© Brian McCarty

Fascinating work of pas­sion by a Memphis-born toy pho­tog­ra­pher Brian McCarty.

Charles Bronson, before he was the Charles Bronson.

Exquisite col­lec­tion of vin­tage F1 pho­tographs. And some more here.

(Uncredited photo, source: ive­g­ot­my­towel)

In his own words:

What we do know is that we live in a world where a cam­era, far from being the shield for the press that it once was, is now often seen as a tar­get in con­flict sit­u­a­tions. Rather than be safe­guarded, we become the tar­get. That cre­ates a new world of unease and mys­tery for those work­ing in places where just being a pho­tog­ra­pher puts you at risk. It requires an extra sense of self, and smarts, to be able to not only make the pic­tures, but safely get them, and one­self, out.

I have linked to David’s work a num­ber of times here, but I rarely read his words. This one, a 2-part score by John Camp is not to be missed.

I have owned three gen­er­a­tions of MacBook Pro Unibody and all three gen­er­ates a sub­tle but annoy­ing click­ing noise after a long use and increases fre­quency as I click the touch­pad or typ­ing with it on my lap. Luckily I am not the only one with such prob­lem, and if you own a recent 15″ model MacBook Pro there’s a good chance you are expe­ri­enc­ing it too. Here’s a YouTube record­ing of the noise.

Ten One Blog dis­cov­ered the source of the noise (no, it’s not the sud­den motion sen­sor) and found a per­ma­nent fix:

One of the con­nec­tors in this sys­tem touches the bot­tom plate right in the cen­ter where it flexes a lot. When the com­puter heats up, the metal pins in the con­nec­tor scrape nois­ily against the cover and chas­sis. It makes you want to eat your hands.

By remov­ing the con­nec­tor (two easy screws!), you remove one of the ground­ing con­nec­tions between the uni­body enclo­sure and the bot­tom cover.

I chose not to remove the con­nec­tor but to stick an elec­tri­cal tape on the back of the bot­tom case where the con­nec­tor touches, which seems to have fixed the problem.

Jump to the linked post for some pic­tures and more details.

From usabil­ity per­spec­tive, pro­gres­sive is usu­ally good, because the user gets feed­back that some­thing is going on. Also if you’re on a slow con­nec­tion, pro­gres­sive JPEG is prefer­able because you don’t need to wait for the whole image to arrive in order to get an idea if it is what you wanted. If not, you can click away from the page or hit the back but­ton, with­out wait­ing for the (poten­tially large) high qual­ity image.

Bottomline: Progressive JPEG is the ticket to flaw­lessly serve retina-quality pho­tos for the new iPad today.

Today is that day. Have a glo­ri­ous Nyepi, my dear Balinese friends.

Fascinating two-part film on the early days of Shanghai, when they were still encour­aged to have ‘no more than two children.”

Three bil­lion pop­u­la­tion and forty years later, it’s eco­nom­i­cally imprac­ti­cal two have a sec­ond child. (via China Stories)

New UI design & engine, content-aware and includes the new Camera RAW with adap­tive wide angle, field blur & tilt-shift capability.

The down­load size is mas­sive: 984 MB for Mac, and 1.7 GB for Windows. I’m curi­ous as per why the Mac ver­sion is only half the size of the Windows download.