Category: Computing

General computing with a bias towards Unix, OS X, Apple products, for use in Music and Photography

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Apple’s Spring Forward Event

MacBook12

 

The Apple event has now passed, two things impressed me and neither were the watch, which I do like by the way.

The first was the announcement of ResearchKit, with it being open source I hope other phone manufacturers get in on this, it could have a major impact on human health.  This is possibly of the most important Apple releases of recent years.

The new twelve inch Apple MacBook was also impressive, but I cannot decided if its for me.  The rumours were true and it only has one USB-C, which means if I was to use it in office I would need additional dongles or a docking station to provide power, connect to my monitor, external storage and card readers.  For a machine to use out in the field its ideal.

So what about the big announcement, the watch!  Well I have to admit, I want one, being an iPhone 6Plus user, the watch is a useful addition when you want to check notifications or message someone quickly.

Unfortunately the price for anything other then the iPhone Sport is a little high.  I have to think about it a little longer.

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Updates now and to come

Macbook Air -topThere seem to have a flurry of computer updates so far this month, several Adobe flash updates an Apple Camera Raw OS update but it’s what’s coming that has me excited.

Apple have been testing iOS 8.2 in the wild now for some time so with the Apple press conference next Monday I expect to see this launched.

I hope to see the new Apple MacBook Air that has been rumoured. A twelve inch retina would make a great mobile photography platform.

There are a few rumours that it will lack the common ports like Thunderport which I doubt but that is true it might be a no go for me, at least for now.

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Photoshop is 25

facebookcover_Grid-copyIts now 25 years since Thomas Knoll came up with the concept of Photoshop, the prepress tool that also became essential for Photographers, that was until Thomas and the team came up with Lightroom.

Well done guys.

 

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Apple Pay and Starbucks

Leica M8 & 50mm Summilux ASPH
Leica M8 & 50mm Summilux ASPH

It does seem like support for Apple pay is growing.  Its going to be interesting to see if it takes off in the UK.

Whilst I general try to frequent independent coffee shops, Lincoln’s Coffee Aroma and Norwich’s The Window being two of my favourites if you need a coffee then the big chains like Costa, Nero and Starbucks are always nearby, and if your a Starbucks iOS app user in the USA you can now use ApplePay with the Starbucks app.

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Apple Updates

OS X MavericksThe last few weeks has seen a number of bugs and security issues announced by security investigators for Windows, Unix and OS X (which is Unix but people forget because of the pretty easy to use interface).

Last week one of the three bugs was patched and today saw the release of 10.10.2 which fixes the other two.  If you have a Mac with the latest OS please update now.

Windows fixes will be coming soon, its just a shame that the security investigators released their findings to the world before all machines could be patched.

iOS also had an update today so its been a busy day, backing up all my machines, and updating them.

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Terry White’s 30 Creative Cloud Tutorials in 30 Days

Import export LightroomMany photographers use Adobe Lightroom and/or Adobe Photoshop in their workflow.  If you do its highly likely then you subscribe to the Adobe Creative Cloud.

If you do then I suggest you check out Terry White’s Tech Blog at the moment as he is publishing 30 tutorials in 30 days on various techniques on many of the Creative Cloud products.

Check it out here, you may learn something new.

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So what did you get for Christmas

towel_hub

Terry White apart from being a Photoshop God and a good photographer is always posting about interesting gadgets he has found but this year he really topped himself.  How cool is this.  How often like me do you want to charge the iPhone or iPad in the kitchen, and now you have this a kitchen roll stand with built in charging!

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Building PC’s

Macbook Air in profile -closedBack in the good old days of 386 and 486 processors, I got into building my own PC’s.  This continued up to the point where I got my first Mac and since then I have always had Mac’s.

I keep thinking about a home media server and also a friend recently has been asking me about building a server to run some virtual machines on for training.  So with this in mind I spend a few hours recently looking a component prices, also to compare I looked at the PC World prices.

Unless your after something specific, looking at prices today its very difficult to justify building your own machines, and also the more I looked the more tempted I was with the thought of buying an old refurbished MacMini.

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Screen Differences

Profiling and TrendingChris and myself both posted some images from our weekend wildlife shoot.  It was interesting that while most of our shots looked fine on our own colour calibrated monitors, the office laptop made my photographs look over exposed and Chris’s photographs underexposed.  Now while maybe neither of is was spot on with our exposures, they certainly were nothing like as bad as they looked on these office laptops.

The difference being of course that both myself and Chris operate colour calibrated and profiled work flows and that includes profiling our screens.

The office laptops are not and it really shows.  It also goes to show how ridiculous it is to judge cameras from low quality jpegs posted on the internet.  If a camera is tempting you, try it in your hand and take a memory card to shoot a few test shots to process in your own work flow and see how they hold up.

It also highlights how you should also not judge exposure from the LCD on the back of the camera, they are certainly not profiled and what looks good is generally not the best for actual image quality.

https://brown-family.org.uk/profiles-screen/