Elliott C. Back: In Aere Aedificare

These photos of are my slightly worn Seiko Men’s Arctura Kinetic Watch #SKA201 taken on a Canon S3 camera. It has a nice macro mode.

I love the idea that I won’t have to replace this watch’s batteries for many, many years.

This is cool–this guy can draw a freehand perfect circle:

A useful parlour trick!

James Kim, missing with his family in Oregon, has been found dead. In a heroic effort to find help for his family, he set out on foot and died from weather and the elements after an unsuccessful rescue attempt.

The route the Kim family took was allegedly from Google Maps. It took them down Bear Camp Road (BLM-34-8-36), a logging road that Wired describes as “not suitable for most vehicles and is CLOSED for all traffic during the winter. The road is not maintained, has no dividing line for oncoming traffic, is littered with potholes, and is impenetrable during the winter due to snow.”

Mathew Ingram suggests we don’t blame Google, but I think that’s exactly what we should do. The Google Maps terms of service say that Google Maps is intended for planning trips:

Map information provided through Google is intended for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic conditions or other events may cause road conditions to differ from the map results.

What it fails to mention is that road conditions may differ to the point of putting yourself in mortal danger. If Google Maps gave me a route from NYC to Toronto that involved driving off the Niagara Falls, would I or Google be to blame for my death? A more subtle example–If Google Maps gave me a route from NYC to Toronto that involved driving across dangerous terrain, an off road shortcut, would Google be in any way responsible for injury I sustained by taking that less optimal route? Legally, I think so.

Flickr user Edward Lee has a fabulous collection of macro photographs of his action figure collection. Here’s a sample:

For simple photo editing tasks, Paint NET is a free Microsoft .NET powered open-source alternative. Installing Paint NET is as easy as downloading a small executable from their site, the Microsoft NET 2.0 runtime, and running them.

If you wonder how useful this is, let’s walk you through several common tasks.

1) Resizing a screenshot for your blog post:

In this case, ironically it will a meta-screenshot operation, because we’ll be taking a screenshot to illustrate taking a screenshot… you get the picture. It’s as easy as using the rectangle tool, and image, resize:

2) Cutting someone out of a complex picture:

Everyone’s always needing to mask out a person for one reason or another–how well does Paint compare in this regard? It turns out pretty well–the masking tools seem to work better than in Adobe Photoshop:

There are a few downsides to Paint dot NET:

• It doesn’t have all the fancy features that Photoshop has
• It has a limited set of FX plugins (but they’re free)
• It uses more CPU than Photoshop, and feels slightly less responsive
• It’s idea of multiple documents is to have them selectable in a single window
• It’s brush tools are relatively useless because they don’t have varying opacity and flow

Not everything’s bad, though–the source code is open, so you can go fix it up yourself and submit patches to make it better. In another year or two, it will probably be a lot more useful.