episiarch

I didn't mean that. But I do have the one you hold between your knees. Yes, yes, the grinder.

FWIW I'm getting shockingly good results with a Zassenhaus hand-cranked grinder. And my standards are high. Inexpensive, and quieter than an electric grinder too, which is a factor for me since I'm the early riser in the house.

I've never used a 'proper' lever machine but I used to make my home shots with a Presso, a different sort of manual-pressure machine. The extra degree of feedback and control it gives you is really interesting. One of my favorite blends had a particularly arm-wrestling-like profile: it would fight back really hard until a certain point, then go from there to okay-okay-you-win really really fast. With a pump machine you can watch flow rate over time but you don't get anything like the same feel for what the coffee is doing from moment to moment.

The award show you have entered is caught in a bad romance.

Has been for some time -- it's been a while so I don't remember all the details, but IIRC if you go to opera.com with the default BB browser, either you're offered the chance to install the Opera browser or it's easy to navigate from there to a page where you can.

Those did look like fun! Too bad it's not on this ship: New Cruise Ship Features Apple Reseller Store

I think you're entirely right but I differ a little on the particulars. I think a successful iPad competitor needs to have a really clean, simple, unified content buying experience built in. But I don't think it matters a lot who provides the content infrastructure or whether it's one infrastructure or several aggregated ones, as long as the product's Content Shoppe thoroughly hides the details and the complications from the end user. That said, I would be pretty surprised if any company but Apple (and maybe at some point Google) actually does realize that kind of clean unified buying experience in practice.

Pretty! Got a mental image there. Hoping it's wrong. Wow, that's old-school. Having fun with it and getting good results?

Saw that. It's attractive in theory. The thing is I'm so used to listening on stock gear that I wonder if a JH13 adjusted to my hearing loss would just sound wrong to me, instead of sounding better. I've posted the question to them (via their FB page), and we'll see what they say. I'm somewhat more tempted not to do it than to do it, at this point.

Apple's catching up as best it can. Didn't even open in France until November, fercryinoutloud. I'm sure as soon as the scouts identify an appropriate premium high-traffic retail location in Great Southern Bumfuck, they'll set the wheels in motion.

NOT just you. Pretty good for theft prevention, though.

A box of 6 90-ml (about 3 oz) Duralex glasses Our daughter keeps wanting to drink from our water glasses at the dinner table instead of from her plastic cup. These ultradurable small-sized glasses seemed like something we could try to get her to drink from her own glass. They are so durable that one of the demos involves pounding nails with them, so maybe she'll just pour out the water and use it to destroy the house instead. Time will tell.

It's a strange day when something that a mid-fi guy like me thinks good only for ringtones gets better scores from the the Omega-toting, DAC-offing, ball-rocking, customs-remolding, Dead-taping HC elite. Maybe I woke up in bizarro world this morning. More seriously, what phone models are you guys using? Mine's just a 1st generation iPhone which doesn't have much of a speaker on it to begin with. Maybe the little Griffin thingy simply outperforms it, though I wouldn't have expected that.

I pretty much agree. We have the D90 with the 18-200 VR (and SB400 flash) and it's a terrific rig. But I could pretty easily make do with the 18-105 VR. I was pretty darn content with my old Canon rig and the 17-85 IS, even. So while I ultimately did divide my bucks roughly 50-50, really the higher end of the zoom range was something I could have done without if I'd felt squeezed. Actually so was the fancier body. A D40 with 18-105 VR would have met my needs very adequately, not that it's not nice to have the stronger rig that I do have.

I have one of those and honestly it's not much for music, but it gives a really good improvement in the distance from which I'm likely to notice the phone ringing (1st generation iPhone's ringer is pretty weak). At $11 it'd be more than worth it to me just for that. Also fairly pretty; good if a Lucite stand fits your office decor better than a standard slab-white iPod dock. (I'm actually somewhat serious about that.)

I've missed whatever it is as well, and I thought I was well-informed. What's the struggle and what's Apple done wrong?

That sounds like a pretty nice stepper. But if it's all SMD, then does it really need to be limited to such a modest number of steps? I realize that more steps would make it more costly, of course, but in terms of physical dimensions can one with more steps be fit into the present case?

morphsci, if you're looking at the D90 as kind of a D300 sampler, then maybe you want to consider the D5000 as an alternative. It still has the D90's sensor, its AF and its exposure smarts, costs a few dollars less, is smaller, and adds two really interesting features: an articulating screen, and a quiet mode that's apparently really really effective. In exchange you give up the extra complement of controls that the D90 body has. Haven't tried one myself, but there've been times I really would have liked one or the other of those extra features.

@morphsci another D90 fan here. I don't know the D50, but I do have a D40 (which I guess is newer and which photography blogger Ken Rockwell likes better) and the D90 is a very nice step up from it. The big wins for me compared to D40 are: - Better autofocus. Lots more focus points, some 'intelligent' focus-point selection algorithms, and most importantly, finds focus faster. Hit the shutter and it just nails focus NOW and fires NOW. I value this. - Better exposure. I frequently needed to introduce exposure compensation on the D40 (just a third or two thirds of a stop down, but it varied), but I almost never do on the D90 unless I'm shooting 'artistically' for some effect. - More, more-accessible, controls. Some customizability too. I like being able to switch 'film' on the fly, going from a high-saturation kind of look to something less saturated and a little warm for people pictures, with only a few button presses instead of digging deep into menus. Whether or not that specific thing is important to you, the D90 just has lots more controls, lots more you can do on the fly instead of through the menu system.

Jumping in a little late here. What I've found is that I feel handicapped without an image-stabilizing/vibration-reduction lens covering at least the 18-85mm range (assuming the reduced-frame type of DSLR usually available on this budget rather than a full-35mm-frame DSLR). So if it were me with $1K to spend, I'd be building the system around that requirement. Having a 28-135 IS already in the closet almost complicates things. When we got our Canon DSLR we just moved all our EOS film system lenses over to it, including that exact 28-135 IS lens, and we were pretty much ready to go. We used whatever non-IS kit lens came with the rig for the range below 28mm, and that was okay some of the time. But really it was a hindrance, especially when traveling, and eventually we got the Canon 17-85mm IS lens and really never used the 28-135 after that. The wide end of the range is pretty essential for us, but maybe it isn't for you. I suppose I'm really saying: give some thought to whether you really will be happy with your current EOS lenses plus some kit lens for the wide end, or whether you need to plan your budget around the expectation of getting a more all-in-one type of zoom before long. (We now shoot Nikon instead of Canon, for circumstantial reasons having nothing to do with the intrinsic benefits of either brand. I'm comfortable with the Nikon now but I'd probably lean towards Canon if I were starting over, just because I shot Canon EOS 35mm for so long that the Canon controls are still what feel most right in my hands.) I concur with Knuckledragger's opinion that having a second control wheel is a big plus. Two things re shooting pictures of kids: (points @ avatar pic in case there's a question about whether I'm a parent) First, when shooting children there is no subsitute for a camera that fires right NOW when you hit the shutter release. Every P&S (and intermediate camera like the Canon S IS series) that I've tried has had pretty intolerable levels of shutter delay. And DSLRs aren't all equally fast either. Our D90 was a very nice step up from our D40 because it finds focus and fires a lot faster - a make-or-break difference in some shots. Second, bounce flash makes all the difference when shooting indoor people pix - like of your child. It's just an indispensable improvement. If that's important to you, then do the research to see how much automation the 380EX you already have will give you with the bodies you're contemplating. Looks like it's an old unit, so it might not be fully automated with the newer bodies. FWIW I've found that a smaller less-powerful unit (mine's an SB400, roughly Nikon's equivalent to the Canon 270EX) is painless to leave on the camera full-time, so we are always ready to shoot great indoor kid pictures.

Fun pic! Did she fall asleep?

BBC3 show found at random, "Snog Marry Avoid?" I switched it on mainly to enjoy being appalled by it (I guess...or something like that) and it was appalling, but less so than I expected. The premise is that fashion-disaster volunteers are offered a "makeunder" during which they're relieved of their false eyelashes, hair extensions, instant-tan products, backless metallic push-up tops and the like, scrubbed and coiffed, and clothed in things generally accepted as respectable while being berated (good-naturedly, they play along) by the makeover technician. Random members of the public are surveyed for their responses to the before and after photos (hence the name of the show). The makeunders seem genuinely surprised at how many people find find their attempts at hawtness make them avoid-at-all-costs scary instead, and how many people think they look terrific when they keep it simple and look like normal humans. Some even keep the new look. In other words the show is cheap crass entertainment in service of good taste. It actually kind of works.

A quick glance at this DJ software for Mac made me belatedly realize what a nice virtual control panel the iPad can be. Bet they turn up in lots of DJ booths and recording studios before long.

I'm using a slightly older Mac Mini this way, and it serves our needs well. Mostly we use it for playing stuff out of iTunes -- we have a 1.5TB drive with a mess of iTunes TV shows and movies -- and we usually control it from the free iPhone / iPod Touch Remote app which provides easy browsing of even fairly gigantic libraries. iTunes has settings to make it automatically go full-screen when playing video, so once something starts playing we have a proper home-theater full-screen experience. Likewise if we put in a disc, Front Row comes up and takes over the screen, so that works fine as well. What we haven't done yet is really try to home-theater-ize the rest of the things we might occasionally want to do. When it's not showing video the screen just shows the regular Mac screen, regular iTunes UI. Watching browser-based stuff is handled by launching screen sharing on one of our other Macs, taking control, opening and navigating the browser, and starting and maximizing the video. I think there are solutions out there to integrate all this stuff into one seamless experience and add DVR functionality as well, but we haven't looked closely at them because we're big enough dorks that having computer UIs on our TV doesn't bother us. If I did care about that kind of thing I'd probably spend an hour really trying to get xmbc configured instead of just wincing at it and saying "all this shiny stuff just gets in the way" like I did last time. And even without that there are some iPhone apps we could use instead of screen sharing for remotely operating browsers and such. We just haven't put much effort into it since getting the core play-the-damn-iTunes-library-on-the-TV functionality running. The main area where I'm not satisfied with our solution is Skype. We have a gooseneck webcam on the Mini, mounted to the top of the TV, so the toddler can visit with her grandparents back home at larger-than-laptop sizes, and this works great. But Skype doesn't have an automatically-go-fullscreen-on-answer option, so that has to be done manually. And our regular remote control techniques are a little too cumbersome once people are excitedly waving hello and you're trying to adjust the gooseneck cam to follow the hyperenergetic little one around the room. Pretty sure this would be the same on all platforms, though, so it doesn't really address the Mac Mini vs. Something Else issue. My Mini is Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) and has Intel graphics instead of the niiice nVidia chipset the current ones have, and still it's just fine. My TV's a crappy one that came with the flat, so I'm driving it over VGA. But I'm getting completely smooth and good-looking video at 720p even out of this older rig, so I expect a modern Mini can pretty readily handle anything you can throw at it. In case you're wondering why we don't use an Apple TV to play the iTunes content on the TV, it's because this TV doesn't have any interface types in common with the Apple TV, and we needed a place to put the Mac Mini with the video library anyway.

That's computer engineer BAR FOO.