like a future version of myself to know I once considered important, and for friends to know today, however unappreciative they might be.

  • Comments on HDR Camera vs iFlashReady [iPhoneography]

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    I just posted a comment on another site that ended up being too long, so I thought I’d reprint it here for my own records.

    Last week, Glyn Evans from iPhoneography.com put up a review of HDR Camera [iTunes link], a US$1.99 iPhone app that promised to magically turn single-exposure photos from a crappy 2-megapixel camera into HDR masterpieces. For that review, Glyn used one of his usual sample photos (a close-up of a bolt on a wooden gate) to demonstrate the app’s effects, but being the smartass that I am, I wrote in to essential say that I thought it wasn’t suited for the purpose at hand (scenes with potential for HDR photography are usually marked by a wide variance between their light and dark areas [hence the name, High Dynamic Range], such as landscape shots with lots of sky. Properly done, HDR photos show the world in ways that our eyes cannot perceive, with everything evenly lit despite an overpowering light source).

    I recommended looking at another application that I use regularly, iFlashReady [iTunes link], which gives fantastic HDR-like results. Glyn agreed with my points, and took down his review for some rewriting. It’s just gone up again today, and his conclusion is still that HDR Camera is a waste of money.

    My comment starts below. The remarks directed at another commenter, TrevorML, are in response to his question about the suitability of other general image editing apps on the iPhone to this sort of processing.

    —

    Hi Glyn,

    Since our correspondence, I’ve had the misfortune of being tempted to try HDR Camera out for myself, and have arrived at the same conclusions as you. It largely produces unpleasant results I would be ashamed to show anyone on my iPhone or Flickr account. Other apps like iFlashReady and PhotoFX are far more capable of taking a badly exposed photo (a fault of the iPhone’s limited camera software) and giving it some points of interest.

    TrevorML: I’m glad you asked that question. Naturally it’s impossible for any iPhone app today to produce true HDR images, as those require a series of bracketed images as you have noted. The iPhone camera API does not allow apps or users to manually adjust the auto-exposure values, or any other values for that matter. The best we can have for the moment (perhaps iPhone OS 3.0 will hand over more control to apps) is apps that simulate the effect by recovering lost/hidden photographic data.

    I initially thought that iFlashReady worked by simply boosting the brightness of photos, which is how we might normally approach the problem in Photoshop/Aperture/Lightroom, etc. but it’s actually more advanced. Looking at the developer’s website, I discovered that they produce a professional application, Essential HDR (www.imagingluminary.com), for Windows PCs. It seems that they’ve taken some of their technologies and applied it to iFlashReady, and probably decided that marketing it as a brightening app would be more commercially successful than proclaiming its HDR features. Rightly so, I think, as few mainstream iPhone users know or give a crap about HDR.

    But iFlashReady does work as an HDR app in practice, and like I was saying, it goes beyond simple brightening. What seems to be happening is a localized contrast balancing that increases brightness in dark areas without touching already well-exposed spots. A dark object can be directly beside a bright one, and the effect does not bleed over. I think it’s probably more than just tweaking shadows and highlights too (as can be done in PhotoFX; I’ve tried and the results are not comparable), as it seems to have many subtle steps and a gentle tonal curve. The result looks surprisingly natural, and you can see that above. The ones from HDR Camera certainly do not.

    Another thing that impressed me greatly was that the makers of iFlashReady seemed to have tuned their results with the iPhone’s camera in mind. Noise is effectively suppressed, or simply not exaggerated by their processing. HDR Camera’s “Night Mode” produces horrendous blotches of color noise across the entire photo. A few other apps I’ve seen also seem to just port their image effects over from the desktop side of things with no regard for imaging characteristics of the iPhone’s camera.

    If I sound like I’m plugging the app because I know the guys who made it, well I don’t. I just use it nearly every other day and enjoy it a great deal. But since I’m recommending, another app I use often and find sadly underpublicized is the superb “ColorTaste with TOY LENS” [iTunes link] by Tandem Systems (who is really a rather friendly Japanese developer), which costs US$1.99. In my opinion, this app handily beats others like ToyCamera [iTunes] and Camerabag [iTunes] because of one feature: lens distortion modelling. It doesn’t just alter colors and add a vignette (although it can do those too), its Toy Lens mode subtly distorts and blurs photos to look like they came from a tiny plastic lens, like what you’d find on a Diana (120 film) or Vistaquest VQ1005 (keychain digital) camera.

    Again, to tie it back to the earlier part of this comment, this sort of initiative in iPhone app development impresses me greatly. Rather than just doing a me-too image processor, these two companies have opened up new avenues of iPhone photography.

  • Karaoke midget*

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    Karaoke midget*, originally uploaded by sangsara.

    I was having lunch at a hawker centre and heard some (pretty awful, I’m sorry to say) Chinese singing, but couldn’t figure out where it was coming from. A little while later, this guy comes from around the corner pushing a karaoke machine on a trolley and singing into a microphone. The fact that he was a midget just made the whole thing more surreal.

    He was also rocking a single rolled-up pant leg, which disappointed me greatly because real gangstas don’t sing Chinese love songs.

    *I don’t know if midget is an acceptable word, although it’s the one I was brought up with. Someone suggested dwarf, which to me sounds even more derogatory.