One of my friends turned me on to Swype, an alternative virtual keyboard for mobile devices. Although it is not officially out yet for Android, is has been leaked, and works wonderfully on Motorola’s Droid (get it here).
I just installed it, and Swype makes the virtual keyboard on the Droid actually usable! It is a MUST INSTALL on the Droid, and I would never go back to the other keyboard. I might even prefer Swype to the physical keyboard on the Droid, which is atrocious.
If you are trying to install Swype using Mac OS X, you will probably run into the same problem I had, which is that the downloaded zip archive extracts to folder instead of an apk file. I got around this by copying the zip archive to my Droid’s SD card and using AndroZip to unzip it (and install it). Piece of cake.
I’m having new DSL installed today (30/2 ADSL2) and was pleased to find awesome cabling in my wiring closet. Special thanks to John Wiley of Sensory Dynamics down in San Jose. I highly recommend John for home theater and digital media solutions for homes. (read more »)
Bowling Ball Beach is located approximately 30 miles south of Mendocino on the northern California coastline. The beach is characterized by dozens of round “bowling ball” like rocks that are visible and accessible at low tide. Bowling Ball Beach isn’t on any maps, but you can get to it by driving on Highway 1 to mile marker 11.5, just 3 miles south of Point Arena. (read more »)
For a long time, I used Hootsuite to automatically post to Twitter whenever a new Wetpixel front-page article was posted. At some point, Hootsuite’s broke when posting Wetpixel tweets; when readers clicked on the post URL, ow.ly would display an error page instead of going to the actual post (“Invalid GET Data”). Here are twoexamples. The first time this happened, I tracked the problem down to the way Hootsuite works with Google’s Feedburner (which Wetpixel uses). Someone posted a fix on a forum involving customizing the way Feedburner inserts Google Analytics tags. I can’t find the forum thread right now, but it was a simple fix and seemed to work… until it stopped working. At the moment, some combination of Wetpixel and Feedburner and Hootsuite breaks the shortened URLs that Hootsuite produces (via ow.ly). As a sidenote, I hate that ow.ly links load into an iframe. There is code to prevent that, but I’d rather add code just to deal with ow.ly.
I’ve just suspended Hootsuite’s RSS to Twitter service and have signed up for Twitterfeed (@twfeed), which seems to be reviewed favorably. If Twitterfeed doesn’t work, I’ll give this Expression Engine plugin a try.
Thanks, Giles, for helping with the service and plugin research!
My MacBook Pro is about 4x faster than my Mac Pro is at running Photoshop actions to produce progressive flashlight fish frames. *confused* #
@RogierDiver I have SSD on my Mac Pro, and source and dest on MBP was spinning drive. It was because Mac Pro was doing a backup… in reply to RogierDiver#
This was driving me crazy because I’m 100% a keyboard shortcuts person. After switching Spaces using the keyboard in Mac OS X Snow Leopard (I have my shortcuts set to Control-Left Arrow and Control-Right Arrow), my keyboard might stop working. I knew it was a software issue because I use Teleport to control another machine from my main machine; during keyboard outages, if I moved the mouse over to the other machine, the keyboard would work over there.
I did some Googling and discovered that it is the Dock process that is causing the problem. Go to Applications->Utilities->Activity Monitor (you’ll have to use the mouse, unfortunately) and quit the “Dock” process. The Dock will relaunch itself and your keyboard will be working again.
Magenta slender anthias (Luzonichthys waitei), bigeye jacks and other kinds of fish above a Gorgonian sea fan. Carl’s Ultimate, Eastern Fields, Papua New Guinea
Many seasoned scuba divers have heard about the Eastern Fields of Papua New Guinea, but only a handful will be able to tell you how to get there and what sort of diving you might expect to find there. Most, however, will probably tell you that they’ve heard great things about it. The Eastern Fields are shrouded in a mystique that is hard to describe; it even affected me — prior to booking back-to-back charters aboard the M/V Golden Dawn, I didn’t even know where exactly where the Eastern Fields were in relation to Port Moresby. (read more »)
Millions of magenta slender anthias (Luzonichthys waitei) stream across the reef in strong current. Underwater photographer Tony Wu, on rebreather, is in the middle of it all. Best birthday dive ever. Carl’s Ultimate, Eastern Fields, Papua New Guinea. echeng091216_0247042
A skeleton shrimp (Caprella sp.) on a Gorgonian. There were tens of thousands — or more — of these guys on this particular gorgonian. Eastern Fields, Papua New Guinea. echeng091213_0246220
Apologies for the lack of updates; I’ve been shooting mostly video on the second leg of this trip, and video is quite impossible to share from satellite!
A large frogfish in the Eastern Fields, Papua New Guinea. echeng091210_0245471
Craig, the captain of the M/V Golden Dawn, went crazy when he saw this frogfish on one of our dives yesterday. Apparently, large frogfish are rare in the Eastern Fields. We’ve also been enjoying the company of quite a few lacey scorpionfish (Rhinopias aphanes). For some reason we have been finding them on nearly every dive site.
Carl’s Ultimate dive site isn’t much to look at from above the surface of the water. There is no land here, which means that it can be difficult to hide from rough weather.
Carl’s Ultimate dive site, Eastern Fields, Papua New Guinea. echeng091204_0244373
The veiny silhouette of a huge Gorgonian sp. coral sea fan. Eastern Fields atoll, Papua New Guinea. echeng092202_0243694
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Sent from mobile device. Apologies for brevity and/or typos.
We’ve been parked for two days at site in the Eastern Fields Atoll of Papua New Guinea called “Carl’s Ultimate,” and I am not sure I’ll be able to dive again anywhere else. Most of Carl’s Ultimate is shallow, but a point extends out and drops off into the deep; along the slope and wall is one of the richest coral reefs I’ve ever seen. A dense collection of sea fans, soft corals, and other reef animals line the entire reef slope from 35 meters to 5 meters in depth, providing underwater photographers with an unlimited number of wide-angle and macro subjects. Anthias and small fish cluster above the coral just below a tangle of parrotfish, wrasses, lionfish, trumpetfish, snappers and angelfish, while jacks, barracuda, and dogtooth tuna hunt from the blue. Jacks hunt the reef with all sorts of partners: barracuda, snappers, Napoleon wrasses, trumpetfish, and others. Three large potato cods hang out in a cave at 30 meters and are so friendly that they allow divers to pet them. The big groupers are incredibly picturesque as they meander amongst colorful soft corals and schools of bannerfish and jacks.
There are small and rare animals as well: pygmy seahorses, Rhinopias, intricately-patterned wrasses, Phyllodesmium nudibranches — and we’re not even really looking for macro subjects (yet).
The reef is fantastic all the time, but when the current picks up, diving Carl’s Ultimate becomes an altogether different experience. The reef almost literally explodes with life. Millions of magenta slender anthias (Luzonichthys waitei) appear from nowhere and swim up-current over staghorn coral in dense lines by the tens of thousands. They are the lifeblood of the reef, thick piscine rivulets ever streaming and branching and merging. When the current becomes too strong, the purple nuggets shoot up into the water column and drift back, flashing this way and that way as they feed on plankton and other nutrients. Every once in awhile, a predatory squadron of jacks shoots into a rivulet, creating an streaking explosion of purple fish.
I have never seen anything like it. I’ve been trying to capture the moment using video, but it will surely prove to be an impossible task.
A commensal goby in a forest of soft corals (Nepthea sp.). Ashmore Atoll, Australia. echeng091128-0242497
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Sent from mobile device. Apologies for brevity and/or typos.
Purrrty cabling…
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