Today's fabulous Editor's Note is all about excellent
random goodies that I've encountered recently.
Books As always, I love books. I reviewed
Wicked
Cool Ruby Scripts recently, and I pronounce both the book and
Ruby quite worthy. In the next couple of weeks I'll be reviewing
"Pragmatic Version Control using Git" and "Ubuntu For Non-Geeks".
The short story is both are quite good.
Digikam The more I use this the more I love it.
It almost does it all-- archive management, including an excellent
tagging system that lets me actually find photos again, and editing
tools that save me from having to drop into Gimp very often.
It took some re-adjusting of my mindset, but I love digital
photography more than old-fashioned film photography. I've been
saving up for a Canon 5D Mark II because it's not huge like their
other high-end cameras, and it has a full-frame sensor, which is
the same size as a 35mm negative. But digital photography, just
like digital audio, is different, so thinking in old terms messes
things up. I don't need a full-frame sensor because the resolution
of the higher-end sensors is already beyond what 35mm film could
ever do. So I'm going to stick with the 1.6 sensors, which you get
in the Rebel and x0D series. You get a lot of bang for your buck
with these cameras, and at least in my case they're not going to be
very challenged by the photographer.
Audacity It seems that humans always want to
align in teams and have enemies, and so the Ardour fans diss
Audacity, and Audacity users snark right back. Three advantages
that Ardour holds over Audacity are better multi-channel mixing and
better support for multi-channel recording interfaces, better
support for the JACK audio connection kit/low-latency sound server,
and it has some nice tools for synchronizing soundtracks. Otherwise
Audacity is a super audio recorder and editor that is easy to use
and chock full o useful features. I use it for live recording,
transferring legacy analog media to digital, and may someday even
make a podcast. Why not, all the other geeks are doing it.
Netbooks! I have not purchased one yet, but I
just got a Lenovo to review. I love the idea of netbooks for these
reasons: one, there have always been something like netbooks
available, like the Toshiba Libretto, but they have always been
expensive. Two, it took the OLPC to ignite the netbook industry,
when all those big innovative tech corporations like Intel and
Microsoft tried to mock them out of existence. Hey, don't you dare
use the work "innovation" in the same breath as "corporate" around
me. I'll believe in Sasquatch and Yeti before I believe in
corporate innovation. Three, they look cool and useful.
So what have you been having fun with the tech world? Forget all
the gloom and doom for awhile, and let's talk about our favorite
toys.
