Wednesday, January 28, 2009Facial Recognition, Not that Good Actually I finally got the new iLife '09 today. Well, I got it at the same time as the other preorderers, but I preordered it a while ago so there was some waiting involved. iPhoto was one of the programs to receive a big update. One of its new features is face recognition, where it attempts to find and categorize faces in my photo collection. It's... well it tries really hard. But the results are sometimes hilarious:
 {My mom = Wonder Woman}  {Ahem, her face is up there.}   {iPhoto just compared my advisor to a mummified trophy head.}  {Josh is a lot of things.} Glasses really confuse iPhoto, and it likes to lump people with and without glasses into separate groups no matter what their face looks like. It also doesn't register the most obvious faces as faces at all for some reason, like the second picture. Well at least the technology is good for a laugh. I may use the handy new Flickr posting feature to make set of misidentified faces. Labels: macs link : 4:47 PM
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Wednesday, November 14, 2007When Good Apps Go Bad I had a half hour in Kansas City International Airport. Like many airports nowadays, they had free wireless internet. I haven't installed Warcraft on the Powerbook yet so I had to settle with surfing the web. I have installed Leopard so I was trying to download TinkerTool, an essential Mac OS X customization utility, so I can change the hideous new 3D drawer dock. I found it easily enough, but when I went to download it, I was shown this webpage:
 Apparently TinkerTool has some features I'm not aware of! Wait.. Tinker... Tool... oh I get it. Eww. Labels: internet, macs, perversion link : 10:34 PM
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Friday, May 18, 2007Soy! Soy! A few months ago I invested some of my savings in the stock market. My portfolio is a whopping 5 shares in several different companies. I'd rather not divulge too much about my financial information on the internets but I'll toss out a tidbit: one of my companies is Apple. Shocking, I know. Who knew I was a fan of Apple? The stock has been doing well recently with new Mac announcements, favorable financial reports, and the upcoming iPhone launch. Anyway it recently started actually turning a profit for me by surpassing the $10 commission fee I had to pay to buy it. Isn't it weird how I have to pay a commission fee to buy and sell stocks unless if I have $25,000 in my account whereby the fee is waived? It takes money to save money I guess.
Why did I buy stocks? I wanted to retire early lol. I thought that now is as good a time as any to get started. I also figured that I could put my knowledge of statistics to good use. It seems to be a simple matter of studying trends and keeping an ear to the (wall)streets for changes. My stocks took a bit of a tumble soon after I bought them, but they all seem to be on the upswing now.  {Apple stock in the past few months. Cha-ching!} Labels: macs, personal, tech:computers link : 1:49 PM
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Friday, January 12, 2007Macworld Expo is Like Christmas for Nerds One of the nerdy highlights for me in January is the Macworld Expo in San Francisco. It's the traditional event for Apple to announce sweeping changes to their tech lineup. This year the buzz has been all about an iPhone, which didn't really interest me at all. The irony is that I've already adopted many of the technologies the iPhone encompasses: I have a Tungsten E2 Palm device, an iPod nano, and a cheap cellphone. None of them needs replacing, so even the ultra-cool interface and widgets (WIDGETS!) of the iPhone can entice me to spend $499 to $500 on it. I mean, that's like buying a luxury item. Like a PS3!
So unlike last year, where the Expo keynote got me so hyped up I bought a new-fangled Intel iMac within a month, this year left me wanting more. Where is the stuff I could actually afford? Where is Mac OS 10.5? Or iWork? Even iLife, even though the only part I use is iPhoto? Or 3rd party things like an Intel-native Adobe Creative Suite or Office (though I admit that listening to their speakers send chills up my spine; Steve Jobs just has so much more stage presence). Or even, you know, Macs? Well, at least in a few years I can have a neat iPod-phone thing. Labels: macs link : 3:21 PM
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