May 19

Sauk Mountain gallery and FujiFilm SL300 review

I’ve been looking for a camera with a good quality zoom lens for some time. Something appropriate for nature and scenic photography; most especially mountains but also including wildlife and foliage. That way I could use it when hiking in the mountains around my Darrington place. I already have some pocket cameras with 10x and 15x zoom but they showed their limitations quickly over the last year.

My upcoming trip to Peru (Machu Pichu baby!) put a fire under me, so I started getting serious about the looking. I spent some time researching the current state of the art and checking prices.

The thing is, I don’t really want to get an expensive digital SLR. The cost isn’t the only issue; I also need something easy to use and not SLR bulky. I nearly settled on a Four-Thirds form-factor of some kind (a Four-Thirds is a mid-range digital camera with replaceable lenses that is not a SLR) and buying several good quality lenses for it. I even found a great deal on an Olympus E-PL3 package that included two pretty good lenses. Then life intervened with some unexpected cash outflows and I realized finding the right camera is something that probably isn’t going to happen in time for the Peru trip.

Yesterday I stopped at Costco with malice afore-thought: thinking I should check out their in-store prices and hoping they had something on their shelves that solved my problem. What they had was a FujiFilm FinePix SL300 for $199 after an $80 instant rebate! I checked the reviews and the online prices quickly and found it was both an excellent deal and reviewed well.

Now, the SL300 isn’t an SLR or even a Four-Thirds; it is a all-in-one system camera with 14 megapixels and a built-in lens that can go from macro to 30x zoom. It also has something really important to me: a viewfinder you can use instead of the 3″ screen on the back. (Ever try to take a picture with a pocket camera in bright daylight?) In size it is about the same as a typical Four-Thirds camera with a smaller lens installed.

So I bought the SL300 and tried it out today up on Sauk mountain, trusting Costco’s excellent product return policy to make things good if the camera is a dog. My favorites from the resulting pictures are in the gallery.

I’ll leave the technical stuff to the photo-wonks. Do a web search if you are looking for a review that does a deep dive on the specifications and what not. Instead I’m going to focus on how the SL300 was to use and what I thought of the results.

I took all the gallery pictures using the automatic modes of the camera and did a full range of distance to close-up shots. (I’ll admit to going a bit overboard on the mountain pictures with the lens at partial or full zoom.)

As you can see from the results the SL300 is a keeper. It definitely takes nice pictures and it has the lightness, ease of use, and flexibility I am looking for. I’m looking forward to seeing what kind of results I can get using manual modes and tweaking a bit.

The viewfinder worked very well and I was able to take more than a hundred pictures and several videos, using the zoom extensively, without running out of power or filling up more than an 800mb of the included 8-GB SD card. Start-up time is excellent; the SL300 is ready to take a picture in less than two seconds after you press the on-switch.

I especially liked the built-in panorama mode. Just twist the dial to ‘P’ and then you take three pictures in a row. After the first picture, each frame is taken automatically when you line the camera up properly (there is a little plus you center in a circle on the screen to do that) and then it generates an excellent pano-pic by stitching up the three frames right in the camera. Cool!

Downsides? The video mode supposedly supports 1080p, but the results were a bit disappointing: motion-blur when moving the camera and the zoom was way too fast and finicky for video work. However, the built-in microphone gave much better than expected results.

Also, small as it is, the SL300 is still bigger than what I would like to carry around, but that’s what pocket cameras are for. In the meantime, I found myself something that does what I want at a price I can afford right now. So, who’s complaining?

Not me.

(Take a look at the gallery for all my favorites from today’s hike!)

Apr 22

Prometheus would be proud

From the Wikipedia article for ‘techné’:

 The term is often translated as craftsmanship, craft, or art. It is the rational method involved in producing an object or accomplishing a goal or objective.

Yet another meta-mind convenience-concept of the Greeks (good for ‘thinking about thinking’), techné both describes a magnificently human behavior pattern and links it to similar patterns in a few other species. For the purposes of this essay I am going to talk about techné as ‘tool use’. However, to do so I need to first define ‘tool use’–in terms of techné.

As stated, humans are far from the only creatures to use tools to accomplish an end. Many mammals and birds, even sea creatures, use tools to get (or get to) food. Colony insects, like ants and bees, could be considered tool using; not just because they create things, but because they apply complex behavior patterns to modifying their environment. Once could say these behaviors themselves are a tool.

Yet, for using tools, techné is the application of ‘rational method’ when doing it. No one has proven insects are exhibiting more than an Emergent System, with simple rules interacting in large masses to generate deep complexity. They don’t think about what they are doing because what they are doing grows out of hardwired behaviors. You could say that Evolution did the thinking for them, except Evolution does not think.

On the other hand, crows actually think about the best way to stick a twig into an old stump and dig out a grub. They peek in the hole with one eye, clearly running through a batch of scenarios based on past experience, and then jab the twig in just so. They are applying techné. Many primates have even been known to use tools to make tools, the acme of techné.

But we humans take all this to the next level and then some. We are the only surviving species of the one known genus to ever use fire. We are also the one species using tools to make tools to make tools to make . . . [cut for length] . . . tools, until we finally have the tools to modify the environment of the entire Earth.

Even if you discount Global Warming (as some do) as non-anthropic, who could deny the impact of human technology on our planet? The evidence is all around you.

Next time you travel to a national park or other wilderness area, begin at the center of the biggest city nearby. Then, as you travel, watch the environment around you change. Starting from the concrete wasp nest of the city your view gradually softens, as the hard angles of made elements are replaced by the organic outlines of natural elements. A slow morph from streets and buildings into forest or empty desert.

True, even in the heart of the greatest city can be found some nature. but these ‘more natural’ areas like parks and farms themselves are a form of techné. Think about this: much of the Earth consists of places where some to most of the natural elements (plants and animals) are there because humans put them there and maintain them in that spot. We turned living things into tools through selective breeding.

Humans have modified the natural environment just about everywhere we have touched. Cities are the least of it. Oil wells are only a symptom. Even low-tech civilizations create harnessed ecologies, like crops and domesticated animals, and plant them into natural ecologies like a horde of demented Johnny Appleseeds.

This extends beyond the farms into otherwise unmaintained grazing land; our animals modify it by simply being there. The resulting changes are sometimes unintentionally negative–we, or rather our animal tools, can turn a working ecology into a broken one; transforming praire or veldt into desert.

Much of the remaining natural land has felt our techné as well, as we lumber and mine and pave our way across the landscape. Replanting tame trees and grasses as we go.

Even the wilderness is not free of human influence. Go to the remotest of places and you come upon some evidence of human passage or works. Try it sometime, try to find a place where you can be fairly certain no human has stood before. If you manage this feat, I suggest cleaning up after yourself and telling no one about it. That way the next poor sod to stand there can think he was the first. The way you did.

What little ‘unspoiled’ wilderness we have left is mostly there on human sufferance anyway. The Earth is our bitch.

There is this science-fictional idea called ‘Terraforming“: changing the conditions of a planet to support a tame ecology planted by humans in order to make humans comfortable there. Throughout the existence of our species, Homo Sapiens has been making the Earth into a place good for humans to live. We’ve been ‘Humanifying’ the Earth.

We’ve been very successful at this endeavor, to the point some argue we’ve been rather too successful for our own good. Others point out that living the way we do is a positive thing because it is good for us as groups and for us as individuals. (Which it generally is, at least compared to the short and difficult life of a hunter-gatherer.) Most of us don’t think about it too much, because we have enough to deal with just living our lives and operating our little piece of the specie’s techné.

Prometheus would be proud! We took his fire and changed almost an entire fucking planet, like an ant colony changing a forest. We used tools made with tools to turn the Earth itself into a tool. Unfortunately, there is growing evidence we broke it in the process.

This was bound to happen. Basically it is what humans do. What we evolved to do. And there might lie the seed of hope.

Like termites we build. Like ants we sometimes modify our surroundings too much and make a forest or a field useless. Unlike them we think about what we do. We think about the unintended side-effects of what we do. We think about reducing or removing the harm of what we do. We apply techné to the problems we create with techné. We might argue over what is the best thing to do and when is the best time to do it, but that’s another thing humans do.

We got into this with techné and only techné will get us out. Despite the ideals of a very small minority, most of us would prefer we live at least as well as we already do and hope our children live even better. This means we aren’t going to stop having children or even scale back our lifestyles until conditions we cannot control make us. (Which might happen, if the doomsayers have the right of it.) To the good, low-birth rates and higher-tech environments are correlated in humans.

So, unless you are a flat-earther who believes oil is a self-sustaining resource and all this environmental claptrap is a con job, it is time to face facts. We’ve got two choices: We can look forward to a future where the last human technical civilizations wage all-out war to control remaining energy supplies and arable land. Or we can invent our way out of the hole we dug. Probably making horrible mistakes along the way, as humans do. What we aren’t going to do is conserve well enough to reach some kind of steady-state. That is a snake-oil solution requiring us to change human nature.

Think about this while you are driving to work tomorrow.

Mar 09

Security and the Cloud (and why you should be worried)

As old as it makes me sound to say this: there are computer users out there who don’t remember a time before malware. If you are one of those who started using computers after 1990 let me assure you–there really was a time when, with few exceptions, every byte of software on your computer was there because you put it there. Those days are long gone and even Open Source zealots can no longer vouch for all the code running on their systems.

In 2012, this applies to less sinister things than rootkits and it doesn’t even matter if your computer is actually infected or not. In fact, if you are reading this on a computer connected to the Internet (aka, the Cloud), then I can just about guarantee there is software code running, which you didn’t specifically install and of which you have no idea what it is doing.

Oh, and the servers you are connected to that downloaded all that code to your computer? The ones that did it without asking you first? Not only do you have no way to find out what code is running those websites, it might not even be the code the owners of that website intended–if they have been hacked or infected with malware. (The 2010/2011 CSI Computer Crime and Security Survey found that almost half of all enterprise companies responding had been subject to a targeted attack.)

Worse, thanks to the wonder of something called cross-site scripting the owners of the server might even have intentionally invited code from yet another server to the party. From a server the owners of the website you are on do not control. (This is how Google ads and Facebook ‘Like’ buttons work.)

This ‘rogue’ code is Flash animating an ad on a web page or Javascript updating your Twitter feed in the background. Nothing to get excited about. Except maybe you should be perturbed. Sure, that code probably cannot infect your computer with a virus and most likely cannot access the contents of web pages other than the one that loaded it. The problem is that any code running on a web page has the ability to change that web page. In fact rogue code doesn’t have to change the page in a way you can see in order to steal a password or change some number you entered to a different number.

This isn’t a new problem, those in the know have been discussing the dangers of cross-site scripting for a while now. But, as the Internet becomes ever more cross-connected, with cloud services depending on cloud services and all of that running on servers which may or may not be compromised, the opportunities for bad actors have increased proportionally while the ability to plug leaks has gone down.

Let’s roll this up into one paragraph: the Internet is a cloud of computers connected together to do stuff. Some of these computers are like yours. Some of these computers are servers and, like all computers, these might be running malware or otherwise get hacked into. You put sensitive information on these servers and trust that the people running them will protect your data at all times. You also allow these servers to run code on your computer without asking you first and trust that the owners of those servers would never allow this to include code harmful to you or them. And, because of the interconnected nature of the cloud, it is like the risk of STDs: you aren’t just in bed with one server, you are lying with every server they are connected to.

Go that? Comfortable with it? Me neither.

There is little we can do about other people’s servers. One option is to avoid logging into or using services representing really big attack vectors; high value targets to the bad guys because they give access to lots of victims like you and me. (You are a black-hat hacker. Do you target an website with a thousand users or website with a ten million users, even though the latter might be a harder nut to crack?)

The problem is, this means logging out of Google and Facebook and all the other popular services that make the cloud interesting. I’m guessing you will probably find the risk-reward ratio such you will continue to use them anyway. This is similar to the choice Microsoft Windows users make: you want to run the most popular Operating System on the planet, so you accept the risk associated with that popularity. And, besides, if you are still using Facebook after all the (quite warranted) fuss about privacy issues, you are probably going to convince yourself they are doing enough about security as well.

Another option is to use ad blockers and other browser plugins that block some or all cross-site scripts. If you aren’t already doing this, start now. This can reduce your vulnerability to the server you loaded a webpage from and third-party servers you find trustworthy. (It also reduces the number of ‘punch the monkey’ ads, but that’s a side-effect from a security viewpoint.)

So, which ad blocker do you use? A quick search for “ad blocker plugin {your browser name here}” will probably return tens to hundreds of options and, here is the fun part, these represent foreign code you install on your computer. They might (and some of them do) contain malware. (This is the reason I’m going to chicken out and not suggest any particular plugins to you. Do the research yourself, but do it. Pick a plugin, install it on your browser, and start blocking.)

Other than closing the cross-site scripting hole at the browser level, something that would never happen so long as powerful interests depend on it, the only other option we have is structural: we come up with some kind of ‘secure website stamp of approval’ for websites which follow certain security guidelines, provide for frequent independent security audits, and never use third-party services which do not also have the stamp of approval.

I’m not certain how to create and manage such a system so that it won’t become captive to the needs of those powerful interests I mentioned above. (Including their need to limit competition.) Maybe someone will create the cloud equivalent of the Underwriters Laboratories, who knows.

But this I do know: the cloud is an ecosystem of code and it is becoming more interconnected every day. Some of that code is predatory. You look like lunch.

Feb 21

Writing with soul

Educators have long known there are different ways of learning and that different people engage with the material they learn in different ways. I’m lucky in that, for things like computer programming, I am capable of learning from a combination of books and practice. I learned guitar by using books for the basics and theory and picked up the rest from practice and listening to records. Things like history I also learned from books, except I built my understanding of history by linking together facts discovered from different sources rather than accepting any one source as authoritative. In these ways I am both a Converger and an Accommodator in the Kolb model; I learn by getting raw information and then doing something concrete with it.

The problem is, this approach doesn’t seem to be working as I attempt to learn the craft of the fiction writer. Technical writing was easy for me to pick up; I already had the grammatical skills and the structural stuff was simply a matter of application and practice. But fiction is different; like music it lies somewhere past that fuzzy line delineating art from craft. This means that, like music, I could work at it for years and never get to the point where the notes had ‘soul‘.

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Feb 10

It’s always nice to meet a young person who knows the classics

It’s been a long and very sucky day, with few bright spots to lift it out of the suckitude. Among other things I drove over a hundred and fifty miles to take care of various bits of business (some of it in places that moved completely across town, a fact I only discovered by going to the wrong address). Much of this travel on the surface streets of Seattle and Tacoma. I’m exhausted.

But there are those few bright spots I mentioned and one of them lifted my spirits enormously: I stopped for a coffee at a funky little espresso place in Lynnwood. The cute young barista behind the counter asked me how my day was going and I broke social convention by telling the truth:

“Well, not epically bad. But bad. At least there were no explosions and I’m not being investigated by the Senate.”

She laughed and said “Well, you could start whistling that Monty Python song.”

Then we both started singing, on the beat, “Always look on the bright side of life . . .

Dec 10

Double-Dip Lunar Eclipse

It was cold. Bitter, biting cold. My weather station said 22 degrees fahrenheit, but there was a slight wind and it seemed much colder.

I had prepared myself well: warm clothes, gloves, coffee in a thermos mug, a cigar. I had a camera and a pair of binoculars. A chair. It was five in the morning and the Earth’s shadow had already started to creep across the moon; down from the top. When I first went outside the moonlight was nearly bright enough to read by, picking out every blade of frost-covered grass and blotting out many of the stars.

The moon was to the west, just above North mountain; which looms over the valley in that direction. Over the next half hour I watched the shadow dip lower and lower and the moonlight darken while the stars seemed to brighten and more stars appeared. There was no ‘reddish’ color to the shadowed portion of the moon, it was grayed out instead; some features still visible through the binoculars. Finally it reached totality for what seemed like less than the space of a minute.

Then the shadow started moving back up, reversing the direction it had come. I’ve never seen anything like that before! All the lunar eclipses I’ve seen in the past were nearer to midnight with the moon moving through the umbra and the darkness eating into one side until totality and then the sunlight reappearing on that same side and sweeping across in the same direction the shadow had moved. This time it came down like a curtain and then it went back up!

It didn’t go all the way back up, though. When the umbra had bisected the moon, half in shadow and half in light, it started going back down again. This time the shadowed portion of the moon was a dull, brick red and I could clearly see some features on the shadowed side with unaided vision.

It seemed to take longer this time, or maybe I was just getting colder. I had to shift my position several times to keep view of the moon through the trees. Finally the eclipse reached totality again, just as the moon started to drop below North mountain; which meant that I could see the trees on top of the mountain in relief against the reddish eclipsed moon through my binoculars. I stayed until the moon dropped completely below the mountain.

Due to my location down in this mountain valley I couldn’t see the end of the eclipse. Nor could I see the rare event called a selenelion, where the rising sun and the eclipsed moon are in view simultaneously. Plus none of the pictures I took turned out worth keeping. And yet it was a spectacular experience, entirely worth getting up early and freezing parts of my anatomy best not mentioned in order to see.

Nov 26

Why Occupy Wall Street matters

Watch the TV news or read the newspaper coverage and you come away wondering just what it is those crazy protestors camping out downtown want. Sure, they want something done about bankers and financiers getting rich off of the misery of ‘the 99%’. Certainly they want social justice. Clearly there is a fairly standard leftist streak running through a disorganized movement that looks and smells (literally) like the anti-war movement of 1969. There is general agreement as to who and what they are.

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Oct 11

The Computer User Interface of the Future is here!

Step right up folks! Learn all about Doctor Jack’s UI of the Future! Yesiree ladies and gentlemen, the answer to all your computer user interface needs in one familiar package. All ready to use on your next project. Fully tested and cross-platform! Multiple implementations, with both Open Source and proprietary solutions depending on your project’s needs! And, folks, here’s the best part: there are hundreds of thousands of software developers who already know how to write for it and your users will require little or no training because they already understand its underlying metaphors and behavior!

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Oct 10

Endings and Beginnings

I originally set up this weblog a full year ago, even writing a ‘first post’ breathlessly explaining how this was going to be an active site. Then I let it lay fallow ever since, failing to live up to my own expectations and falling further behind in catching up every one of the three hundred and sixty days elapsed since.

There are several reasons for this; not escuses, but reasons. I’m not going into the gory personal details (you are welcome), but the biggest problem was one of my own expectations: I didn’t have any! Here I had this an eponymous blog-and not a single clue what to do with it. My first idea was to make it something purely professional, except at the time I was writing and editing a professional blog as part of my job. (A blog my business partners pulled down after I quit the company, so I can’t even link to it now; but that’s something for a different post.) I figured I could create a blog about writing and programming on some kind of meta level, but that didn’t excite me enough to get me going.

I certainly didn’t want to make it a personal blog or a journal. I have a LiveJournal for that and I suck at writing about myself there. In fact I tended to use it more the way I really wanted to use this blog. Only, being human, what happened after I decided to post the stuff I used to post on the LiveJournal here and leave the personal stuff for the LiveJournal was that I posted nothing here and less often (although more personal) there.

Yeah, kinda sounds human doesn’t it? I am a Homo I. Sapiens and the middle initial stands for ‘Inconsistant’.

So, what changed? Why am I writing this? Steve Jobs died, that’s what pulled the trigger for me. Here I was trying, and failing, to make a beginning and Steve-O came to an ending and gave me something to write about.

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Oct 16

First Post!

Hello!

I am Jack William Bell and this is my eponymous website and my new blog: ‘Dispatches from the Edge’.

I’m glad you’re here and I hope you will find this an interesting virtual place on the web. One worth coming back to. Worth exploring every nook and cranny.

Of course, as I type this, there aren’t may nooks or crannies. That will change over time, I guarantee. I intend to talk about a lot of things that interest me. Like culture, food, travel, and writing. Like making and programming. Like what it means to be human. Like how to do stuff that far too many people have no clue how to do. I’ve got a great deal to say on those subjects and I will try to find the time to say as much as I can. (Life tends to get in the way of things like writing for a personal blog, as I’m sure you already know.)

Things I won’t talk about much here? Family, friends, private stuff. Not that I’m a particularly private person. It’s more of a long-time habit of mine when writing for the web. I figure the less you say that can possibly bite you on the ass, the less you get bit on the ass. Not that writing about programming or futurism will be entirely safe from ass-biting either, but the chance of someone I care about also getting bit go way down.

Anyway…

So, welcome. Thanks for coming. Take off your shoes and get comfortable. Eventually I’ll get around to putting up a tin cup somewhere and, if you feel I’ve sufficiently helped or entertained you, please toss in a quarter or something.

Sincerely,
Jack William Bell

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