Knuckledragger

Oh, SNAP. Ordered. I'm supposed to be saving for a new MacPro.

Somewhere in Louisiana.

Can't possibly be an accident. Gandalffi.

Labor Day Bundle MAC ONLY | Braid, Tiny Bang Story, Jet Set Go, Lume, Jewel Quest Mysteries: Seventh Gate | $10 | Ends Sept. 6

Wow. Sometimes the information age leads to the coolest things ever. Don Verbrilli, the guy behind The Verbrilli Sound, recently joined facebook. I send him a friend request and included a note telling him how much I enjoyed his music, specifically Dizney. He wrote me back: How cool is that? I don't have any Steve Miller Band at home, but fortunately for me there's a shit ton on Grooveshark. Initially I thought the beats came from Swingtown, which starts with just drums and has been heavily sampled over the years. After doing some A/B listening, I'm not so sure.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7UdfBAVIz8o

Yeeow. There's a pretty major bug when one previews a PM. It converts any BBcode to HTML and mucks up the entire message. I replicated the bug three times in a row with a message I just sent to Dusty.

My ears hurt just from looking at that. It's bad enough to make actual brick walls blush. Yes, please. There are so many bad remasters out there that finding and identifying the few good ones is worthy effort. I've got a number of remasters/originals to compare, time allowing: Rolling Stones - Tattoo You (original CD and 2009 UMG remaster) Stevie Wonder - Talking Book (original CD and 2000 remaster) Between Interval - Radio Silence (2004 original and 2007 remaster) That last one is an obscure but absolutely wonderful ambient album. The original release was on CDR, distributed in very small quantities mostly in Sweden. The remaster actually got released in the US (a bleeding miracle.) I haven't had time to critically listen to any of the above yet, but I am hopeful that the Radio Silence remaster might be a (shock) improvement.

Just got off the phone with a telemarketer phone monkey from my ISP. He was trying to sell me on a variety of digital cable packages, of which I had no interest. I did ask him about potential bandwidth upgrades. Right now I'm paying $60/mo for "12Mb down, 1Mb up" though I often get far below that. The marketing droid listed the following options: 18Mbit down, 2Mbit up for $70/mo. 25Mbit down, 3Mbit up for $85/mo. 60Mbit down, 5Mbit up for $120/mo. That last option is pretty sexy, but I am positive the wiring to my house would never deliver anything close to that throughput. After I got off the phone, I did a speed test:

It's not that simple. From wackypedia: "The sRGB color space standard used with most cameras, PCs, and printers does not use a simple power-law nonlinearity as above, but a decoding gamma value near 2.2 over much of its range." Both the sRGB and Adobe gamuts are huge. Very few, if any monitors are capable of displaying them in their entirety. Even the aforementioned Eizos "only" reproduce 98% of Adobe RGB, and that is a pretty impressive achievement. It is perfectly possible to make an image look good under gamma 1.8 or 2.2, but in general most images will look better when viewed on a properly calibrated monitor tuned to 1.8. OSX does now default to gamma 2.2, but it is possible switch the it back to 1.8 and that's just what most photographers do. As I said before, gamma 1.8 is essential when doing image preparation for printing, especially if doing one's own color separation from RGB to CMYK.

Gamma 2.2 is fine if one is working on broadcast television media ...maybe. For anything photography-related, especially pre-press (which is what Salty is effectively doing) then being able to properly see low level detail is not just handy, it is essential. There's a reason Eizo's ColorEdge monitors are capable of displaying gamma 1 point fricken 0.

Um.

Yes. In short, get a Spyder, and don't get one of the cheaper ones. The Spyder3Express only does gamma 2.2, not 1.8. That makes it effectively useless. IIRC, the Spyder3Pro and the Spyder3Elite use the same (better) hardware, while the Express uses something inferior. When I investigated the price difference between the Pro and the Elite, it was far less than the upgrade price from the Datacolor website (which is the only way to get it. Beards and Hats has the Pro for $130 and the Elite for $180. As of this writing they aren't taking orders because...