Linked List: September 24, 2010

Friday, 24 September 2010

My thanks to PowerMax for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. PowerMax is an Apple authorized reseller with a long history of great service. The sell new Macs, high-quality used and refurbished Macs, and over 65,000 additional products, including iPods and iPads — all with free shipping on orders over $100. How can you not love a company whose slogan is “We work to keep our customers gruntled”?

YouTube Time Machine ★

“Pick a year, click refresh, and travel through time.”

Some Photos I Took in Downtown Vegas on a Trip Back in July ★

All were taken with my then-brand-new iPhone 4, before the HDR feature was added in iOS 4.1. I didn’t take any other cameras with me on this trip — I thought it would be a good test of the iPhone 4 camera. I did process them using Lightroom, but I didn’t spend any more time on them than usual. For comparison, here’s the unprocessed version of my favorite shot from the set, (a) resized to 1371 × 1024 (465 KB); and (b) completely unaltered, right off the camera (2.2 MB).

I still adore and use my three-year-old Ricoh GR-D point-and-shoot, and the iPhone 4 camera isn’t that good (compared to my Ricoh, say) in low light, but with a phone camera this good, it’s hard to justify getting a new standalone point-and-shoot.

Maybe Just Buy a New Bottle of Shampoo Next Time ★

From The Telegraph’s week in pictures:

A man had to be rescued by firefighters after getting his hand stuck down the toilet while trying to retrieve a bottle of shampoo. Wang Xuekui explains: “I wanted to wash my hair, but accidentally dropped the shampoo bottle into the toilet hole.” He put his hand down the hole in an effort to fish the bottle out. “I touched the bottle but when I was going to pull it out my arm was suddenly sucked in.”

Better Than a Gold Watch ★

Nice five-year employment anniversary gift for Rogue Amoeba’s Mike Ash.

‘How About That?’ ★

The television broadcast of game seven of the 1960 World Series was long considered lost. A copy has been found, apparently in good condition, in Bing Crosby’s wine cellar/media vault:

Crosby loved baseball, but as a part owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates he was too nervous to watch the Series against the Yankees, so he and his wife went to Paris, where they listened by radio.

“He said, ‘I can’t stay in the country,’” his widow, Kathryn Crosby, said. “‘I’ll jinx everybody.’”

He knew he would want to watch the game later — if his Pirates won — so he hired a company to record Game 7 by kinescope, an early relative of the DVR, filming off a television monitor. The five-reel set, found in December in Crosby’s home, is the only known complete copy of the game, in which Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski hit a game-ending home run to beat the Yankees, 10-9. It is considered one of the greatest games ever played.

MLB plans to broadcast the game in December.