News Alerts

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I have both the WCVB app on my iPad and the Boston.com app on my iPhone. Both are way too chatty when it comes to news alerts.

I’ve allowed these apps to send me notifications, because I do want to get a notification when something major happens. The trouble is, neither one has much sense of proportion about what’s important enough to interrupt the user for. The most recent example was this evening when the Boston.com app sent an alert to let me know that the Duck Dynasty guy was going to stay on television. Really?!? Who the heck gives a crap? Was it worth interrupting me? Emphatically NO. And they’re not quiet little banners, either. The WCVB app plays their jingle, and the Boston.com app vibrates the phone and seems, at first impression, to be an incoming text.

I don’t care if the Celtics won or lost their game. I don’t care if the latest unemployment stats have come out. I don’t care if the Patriots are in the playoffs. I don’t need to know right away if another witness is appearing in the Whitey Bulger trial. I don’t need to be interrupted with additional details about the Target data breach. I will find all these things out in due course when I go to check the news, on my own schedule.

The rule of thumb I would apply is, “Would this be worth interrupting a prime time tv show for?” If so, by all means, send the alert. I do want to be notified about something like the Boston bombing, or the Newtown shooting, or some major figure dying, or some immediately pressing weather threat. So a tornado warning for the next half hour? By all means. A winter weather warning for tomorrow?  I’ll find out about it in good time.

To be fair to the developers, I don’t know whether the iOS notification frameworks allow messages to be sent with differing levels of urgency. It might help if they could send a notification about the winner of the presidential election with top priority, and the winner of a baseball game with lowest priority.  At the current time, I suspect the best that could be done would be to have a user create an account with the organization, and tell them what kind of notifications are desired. But who wants to create another account?

For now, though, I’d settle for a little more discretion in sending notifications.

 

Getting Files out of an iPhone Backup

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As I mentioned in my previous post, I decided to set up my new iPhone 5s as a new phone, rather than restoring it from the backup of my previous iPhone 4s.

Overall, starting over from scratch has worked out well. Once I set up each email account, my old mail came over, and Twitter was easy to set up too. Resetting the high scores in my games has been kind of nice in a way, and I’m happy to have cleaned out the camera roll—whenever I sync my phone, I import the pictures to a dedicated project in Aperture anyway, and I copied back the few pictures I want to have on the phone.

The one exception was my GPS tracks in MotionX-GPS. I keep GPS tracks of my bike rides and ski trips, more for times than anything else, and they were locked in my old 4s backup, through a lack of foresight on my part—you can get them out of the app via iTunes File Sharing; I’d just forgotten to do so. I stewed over this for a day or so, and then decided I really did want my old GPS files. Continue reading →

25 Years

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Twenty five years ago, my brother Brian married his wife Pam. It seems like both a long time ago, and no time at all.

Pam and Brian, October 1, 1988

Pam and Brian, October 1, 1988

He has been very fortunate to have her by his side. Tomorrow, 25 years, 18 days, 3 kids, 2 houses, a cat, and a pair of dogs later, we celebrate their anniversary.

Happy Anniversary Brian and Pam. I wish you many more.

Discoveries in the Details

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The most boring, mind-numbing, tedious part of the slide scanning I’ve been doing has to be dealing with the dirt on the scans. Although I did have one slide this week that only took about 5 minutes of work from start to finish, some of them entail hours of work zoomed in close, retouching the scan spot by spot.

And yet… it also means I’m looking at these pictures more closely than I’ve ever looked at them before. And I’m noticing details in them that I never noticed before:

  • In the self portrait of Dad that I posted last week, I noticed he had a pipe in his hand. He almost never smoked a pipe when I knew him; it was always a cigar.
  • There’s a picture of my mother looking at a kiddie train ride somewhere; we’ve never been able figure out where. She doesn’t remember. But you can see a bus in the background, and after lightening up the picture in Photoshop, it looks like it’s in MTA* livery. So it’s probably in the Boston area.
  • There’s a picture of the two of them sitting on a picnic table, which I’d assumed was taken down the Cape. But when I was zoomed in close, I noticed Dad had the same kind of tag on him that was in another picture of my mother, grandmother and great aunt that was taken at Old Sturbridge Village.
  • One of the pictures I worked on in June was a picture of my brother Brian. It’s a long shot of him on a pony, and I’d never looked very closely at the face before. And while their faces are dissimilar, the expression on his face is exactly the same as one I’ve seen on his son Matt’s face dozens of times.
  • In the picture I finished last night, I’m holding Dad’s folding medium format rangefinder camera while he was obviously shooting the slide in 35mm. I don’t remember seeing the medium format pictures–are they prints filed away in albums, or are they the medium format slides I haven’t seen in decades?

I remember Dad’s cameras very well. At the time the picture was taken, I was 14, and I think I was just holding the camera for him–it’s not in the other pictures of me. But eventually he did let me use them, and I used them off and on through the latter years of  high school and college. Both were rangefinders; you focused the camera by superimposing two images in the viewfinder. Neither camera had a light meter or auto exposure; you used the exposure recommendations packaged with the film, and hoped you set the camera right; the batch of slides I’m working on now are almost all a couple of stops overexposed, which I’ve been trying to correct (to some extent) in Photoshop. I tended to favor the 35mm camera because I had a darkroom and was set up for 35mm.

But my photography took a quantum leap upward when I got my first SLR as a college graduation present, about a year after he died. No more guessing at the exposure, just watch the needle. Composition is easier when you can see exactly what the lens sees. And interchangeable lenses! I almost never use the “normal” focal range anymore, but thats what the rangefinder gave you. As good a photographer as Dad was, he was limited by the tools he was using. I wish he’d lived long enough to use my cameras with me.

* Metropolitan Transit Authority: the 1947 – 1964 predecessor to the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA), also known as the “T”. Boston’s transit agency. ↩

Slide Scanning Work Flow

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I mentioned in my previous post that I’m scanning my father’s old slides. The slides are almost all Kodachromes, spanning the period from the mid 1950s to the 1970s. The eventual goal is to have a set of scans that I can disseminate to family members at a reasonable resolution, without, hopefully, it becoming my life’s work. The slides are in a variety of states: some are well exposed, well processed, and have no color casts, some are underexposed, a set are overexposed, and some have visible color casts. All of them, I’ve found, are filthy, and many are covered with fungus.  What I didn’t realize was that I’d signed up for a restoration project.

Continue reading →

Scanning Slides With the Plustek OpticFilm 8200

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My Dad was a great photographer. With his 35mm Kodak Signet, and Zeiss Ikon folding medium format rangefinder, he shot a ton of slides that he would bring out from time to time for a “movie” show. Somehow, when he died, I became the custodian of his pictures. When I picked up a Carousel projector for my own slides, I organized his slides into a couple of standing carousel shows.

Every now and then, some family member has asked about getting copies or scans of the slides. Every now and then, I’d think about transferring them to digital, look into the matter, and come away with these options, all of them bad:

  • Have them scanned locally by a camera store, at about a $1 a slide. I did this for a couple of my own slides for a funeral; the quality was atrocious. The scans were blurry, the contrast was muddy, and the color was shitty. There is no way I was going to let them do more.
  • Send them out to a digitizing service. Aside from the inherent risk of sending them out at all, I’ve read that the lower priced services actually send the slides overseas, where labor costs are lower. No way. There are services that do the work domestically, but they’re higher priced—on the order of $3-6 apiece. I may still explore this option for his medium format slides.
  • Get a scanner, and scan them myself. This would entail the cost of the scanner, plus my own time scanning and post processing the slides. For the longest time, the only scanner I could find that looked like it had quality I could live with was the Nikon CoolScan series. The only problem was that they were $2000 – $5000 — and no longer available. Every now and then I would desultorily look at eBay to see if they had one I could afford at the moment, and come away empty handed.
  • Get a cheap scanner. My mother actually got one for me for Christmas, but it turned out to be Windows only. I tend to doubt I would have been happy with the quality.

Finally, about a year ago, I started reading about the Plustek OpticFilm series of scanners. I saw some sample images, and they looked good. I checked the reviews, and they were mostly good, with the caveat that there was a learning curve involved, so last March, I bit the bullet, and bought one. Continue reading →