Tag Archives: micro

More Annoying Camera Blogging (With Cats)

Mother Jones

Someday I will get bored of regaling you with pictures from my new camera, but that day is not yet. It turns out that burst mode is both a blessing and a curse.

First the curse. With my old camera, I never culled any of the photos I took. I just copied everything onto my desktop PC and left them there. Storage is cheap, and no matter how many pictures I took, I was never going to run out of room.

Then, a few days ago, I ran out of room. Not on the desktop machine, but on my tablet, which is synced to the desktop. For some reason, Microsoft uses MicroSD for expansion memory on the Surface Pro 4, and at the time I got it that meant a maximum size of 128GB. But the new camera takes pictures that are about twice the size of the old Canon, and burst mode means I can crank through a couple of thousand shots in a few days. So the Surface croaked.

In the short term, the answer was a bigger memory chip, which is thankfully available now. In the longer term, it means—what? Going through all the files every time I transfer them and weeding out 90 percent of them? That sounds tedious. Stop syncing some of the folders? I’m tired of that. It’s handy to have everything available everywhere at all times. I’ll have to ponder this.

But burst mode is a blessing too. I’ve tried a few times in the past to get a picture of Hilbert scurrying down a tree after climbing onto the roof, but I could never do it. My old camera had terrible shutter lag, slow autofocus, and no burst mode. Unless I timed it perfectly—and I never did—I couldn’t get the shot.

But burst mode plus fast autofocus makes it easy! Check it out:

Now we can all pretend to be Vogue editors, choosing just the right shot for this month’s cover. I chose No. 3, which shows Hilbert at his graceful best:

So there you have it: better action photography, but lots and lots of gigabytes. Is there a solution that’s neither mind-numbingly tedious nor exorbitantly expensive?

Follow this link: 

More Annoying Camera Blogging (With Cats)

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on More Annoying Camera Blogging (With Cats)

Today’s Intriguing News About New Contraception Options

Mother Jones

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/REC-html40/loose.dtd”>

Megan Thielking tells me something I didn’t know today:

With some financial help from the Gates Foundation, Massachusetts drug manufacturer MicroCHIPS Biotech is developing an implantable contraceptive for women. Contraceptive implants currently on the market are thin plastic devices that are put under the skin on the upper arm, where they release hormones for up to three years. If a woman decides she wants to have a baby, the implant needs to be removed.

But the MicroCHIPS implant will last up to 16 years, and women will be able to turn it off via remote control if they’re trying to get pregnant. Trials in humans are expected to start next year, but the same microchip technology has been tested successfully in women with osteoporosis. MicroCHIPS Biotech says the implant could reasonably be on the market by 2018.

There are also some new options for male contraception that look promising. Interesting stuff.

Read this article:  

Today’s Intriguing News About New Contraception Options

Posted in FF, GE, LG, ONA, Uncategorized, Venta | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Today’s Intriguing News About New Contraception Options

Could the sharing economy kill public transit?

Could the sharing economy kill public transit?

Ken Schmier is a Bay Area transit guru. He’s essentially responsible for the limitless Muni Fast Pass in San Francisco, and created the NextBus application in the 2000s to help people catch those ever-elusive city buses. But now Schmier is thinking transit may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

“Frankly,” the Bay Area attorney and businessman told Next City, “I think transit agencies are obsolete.”

Blame that damn sharing economy.

Schmier is now all about what he calls “Micro-Transit” — in other words, ride-sharing, or turning regular cars into taxis.

The Bay Area already has Casual Car Pool, a long-standing ride-share project that relies on a vintage website and message board instead of the smartphones and big money of new ride-sharing ventures. It’s kind of an organized form of hitchhiking, and it really works.

Schmier wants to make this general idea more efficient, scalable, and tech-savvy. From Next City:

His vision, detailed in a white paper shared with Next City, is to put radio-frequency identification chips into the hands of passengers — in key fobs, transit cards or even driver’s licenses. Willing drivers, in turn, would be equipped with readers. When a potential passenger comes within scanning distance of a participating car, the driver’s picture would appear on an external display, and the rider’s on an internal one, confirming that both have gone through a background check.

Making the moment ripe for Micro-Transit, concludes Schmier, is that the technology is newly affordable: About $2 for the chip and $200 for the reader.

As for passengers getting where they need to go, drivers might opt for a signal showing the direction the car is heading. Longer trips could require hops between cars.

The program is good for cities, says Schmier. Tapping private cars’ “excess capacity,” i.e. empty seats, cuts down on underused public transportation, creates feeder lines to high-traffic trains and buses, and saves gas.

As for providing incentive enough to make drivers willing to let a stranger in their car, Schmier envisions a small fee — 50 cents or a dollar — that would be deposited in their Micro-Transit account for each rider picked up. Or, drivers might opt for high-occupancy vehicle credit.

Schmier’s plan might make sense for less dense regions full of cars, like the Bay. And in a lot of ways, it’s more in the spirit of the sharing economy than many of the new ride-share start-ups driven by a profit motive. But if our goal is more dense, livable, transitable cities, cars ain’t gonna cut it, no matter how many of us we try to cram into each one.

Susie Cagle writes and draws news for Grist. She also writes and draws tweets for

Twitter

.

Read more:

Cities

Also in Grist

Please enable JavaScript to see recommended stories

This article – 

Could the sharing economy kill public transit?

Posted in GE, Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Could the sharing economy kill public transit?