Saw this small segment on the Baha’i Faith earlier tonight on NBC…

Faith in America: Diversity and division

graball.com is useful for those of you who are not satisfied with sticking to one search engine, or simply want to compare search results across the big players.

It also has toolbar you can install.

This documentary was shown on South African TV recently it seems…

I learned about HDRI technique a while back, but did not really bother to experiment with it as I didn’t have a DSLR camera (you can do it with a point and shoot camera too, but I figured I would just wait and get a DSLR). Anyways, I thought I would give it a try now that I have a DSLR and looked around and found two different tutorials (the authors disagree with each others ways strongly).

I know some of the friends HDR work on Flickr and you can get very nice results.

- Ryan McGinnis’s Tutorial
- Peter Carr’s Tutorial

Will post results of my experiments once I get around to it.

I’m sure anyone who has to share photos to a wider circle on a semi-regular basis realizes that emailing them is not the best option. So in my circle, I know most people use one of the three ways of sharing, namely: 1) Flickr, 2)Picasaweb or 3)Kodakgallery. I have gone back and forth a lot and been very torn between these three for several reasons, here is why:

Kodakgallery (used to be oFoto.com) - While allowing unlimited space and traffic free of charge and very easy to drag and drop pictures and create albums, it is fairly limited and doesn’t allow much for tagging and frankly doesn’t have a cool sideshow feature. And you can only see the pics in one size only. In terms of uploading, you can either drag the pics you want from your file system in original size (takes long time) or resize them to being smaller and then drag and drop (also not the fastest or most efficient way in today’s web world).

Picasaweb - Wonderful site which is really an extension of the Picasa photo organizer application (free from Google). So its very easy to select a bunch of pics from within Picasa desktop, and then create an album and have it uploaded to your picasaweb site (in original or reduced sizes). You can choose to share your albums with the public or exclusively with a small circle of family/friends (which is also supported by the two other services). So no complaints here except that you only have 1 gig of free space and if you want more space, you have to pay a yearly fee depending on how much extra space you want (e.g. 6 gig = $20/year). One feature that I really do like is the fact that; say someone has sent you a picasaweb album link and I want to download all these pictures and includes them among all my other neatly organized pictures within Picasa desktop tool. No problem, just hit download and it will get downloaded and organized with the rest of your photos.

Flickr - Probably the most popular choice by a lot of people. Comes in two flavors: free accounts (i.e. you have unlimited space, but limited amount of traffic upload/month) or pro (i.e. $24-25ish/year without any limits on space or traffic and mind you a lot of my friends have this). Again wonderful site with a lot of good features. Also provides a few different way to upload pictures, yet none of them I found to be as easy, powerful and straight forward as Picasa’s solution.

So what do I do? Well, why choose one over the other when I can have all three? Here is what I did. I have a free account on all three services (but have pretty much stopped using Kodak since I find working with the other two more smooth), which means limited monthly traffic on Flickr and limited space on Picasaweb. And since I wanted to be able to export to both flickr and picasaweb equally easy, I found this solution for getting pictures uploaded to Flickr from within Picasa desktop tool (one tip, make sure you have Java installed on your machine before installing the rest).

So now, for more artistic pictures that I want online for a long while ahead, I upload them to Flickr and the everyday life pictures from different events that family and friends want to see I upload to Picasaweb. This way, my flickr account continues to have a manageable monthly traffic (i.e stay within my limits), while I can enjoy the no space limit on it. And on my picasaweb account, over time I can delete very old albums on it to make space for new ones if need be.

Then go to skydrive.live.com. Seems like the beta is finally open to public.

See link

Update: I stand corrected as Anne-Marie tells us how to make international calls with paying local rates (or free if you don’t pay for local calls)…read the first comment on this post. Thanks Anne-Marie!

Previously, I wrote a post about all the different ways I use to talk (voice) with friends and family. Pretty much all of them involved having access to a computer in one way or another. Here is one that doesn’t need you using a PC at all. In essence it is comparable to using calling cards but much more straight forward.

On Rebtel.com you sign up, then give the number you want to call, the site then gives you a (permanent) *local* number and whenever you call that number, it calls the international number. Benefit : Don’t have to keep track and punch in calling card codes (or program them), most local calls are free these days. Drawback: you still have to pay a international rate (which is very cheap) by charging your account, so no free lunch.

Took my new Nikon D80 for a spin during sea fair this weekend…here are some of the results…

Seafair – August 2007

After much deliberation and research, I have come to decide that Nikon D80 will be the better camera for my needs. Yes, I pay almost $300 more for it in comparison to D40X, but the list of small extra features that D80 has adds up to this verdict. Now, here is another good tip that I came along in my independent investigation for truth: there are a bunch of good lens kits out there, most typical being 18-135mm. In order to avoid having too many lenses to haul around everywhere I take the camera, I will probably get a prime lens (probably 50mm) for portraits and casual everyday stuff and either a 18-135mm or a 18-200mm lens to cover the whole range. Oh yea, and add to that a polarizer filter.

Reasons for not getting the other two cameras:
Pentax K10D – Needs to much configuration for simple casual every day shooting. Sometimes I want my DSLR to just take casual pics without too much fiddling.
Nikon D200 – The price was just not right.

My main source for research: imaging-resource

PS. I just noticed the number of visitors to this blog increased by a factor of 5 (who would have thought)…and top search terms that led to this blog:

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Came across an interesting post from Scott Hanselman on how you can migrate an entire family to Google apps.

You can now get a link to map when you call the free 411 service from Google. See the link

Useful for future reference…

Walking to my car after work today, a surreal rainbow was right above me, so I pulled out my new phone and took a picture and although it’s not anywhere close to how amazing it was in real life, it still gives a hint…

Title says it all. I found a couple of useful extensions here…