Artryst.com: Design by Gregory Tarnoff

The iPhone’s Achilles Heel

Many probably don’t consider this, but I had to this weekend. Over the holiday weekend, my phone performed as needed until Sunday when I went to call my tennis loving mother about the epic battle between Nadal and Federer at Wimbeldon. My call appeared to go through as I could see the little timer counting my time connected, but I couldn’t hear a damn thing. Upon further examination, I didn’t hear any of the little clicks either. It rang, but that was the only audio coming out. I thought for sure my phone was dying.

more »

Launch of Firefox 3…and the unfortunate death of Firebug

If you haven’t been paying attention to the interwebs lately, this has been a big week for the browser wars. Opera 9.5 launched as well as Firefox 3.  I have been a fan of Firefox for a long time and recently have become a huge fan of the extension Firebug for it.

In my current work environment we are building Java web applications and while I can and do run them locally, it can take a while to put the build up, take it down, modify it and put it back up. Since most of my work is front end focused I spend a lot of time in Firebug testing things before taking the build down to update.

When Firefox 3 launched on Tuesday, I diligently downloaded and installed it. I played around with it a little and saw that Firebug wasn’t updated for it yet. So I packed it away and pulled out Firefox 2 and got back to work. Then I started having tabbing issues. I have had to restart my PC three times because my tab button on my keyboard stops working in Firefox 2. Additionally, if I am in Firebug’s CSS live editing window  and highlight a property it automatically deletes the property when I tab out. Becoming increasingly frustrated I dug around and saw they now have Firebug updated for Firefox 3 but in a beta format (although is it beta 3). so like a good little boy, I installed the new extension and booted Firefox 2 back up.

One of the beautiful things about Firebug is the ability to turn on and off various properties. However in the new beta on Firefox 3 this is causing the entire browser to crash. So here I come Firefox 2, wait what is this…the new beta is incompatible with Firefox 2 BUT deletes the old version on install. Come on guys, if you are going to not be functional, you can at least not touch my previous install.

By the way, what is with Firefox 3 not importing all my bookmarks from Firefox 2 on install? It captured my IE and Opera ones, but ignored the ones I actually use.

Majestic

I have been intrigued by HDR photography for a while and wanted to experiment with it. I have tried converting single image raw files with limited success, but here is my first bracketed photo attempt at HDR.

This is the relatively new movie theater in Waukesha, WI. I loved their old schoolish neon sign and thought it would be a great subject. I am definitely going to return for some other angles and go later at night.

View on Flickr

Moving from Twitter to Friendfeed, Come Join Me!

I have been twittering for a while now and really enjoy the connectivity and the ability to have updates tied here on my site. However with the sudden explosion of users on Twitter, they seem to be crumbling under the weight. Yesterday the service was barely up at all. According to their blog this was due to a database error when they made an update to the service, but I have been experiencing daily outages.

Because of this I am moving to Friendfeed. The beauty of this service is it not only will allow you to interact like Twitter does, but also can import your updates to other social applications like Flickr, Digg, Google Reader, Facebook and many more. There are two drawbacks I have noticed so far. One is the noise. Because Friendfeed shows you all activity by friends including comments they make on their friends feeds, it gets very noisy. However this allows you to interact and meet people you wouldn’t have met otherwise. Fortunately Friendfeed has a hide option that allows you to clear out the noise. The other drawback is that there is no mobile updates at this time. No one will be using Friendfeed to get out of Egyptian jails anytime soon.

So come on on by, join up and subscribe to my feed: www.friendfeed.com/urothane

Stop back here and leave your handle in the comments and I will subscribe to your feed as well.

Short Listed for Schmap.com California Edition

I just received a notification from Schmap.com saying they want to use my Cleveland National Forest image for an upcoming edition of the application. The terms look ok even though there is no pay. They do link to my Flickr account and only use a thumbnail, so I will use the publicity.

more »