I came across this “open letter to Steve Jobs” by David Ciccone while browsing my Gizmodo RSS feed.  I have no doubt in my mind that his MacBook Pro is really broken, and that all of his facts will check out fine.  Here’s the problem: While reading through his open letter, he kinda lost my sympathy after reading the first paragraph; I was kinda pissed off by the time I read the whole thing.

His letter is littered with missing/misused punctuations, grammatical errors, and run-on sentences.  Almost every other sentence starts with “So.”  If I were Steve Jobs, I would replace his MacBook Pro with a 12″ Powebook G3 (out of spite) until he corrects every grammatical error in his “open letter.”

Bah.

Popularity: 6% [?]

With this Nikon accessory, you can mount any lens with a 52mm filter thread in reverse and achieve higher magnification (by being able to focus closer).  The downside is you only get stop-down metering (available for the Nikon D200 and higher models…D70s users are SOL), and with this setup you can achieve focus by only moving the camera setup back-and-forth.  Of course, you can only use this with older lenses with built-in aperture rings (you set the aperture on the lens ring itself since with stop-down metering, you lose electronic coupling with the camera).  So in short: it’s cheap, but if you’re looking for a real macro lens alternative, this is not even close. 

Popularity: 7% [?]

As I complete my full transition (back to) Nikon, I am now selling off my Canon stuff:

• Canon EF 17-40/4L
• Canon EF 85/1.8
• Canon EF 15/2.8 Fisheye
• Canon EF 28-135 IS

Not sure yet where to dump these…

Popularity: 7% [?]

The formal evaluation of this lens has been added to my backlog of yet-to-write-and/or-publish reviews.  In the meantime, let me just say that if you’re expecting a night-and-day difference between this lens and the Nikon 50/1.4 in terms of sharpness (even at f1.4), you’re in for a huge disappointment.

Popularity: 9% [?]

I don’t know how to begin to describe how awful this movie is. I didn’t plan to watch this one, but I just happened to be in one of my friends’ home and they popped in this movie. Holy crap! After a record-breaking 10 minutes into the movie, I felt like having massive internal bleeding. I silently screamed “Please stop this movie before it hurts anyone…” but it was too late…

Popularity: 11% [?]

This is a surprisingly good lens.  Its VR feature works well, too. 

Popularity: 7% [?]

http://smithmag.us/shootingwar/index.php

Popularity: 7% [?]

After going through a few hours trying out the software, I am almost certain now on buying the full version.  While a few users in this forum complain about the lack of shadow detail, I–on the other hand–complain about difficulty in highlight detail recovery without resorting to “low contrast” in the contrast setting.  Granted that I am only working on the “free” version, this complaint that I have is probably not even valid. 

Most of the raw images that I have converted to 16-bit TIFF through SilkyPix requires minimal or no post-processing at all.  And, like I have said before, its user interface is quicker and far more responsive than the OEM raw converter, albeit a little confusing.  Overall speed coversion is faster, too. If I purchase the OEM raw converter, I am sure I will be purchasing computer memory upgrades along with it; with SilkyPix, I may not have to do that.

For now, I will be trying the software in its “trial” mode for 2 weeks just to make sure…

A sample utilizing SilkyPix basic conversion: +2/3 exposure correction, average contrast, sharpening, and color.

Popularity: 8% [?]

In the last hour or so I’ve been checking out this surprisingly-impressive RAW converter, which I just discovered while perusing dpreview.com’s forums.  I usually dismiss third-party converter (including the highly-regarded Capture One and Adobe Camera Raw), and until I tried SilkyPix, the only third-party converter that is a distant second to first-party converter is Bibble. 

“Jack-of-all-trade” converters are plagued with images with strong tint of magenta, Bibble included–although not as bad as ACR.  So far with my quick tests with SilkyPix, this is not the case; in fact, the output images is sometimes better from OEM Raw converter!  Not to mention that its interface is about one thousand times faster and more stable!

It will take me a few more days to decide, maybe I should get this instead of the OEM converter, since it also natively supports Ricoh GR-D DNG format.

Popularity: 9% [?]