I’ve been using the Vignette app for photography on Android ever since Dawn recommended it to me. It allows me to tap to shoot (avoiding the balky Droid X camera button) and offers a bunch of shooting options.

It also offers dozens of filters for creative photo-making, any of which can be applied either at the time of taking a shot, or later, to any photo in the Droid’s gallery. In fact, there are so many filters that I have trouble keeping track of all of them, and developers neilandtheresa (who, by the way, have an utterly charming blog and web site that seems not to discuss their super application at all) continue to add more with each update to the app.

So I cheated and made myself a handy reference for the current set of built-in effects. It’s a little unwieldy to use on the droid itself, but not too bad — and it’s a big help for thinking about post-processing of photos that I’ve already shot. It includes examples of the vignette, coloring, camera and film effects styles and more. I hope it’s helpful to you. Click through for the full-size sheet at flickr.

Keep in mind that the effects can be layered on top of one another via the customizations menu, allowing the stacking of any number of treatments. This sheet doesn’t show any of those combinations.

One hint for working with Vignette: Set a favorite preset with all effects, frames and customizations to Normal/None; then you can quickly toggle from fancy-pants artistic to straight normal settings.

For the sake of completeness, here’s a list of all the effects currently in the application (note that not all simple color variations are included in the example sheet).

COMPLETE EFFECTS LIST as of Aug 21 2010
1. Normal - Generic film effect
2. Vignette
3. Portra
4. Velvia
5. Ilford
TOY
6. Toy Camera
7. Toy Camera BW
8. Leaky
9. Cross-Process
VINTAGE
10. Faded
11. SX-70
12. Summer - hazy grns and browns
13. Colourised - flat pastels
14. Oversaturated - bright washed out reds & yellows
15. Yearbook - faded B&W
16. Sepia
17. Platinotype - bright smooth tones & deep shadows
18. Retro Red - faded color variation
19. Retro Yellow
20. Retro Green
21. Retry Cyan
22. Retro Blue
23. Retro Magenta
COLOUR HIGHLIGHT
24. London - contrasty b&w and red
25. Paris - contrasty B&W and blue-green
26. New York - contrasty black & white and yellow
COLOUR SWAP
27. Red/blue
28. Red/green
29. Blue/green
30. Rotate Hue
TINTED MONOCHROME
31. Sepia - same
32. Platinotype - same
33. Bleach bypass
34. Night vision- grainy and green
35. Duotone red, yellow, green, cyan, blue, magenta
LENS EFFECTS
36. Dreamy - soft-focus
37. Tilt-shift - portrait and landscape modes
38. Tobacco filter - deep orange tint for dramatic skies
39. Grad tobacco - portrait and landscape
40. Grad ND - portrait and landscape
41. Red, yellow, green, cyan, blue and magenta simple filters
CINEMATIC
42. Action movie - vivid reds w/blue-green tint
43. Technicolor - red and cyan 1930s look
44. Scary movie - tri-tone blue and magenta
MISC
45. Posterise
46. Blackboard
47. Infrared
48. Rainbow
49. Negative
50. Invert
FRAMES
51. Bordered
52. Rounded
53. Oval
FRAMES - INSTANT
54. Instant classic
	variants: Wide, mini & square
FRAMES - GRUNGY
55. Instant transfer 1
	variants: 2 (smaller border) and 3 (yellow/magenta border)
56. Filed carrier
FRAMES - FILM
57. 35mm
58. 35mm full bleed
59. 6x6
60. 6x6 full bleed

Now that I have a photogenic, tiny gurgling creature in the house, I’m shooting a lot of photos, both on the Droid X and the Pentax. Most of these photos end up, one way or another, in Lightroom for cataloguing, and as I’ve described earlier, I have a nice workflow for updating these rapidly-growing galleries on my iPad.

But how about the Droid X? It has a nice screen, and I want to foist photos of my beautiful boy on anyone I happen across — so I started to wonder if, continuing to use Lightroom as my core platform, I could keep a small gallery of photos on the Android phone with as little manual work as possible.

Here’s the executive summary: I again use a smart published collection in Lightroom to create the gallery; then I use a LaunchAgent in OS X to monitor the mount point of the Droid X on the filesystem; and a tiny shell script syncs the published gallery to the Droid whenever I plug it into the MacBook Pro. Read on for altogether too many details.

First, a couple of things to note about how the Droid X generates image galleries [ note that this may apply to all Android devices; I have no idea, and your mileage may vary ]:

• Android automatically displays galleries based on image type — so you don’t need to update a database or anything to build your galleries on the phone. You just need folder(s) full of images.
• When you run the Gallery app, it will display galleries with the name of the parent folder containing the images. This means you can make a folder tree on the Droid’s SD card and neatly package multiple gallery folders within it, without cluttering up your root directory.

Prepare the SD card

When I attach my Droid X via USB to the MacBook Pro, it automatically mounts it as a volume titled NO NAME, so I used the Finder to change the label to DROIDX. This, happily, seems not to have affected any of the phone’s operations; the Droid must not depend on the name of the SD card for any of its internal work.

The second preparation step is to create a master gallery directory on the SD card. This is just for housekeeping purposes; everything in the galleries will be in a subdirectory of that top-level directory. Again, I simply did this with the finder: navigate to the DROIDX drive when the phone is connected, and create a new top-level directory, Galleries.

Your SD card and Droid should now be ready to go.

Set up the Gallery/Galleries

Just like last time, I’m using smart publish collections, based on keywords, to populate the galleries that will be synced. I decided to prefix all the keywords for this usage with dx — so, dx-gallery is my main tag, and I’ve edited it in LR to not be included in export. It’s a housekeeping tag only.

I’ve tagged a bunch of images with the dx-gallery tag.

Then it’s off to build the publish service. Here’s what it looks like in the publishing manager:

And add to that service a Published Smart Set that looks like this:

You can assign multiple keywords to the Smart Set, or create as many smart sets as you want galleries, and use unique keywords to assign photos to each. Each smart set within the published collection will appear in your directory tree as a subdirectory of the top-level folder for the set — and that makes the syncing to the Droid easy.

Automate syncing via LaunchAgent

Everything I know about LaunchAgent I learned from this tutorial. This is basically a concise repeating of that description, edited for our purposes. (I’ve previously described using this process to perform system backups)

First, if it’s not already there, mkdir ~/Library/LaunchAgents. This is the folder that OS X will watch for scripts triggered by system events such as mounting an external drive, which is exactly what plugging in the Droid does.

In that directory, make a new plist file (I called mine droid-sync-watch.plist) and give paste this into it:

In short, this plist file tells the OS to run the identified script (~Library/Scripts/droid-sync) when the specified WatchPath changes.

The sync script itself lives in ~Library/Scrips and consists of a check against the desired volume (here’s where naming the Droid SD card comes in) and an rsync of the designated published collection to the previously-generated target directory on the SD card.

Finally, tell the LaunchAgent controller to watch your scripts by doing the following at a terminal:

• launchctl load ~/Library/LaunchAgents
• launchctl list | grep sync

You should see your droid-sync script appear in the list produced by the second command, above.

Now you’re ready!

Plug in and go

That really should do it. When you connect the Droid X, you can watch the messages in the sync script appear in your console log, and everything should work — after syncing, disconnect the device again and fire up the gallery application; in the “Folders” section of the gallery you should see an item for each gallery you create in Lightroom. You’re done!

As with the iPad workflow, the great part of this is that once it’s set up, it’s pretty automatic. If you edit, add, or remove photos, as long as you republish the collection, those changes will all be pushed over to the Droid. Thanks to a little nerdery and Lightroom, we’ve built a bit of functionality that the Droid software doesn’t directly offer — and it’s still done with LR as the core of the photo library.

This little draft has been sitting unfinished becuase, well, life happened, so I thought I’d just throw it on up to get it out of the bin. These are somewhat organized thoughts about getting a Not-iPhone

So I posted this bit of a rant a couple of weeks ago about how Android just didn’t float my boat and etc. Well, not long after that I finally decided to stop waiting on a Verizon iPhone, and I ordered myself a Droid X.

Yes, the one described by David Pogue as like talking into a frozen waffle.

So how is it? Well, it is large, but it doesn’t feel like talking into a toaster pastry. I actually like the finish and feel a lot. The volume rocker is a little small, and the hard camera button is sloppy feeling. But the rubberized feel to the back of the phone is nice to hold, the ridge for the camera is a good contour, and the device overall feels quite thin.

Now that I’ve had some time to get used to the four hard buttons (menu, home, back and search), I’m pretty efficient at using the Droid X. I quite like the way the back button in some contexts returns to the prior application — for example, after visiting a link clicked in the twitter client, the back button returns you from the browser back to twitter. Search is application context-sensitive, and at the home screens it searches applications, contacts, and google. It also remembers prior searches, so it’s a handy way to launch applications or make calls, too.

However, the menu button can cause some complication, because applications don’t always use it consistently — worse, some create a soft button of their own that might or might not invoke a context menu. Here the iOS model definitely wins.

Keyboard: Text edit views often obscure UI elements, and small text boxes often are rendered as multiline text areas, taking up space rather unnecessarily. Fortunately, I have learned how to hide the keyboard after typing: since the Droid X keyboard doesn’t have a “hide” button like that on the iOS (and as I understand Android offers standard), swipe down from the top of the keyboard. That will re-hide it and give you back the rest of your UI. (That’s an undocumented Pro Tip, right there.)

Horizontal coverflow like display of bookmarks and images in gallery is awful. Really, it’s bad. Hold the phone vertically for a standard thumbnail-style view. (The same holds for the bookmarks view in the browser. In the faux coverflow style, bookmarks are entirely, entirely unusable.)

Lack of bookmarklets is regrettable. I hear there are workarounds that involve chanting and offerings to Shiva, so I’ve delayed exploring them.

Battery life: I have heard bad things about smart/app phones in general, including the Androids. It’s easy to imagine that Android’s true multitasking could be a big battery liability. This is where the fanboys go ZOMG APPLE SUXORS, but the presence or lack of multitasking hasn’t been an issue for me yet, in terms of functionality. I have observed that Android runs a lot of applications that i have not once, ever, run on my own — Amazon mp3 store and the car dock, for example — and this strikes me as a pretty inefficient thing to do.

So does it matter for battery? Who knows? After a handful of days I stopped using Advanced Task Killer every twenty minutes and just relaxed. While I reserve the right to revise and amend my statement, for now I’m very happy with my Droid X’s battery life: I routinely finish the day with 50 percent of battery life left on the meter after a day of pretty heavy use.

Apps I like (The range of Android applications seems … adequate if not impressive. The Android market badly needs some kind of curation.):

• My Tracks: nice tracker app for biking in the hills. Integrates well with google maps.
• Twitter app: Clean, works well, nothing extraneous.
• Vignette: Much better than the built-in camera app, with a bunch of creative filters. I’m taking more pictures with the Droid X than in the past several weeks with my DSLR. Really good photo application a la the Hipstamatic app for iOS.
• K-9 Email: This is a powerful email client with IMAP support. On the Droid X, there are lots of problem reports about the stock client not correctly refreshing, and while I am loath to solve a defect with an app, K-9 syncs properly and offers a bundle more features than the stock client.

It’s a good device with very nice hardware and some software feature that I really like — and some hitches.

More later?

Marco Arment sums up my bemusement with the Android platform, and, by extension, why my frustration that that AT&T’s network is so awful where I live:

The current must-have Android phone changes every few months, and they’re often radically different from each other, making it difficult for consumers, developers, the press, and the carriers to build loyalty toward any of them or entrench them in the market. The OS needs to be updated over the air with three involved parties, only one of whom is motivated to update it. Features are added when they can be, not when (or if) they should be, or if they can be done well. Nearly every usability detail appears to be an afterthought, as if “design” is relegated to a coat of paint at the end of the development cycle rather than a deep-rooted philosophy throughout it.

The driving theme of the iPhone, as evident in every “There’s an app for that” ad, is “use this to do stuff.” Meanwhile, as near as I can tell, the driving motif of the Droids — with all the menacing Terminator-style chrome and unblinking red eyes — is that they’ll kill you if you aren’t careful. The tech-heavy “Droid Does” slogan reminds me of the days when Sega, hoping that more advanced specs would win the video game wars, tried out “Sega does what Nintendon’t.” And that turns out to have worked great for them, right?

The Verizon signal where I live is great, and I get a work discount, too. I simply can’t justify ditching that right now for AT&T’s extraordinarily mediocre signal, no matter how much I prefer the user experience of the iPhone. While there is precious little that actually draws me to Android, it’s a less dead end option than any other option that’s not an iPhone.

Joy.

Brayden asked below about my experience so far with the iPad. Can it replace a PC for most uses? Put most simply, yup. I’m using mine for about 90 percent of the everyday time that I would normally spend on the MacBook Pro. In fact, it’s probably easier to write up the things that I’m not routinely doing on the iPad, these days:

1. Lightroom: I do have a nice workflow for publishing photos to the iPad from Lightroom, but for now at least, that application itself still lives on the MBP. And Lightroom 3, by the way, has a host of improvements that I recommend.

And that’s about it. Now that I’ve had some time to get used to the keyboard, i can write pretty quickly with the iPad; autocorrect doesn’t always seem to catch things I think it should (like the lowercase “I” in the prior sentence), so i think about the Bluetooth keyboard once in a while, but I haven’t really needed more than the software keyboard. If i want to write a lot, of course, I can hop onto the laptop and TextMate away. (I drafted this article using simpletext.ws on iPad.)

The iPad so portable and easy that I do a lot of sitting on the patio with it. It undersells it significantly to call it a reading device, but it’s so very good for propping in my lap with a coffee or a beer and diving into instapaper or the Kindle app. It’s just a thoroughly enjoyable experience.

Shortly after the iPad launch, some reviewer noted how it just gets out of the way and just becomes the application you’re using or the web site you’re visiting. That’s really a great way to put it, and it’s largely true. With a well done app, the iPad mostly disappears.

Here’s a short list of the good apps I’m spending time with (in addition to Safari and Mail):

1. Instapaper Pro
2. Kindle
3. 1password Pro
4. Twitterific
5. Tab Toolkit
6. Netflix
7. Reeder

I’m still looking for a case for the thing (the DODO Case is mighty tempting), just for a bit more protection, though I’m not eager to cover it up, either. [Other recommendations, anybody?] And I don’t love the crop of text editors I’ve tried, so far, hence using simpletext.ws for this post; the upcoming PlainText app sure looks good, though. But I have no true complaints. This is a super little device and I’m really having a great time with it. Don’t let anybody tell you it’s just a big iPod Touch.

(Or, an efficient way to use Lightroom to manage photos on your iPad)

I got myself an iPad a few weeks ago. Short review: It’s a big iPhone only in the sense that an iPhone is just a phone; that is, it’s hawt and I love it. (More ZOMG iPad articles to follow, I’m sure.)

The iPad really shows off photos, so I’ve been thinking about the best way to manage the photos that I want to put on it. With the non-beta release of Lightroom 3 this week, I think I’ve found a start at a workflow in the new publishing service that it offers.

First a note about syncing photos to the iPad. Like the iPod/iPhone, you have to select a single parent directory, and optionally subdirectories, of photos that you want to sync. The iPad stores photos in a series of albums simply named after the subdirectory where they live on your hard drive. In my case, I keep the photos that I publish out of Lightroom in one of a number of subfolders of a ~/Pictures/Exported Photos directory, but I don’t necessary want to sync all of them to the iPad. And, for the iPad, I wanted a little more control over the album naming for purposes of navigation — so I didn’t want to keep the directory names I’ve previously used for simple file management.

So: I have an “iPad” directory in my exports folder, and that’s what I sync to the iPad — along with all its subdirectories. I’ve copied a handful of existing albums into that directory, which isn’t a great solution but it does work for now. Apple has apparently decided that symbolic links cannot be synced [that would be a great capability, wouldn’t it?], so I can’t simply create links to the file locations of the existing, non-Lightroom albums that I want to sync.

But the Lightroom albums are another story. Right now, I’ve simply created a couple of Hard Drive publish services, each of which publishes to a subdirectory of that “iPad” folder I described above. For example, the current flickr one simply sets up a set of export parameters for photos that will be published to a subdir.

But the slick part comes by making a smart collection that will publish everything I post to flickr in 2010. Simply build the smart collection within the publish service:

And then set it to include all photos that match some key criteria: Since I use Jeffery Friedl’s flickr plugin, I can call directly on the metadata it creates at export:

I now have a smart collection within a publish service, so the photos that I export that match that criteria will automatically be added. I’ll have to occasionally republish to the service itself; and each time I do so, the iPad will gather up those photos the next time I sync.

You can use the same methodology to set up hard drive publish services for any album you like; each service will appear on the iPad as an album, and if you create a smart collection (or a series of them) as part of the service, then they’ll be updated automatically as you perform you regular photo workflow.

One final note on why I think the publish service is an ideal tool for this workflow, rather than a solution such as simply exporting to a folder: The publish service will apply future changes to the service settings to all photos under its control. So, were I to decide to apply a watermark, a border (via, for example, LR/Mogrify 2), or adjust photo quality in order to save space on the iPad, those changes made to the publish service would result in the option to re-process the current photos:

In a sense, then, the photos produced via the publish service are truly synced — future changes will be managed and will trigger re-processing, if I choose. I think that’s pretty Good Stuff.

Pics or it didn’t happen

It’s May again (I know, I don’t know how that happened either, except that it followed April, and don’t get me started on April). Among other things, May is home to the “IronMan in May” competition at my place of work. The goal is to complete a sum of distances equivalent to an IronMan triathlon in the span of 31 days: 26 miles running, 2.4 miles swimming, and 112 miles biking. It’s a fun challenge and makes for a nice opportunity to mix up my workout routine, especially since I’m really, really not much of a runner.

And of course it means data to keep track of! There’s a paper chart on the wall at work, but who would want to use that when there’s such a glut of data visualization tools making the rounds now? Two years ago I used Joe Gregorio’s sparklines tool to plot my progress as I went:

Well it’s 2010 now (don’t get me started on 2009; that’s when I dislocated my shoulder — again — and then got nasty tendinitis to boot, so I didn’t take on IronMay last year), and this year I’m using Processing to plot my month’s data. Like R is really a programming language oriented to data-oriented programming, Processing is a language oriented around visualization (unlike R, however, which makes it easy to access vectors and data frames, Processing requires one to go back to array manipulation, so it took me some getting used to). Now, having seen the spectacular stuff in the Processing gallery I just hope that I’m not insulting the poor software by using it to make bar graphs (that look an awful lot like the old sparklines! I figured I had to start somewhere as I learned something brand new-to-me). This quick Processing tutorial is a great place to start.

Update May 31 2010: It’s a gorgeous day in Flagstaff and I knocked out the last of my run and bike miles on the urban trail this morning. Iron June, anybody?

Update shortly after the prior update: I wasn’t content with just the bar plot, so I tinkered just enough with streamgraph.js to come up with this (click through for the full-sized version at flickr):

Pretty rad, I think.

Although I recently gave a disclaimer about my home stereo system, I do enjoy my music. And for the past couple of years, I haven’t loved the way I listened to it. The aforementioned hawt stereo lives with the TV in a little loft space, and the small speakers there can’t really get any good sound into the kitchen, which of course is where I spend a lot of prime music listening time. The MacBook isn’t a bad speaker, but it doesn’t really have the volume or depth to fill the room.

So recently I went in for a Tivoli Model One.

It’s way cool: It sits on the kitchen counter and can easily fill the kitchen with sound — and good, good sound at that. [ Note that the Model One is mono; since my kitchen isn’t really conducive to a stereo setup, this isn’t a problem for me. One of these days maybe I’ll figure out how to rig up stereo there, and might spring for the Model Two. ] All the knobs are big hefty-feeling switches, the cabinet is sturdy, the tuner knob is geared. I tell you, it feels a little weird to write that it feels good to operate this radio, but man, it feels good to operate this radio.

With an aux switch and Airport Express hooked up to the input, I stream to it from either MacBook or iMac. And I can control the whole whiz-bang thing from the table with the iPod remote. It’s like living in the future. I highly recommend it.

A couple of years ago (whoa now, three and a half years ago?!) I commented on using the TextMate Journal Bundle to keep a snippets log. I still use that same snippets file for some references and a handful of things that don’t quite fit in 1password.

When 2010 rolled around, I started up a new journal file to use for a little bit more writing, and quickly found that I wanted to mix content within that file — specifically, I wanted to add tasks and treat them more functionally than straight markdown list items. Henrik Nyh’s TextMate Tasks bundle handles to-do lists quite well, so I cobbled together a combination of the two bundles. A screenshot of some of these integrated journal+tasks lists is below:

Combined, I get the nice markdown-compatible writing of the journal bundle, plus its keywords, search, and folding capability, along with the nested list feature of Tasks.

Use the journal bundle’s dts and dtsp tab triggers to start new entries complete with date stamps (and clipboard contents in the case of dtsp). You can write text into any entry, and intersperse lists at any point by starting a line with - (indent with one or more spaces to create sub-lists; Tasks will love it). Toggle list items to complete with cmd-D, and cmd-E will remove expired items.

I like just being able to put lists into markdown-enabled writing, but there’s a nice Getting Things Done application here, as well: Since the folding in the journal bundle is so easy, you can make @context entries, fill them with actions, and fold them to get out-of-scope contexts out of the way. Drop the name of the scope into a keyword, and the Find in Bundle command will produce a nice list of the first entry in a given context that matches a search. It’s simple but workable for GTD, if you’re into that sort of thing.

A variation that’s even more direct GTD-style tasking is to use @context tags anywhere in your entries and then employing the “find tasks” command to display only the desired matches. Use either or both find commands to fit your style and workflow!

Note that the Tasks bundle is inspired by the very good TaskPaper app. If you’re interesting in something a bit more full-on for lists (and GTD) that also has a bunch of extensions and related projects, do check it out. (Since TaskPaper works with text, you can even load files from Tasks+Journal or Tasks right into it and maintain some (but not all) functionality. I’ve done a little bit of further tweaking to maintain that compatibility in my bundle, like change Henrik’s check-mark back to the “@done” syntax that TaskPaper users (and update the bundle’s commands accordingly), which lets me switch back and forth pretty smoothly.

The JournalTasks bundle is available at github.

The Pentax K-7, Pentax’s current flagship DSLR, is on big sale today at Amazon:

In-body shake reduction (full shake reduction on ancient lenses!), 720p movie mode, 5 frames per second, and dust, moisture and weather resistant case. This is the first time I’ve seen the camera for under about $1200, so it’s significant savings. Both body-only and kit models are available. I just might pick one up. (And so might you.)

A few weeks back I wrote a bit about our new supra-digital entertainment nexus station, also known as The Blu-Raya Playa. After some more time basking in its HDMI greatness, I have a few more reflections that seem, in natural blog law, to require public consideration.

First, a disclaimer: The audio portion of our “home theater,” such as it is, consists of an eight year-old Sherwood receiver that I still maintain is an extraordinarily good buy for 2002, what with its DTS and coax and optical audio inputs and 5.1 downmixing and full LRF support. It’s connected to the bookshelf speakers that I bought in 1994 to take to college, so when I say that the audio from the Serenity blu-ray is totally sweet, you should take my word for it, because I’m not one of those nutjobs who pays $800 for neutrally-balanced balsawood volume knobs.

Right, with that out of the way, the Sony N460 remains a very satisfying little piece of equipment, but I do have a few thoughts about the whole “online digital library” thing.

First, a better remote would be nice. This one’s a little lightweight in heft. Also, for a device that can stream internet music services, a RF remote would be slick — no line-of-sight requirement to make selections. In the dare-to-dream category would be a smart remote with a display to control services like last.fm or pandora from the kitchen. Oooh, iPhone app. Ooooh, iPad app, yes.

Second, every video service is walled off from the rest. Online video is organized by service, not content or category or keyword. I want to aggregate it all up into folders or buckets of some kind. I’d settle for getting this for Netflix only (though being able to roll-up rentals or purchases from Amazon on Demand, too, would be way cool). The current display is just a tile of little tiny cover displays — scrolling through brings up a larger display of title. How excellent it would be to be able to organize all those little pictures of DVD covers, into TV and sci-fi and “serious melodrama” and “re-runs of The Shield.”

Here’s why categorization matters so much: I find I’m really making a library out of the Netflix instant queue, dropping into it movies I’ve been before, movies I’ve heard about, movies I might watch someday, and even documentaries. Previously, the Netflix Instant queue was a list of things tagged, essentially, “I want to watch this.” But having all that material in a device permanently connected to the TV changes that dramatically. It’s not a queue so much as a “I love this or I think it’s cool or I remember watching it in college or I might watch this one day” list. And therefore it’s not a list; it’s a library, and that library needs organizing. And all that stuff? It needs organizing.

The digital mega-library needs organizing, one way or another. Netflix could send category information to these devices, for example, or could allow users to attach keywords; devices could do anything with this information: display tag clouds or let users navigate the categories of video they’ve dropped into the queue, or build sparklines of keyword frequencies or … well, you get it. I think Netflix must ultimately be headed for this kind of system, but its usability will depend on device-level implementation.

[ update: Boxee may present a partial solution here, as the new version claims to be able to better organize material across services. Not having tried it out for quite a while, I downloaded the current release and gave it a go. I do have to say that it’s really slick, and must faster than the prior version I had used for a while. And there is some hint of cross-service integration: Searching for Chuck for example reveals streams from NBC.com and from Hulu; but searching for Doctor Who, which is represented by half a dozen entries in my instant Netflix queue, turns up nothing, so the integration is at best still only partial. But Boxee does have the most complete overall set of services, so the upcoming Boxee box is most definitely worth watching as an alternative to dedicating a PC to the TV. ]

And the day I can get to all the stuff I’ve queued, rented, and/or bought — via keyword, or actor, or ranking, or genre — without having to back out three menus and find another service? That will be Unification Day, and it will rock. Apple TV, I’m looking at you, though if Sony could do this with some sweet firmware updates to the box we already own, well I’d seriously consider a Vaio. Cross my heart.

Just after Christmas, our DirecTV receiver unceremoniously gave up the ghost. I had been looking into alternatives, and wasn’t encouraged by the lack of incentives for us to stay with DirecTV: In order to upgrade to a DVR, we’d have to pay $200 up front for the new unit (and still wouldn’t own it, as I understand), plus the additional monthly fee. By comparison, a comparable package with Dish Network was substantially less expensive, and they even offer an option to opt out of the 24-month contract — which is still cheaper than our existing DirecTV package.

But that’s not actually my point. My point is that when the first receiver broke, DirecTV promised to send us another one right away, but it would still take several days. And, quite honestly, we were bored now. So we gave ourselves a late Christmas gift: The Sony N460 Network Blu-Ray player (amazon link). Very briefly: it changes everything.

Devices like the Roku have been offered this capability for a while, of course [expanding from initially streaming Netflix, to Amazon on Demand and music via Pandora], and we’ve connected the MacBook video to the TV once in a while for Hulu or a Netflix stream. And more recently there’s a whole crop of blu-ray players that are internet-enabled, with varying service connectivity. Actually having the networked device connected directly to the TV is new to us, and the difference is stunning. I underestimated by a massive degree just how cool and convenient it is to push a button and have a library of streaming content available without screwing around with video cables. The N460 supports Netflix, Amazon Video on Demand, Youtube, and a small grundle of additional services, in addition to NPR streaming radio and slacker radio.

Netflix streaming — arguably the headline app — is excellent. Items in your instant queue are displayed in tiled icons on the screen, and it’s a serviceable presentation, though I’d prefer the coverflow-style presentation that Roku uses; the tiles are a little hard to read, and the lack of ability to organize a very large queue might eventually become a problem. Once a video is selected, the streaming starts up quickly and you just go to town (we connected the N460 directly to our Airport Extreme via ethernet cable). Browsing YouTube also works very well (and looks surprisingly good in fullscreen, too), and Amazon on Demand is simply sweet: We rented Star Trek for $3 and got Hi-Def streaming with digital sound. As Doctor Egon Spengler best put it, yes, have some. All of those singularly are super-cool, but as a package it means a new digital on-demand library. I’m still getting a handle on just how big that is for home video.

It’s big.

Oh, yeah, it plays blu-ray discs, too. That’s cool.

Following in the modest two-year tradition I’ve established (see 2007 and 2008 posts), here is my 2009 photo data from my Lightroom catalog!

[ quick howto: Lightroom 1 & 2 (and 3) databases are in sqlite3 format, which means that freely-available tools can extract data from them. I use sqlite3, some shell scripting, and R (and occasionally excel) to produce summaries of that data. Why? Data offers some insight into the kinds of photos I take. Mostly, though, it’s fun. I’d be happy to expand on the actual code that goes into these plots, if there’s interest. ]

Below is a set of plots that summarize some of this year’s data. Click through to flickr to see the larger version.

What’s interesting this year? Well, crop ratios looked pretty similar to last year, so this year, for the first time (suggested in a post by Keitha, whose photos I admire tremendously, and whose Pentax lens set I envy with the fire of a million anti-glare-coated nine-aperture-bladed all-metal suns) I pulled out some information about aperture for each of the prime lenses that I shoot with. You can see these four frequency plots (for each of the Pentax DA 70mm F2.4 ltd, FA 50mm F1.4, FA 35mm F2.0 and DA 21mm F3.2 ltd lenses) in the left hand column of the image. Right off the bat you can see that I shot a lot with the FA 35mm this year (which is confirmed by the “overall lens use” plot on the right column). In fact, I took that lens along as my sole lens on a few long weekend trips to Ventura, CA, and the San Juan Islands, and really loved its performance. It does great at large apertures, but I also used it a lot for street shooting at f/8 and smaller apertures.

Runner-up in frequency this year is the FA 50mm F/1.4, which ordinarily I would say is my favorite lens (and it very much still is; it just wasn’t as convenient a focal length to take as my only lens on those vacations). Its sweet spot [where it’s sharpest but still has a nice narrow depth of field] is about F/4, which is where I primarily use it.

Neither the DA 70mm F/2.4 or the DA 21mm F/3.2 got as much use this year, but I really love some of the photos I took with those lenses. In fact, I carried these two lenses specifically for their light weight and trim size on the Flagstaff photowalk I organized in July.

How did 2009 stack up to 2008? In terms of absolute frequency, nearly identical! I kept 1308 frames last year, compared to keeping 1340 in 2008. Far fewer of those are picks, or posted to flickr — though a good number are waiting for me to come back to, to finish workup or to make a print.

And that’s it for the 2009 photo stats! I did re-work my keyword network code, so perhaps can follow up this post with a little more about keyword relationships.

If you’d like to know more about extracting and summarizing info from your own Lightroom catalog, please let me know (and check out my other lightroom-related posts)

And, as last year, I hope soon to follow up with a report on my 2009 photo goals, and to set a few for 2010.

It would be great if Lightroom could string export presets together, to perform operations sequentially or simply to perform several processes on one image to produce several different outputs.

The first use I’d put to this functionality would be generating thumbnails of exported images right along-side the full-sized image — a common task when producing images to upload to a blog, for example.

Absent that kind of flexible functionality, here’s a nice solution for generating thumbnails of images and full-size exports at the same time. Use Jeffrey Friedl’s Run Any Command plugin in conjunction with mogrify: Just insert “run any command” to an existing export preset, and then add the following as the Command to Run (assumes you have LR2/Mogrify installed, which of course you do):

The command makes a copy of your original image (which is available to “run any command” plugin via the {FILE} token), with “-small” appended to the filename, and then uses mogrify to resize the copy to 50%. You can optionally adjust the percent to scale or add a “-quality” option to the mogrify command.

You could perform this command more cleanly, without the copy step, if you have ImageMagick installed independently of LR2/Mogrify: The full IM package includes the “convert” command, which allows for output to a new filename. Since I didn’t want to separately install ImageMagick, I just make a copy of the file and then invoke mogrify via the path to the plugin.

Presto! Instant thumbnails, appropriately named, to accompany your export. Pretty good stuff, made possible by the great work of Jeffrey Friedl. Check out all his lightroom goodies.

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