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Photography Tips: Get the Most out of Just About Any Flash
by Amazon Current at 10:50 AM PDT, June 15, 2007
Many of us have learned to hate camera flashes from an early age. We were lined up as kids by elementary school photographers or overzealous parents and ZAP! Purple spots in the eyes. Then we start taking our own pictures, and we notice that our friends and family have been transformed into demons--glowing red eyes and paper-white skin against a pitch-black background. The darker the situation, the more you need a flash, and the worse the problem gets. How can we make our pocket cameras' flash-filled pictures better? Here are some tips (and things to look for in a new camera) that've worked for me:
1. A hot shoe (external flash connector): This is almost cheating--you're bypassing the problematic on-camera flash entirely, using an external flash that tends to be larger, more powerful, and loaded with useful features like the ability to bounce light off the ceiling (simulating the effect of a cloudy sky). You could even buy a wireless transmitter like a PocketWizard and easily use multi-thousand-dollar professional lighting systems… which, of course, obliterates the advantages of a pocket camera (size and cost). Cameras with hot shoes tend to be on the more expensive end, such as the Canon G7 or Nikon P5000--and then you have to pay for the flash. 2. Manual control of shutter and/or aperture: Shutter control is particularly important in changing the relationship of the light created by your flash to the existing light. A flash goes off at impossibly fast speeds, usually 1/10,000th of a second or more. So whether your shutter is firing at 1 second or 1/500th of a second, it's not going to affect how much light is reflected back from your flash one bit. But it will affect how much existing light comes into your camera. If the background is too dark, try a longer shutter speed. If you want it darker, try a shorter one. 3. Scene modes (particularly night-portrait mode): If you don't want to bother with manual controls or your camera doesn't have them, this is the next best thing for a different indoor flash look. Normally, when you turn on a flash, your camera automatically brings the shutter speed to a moderately fast value like 1/60th. In night portrait mode, it says "OK, I'm going to expose the scene basically like I would if the flash were off, and then add flash." Warning: this can lead to some very long shutter times, so the parts lit by existing light may be blurry. Remember that the parts lit by flash, though, are exposed at 1/10,000th of a second or faster, so they'll be sharp. Paradoxically, this means night portrait mode works best when your subject is bathed in darkness but there is light behind them. Here's an example where flash is only lighting the very center of the picture, freezing the action in just that spot:  Don't have manual controls on your point-and-shoot camera? You can still get some extra mileage out of just about any flash with these quick tips: 1. Try using flash in the daytime: Flash isn't just about quantity of light, it's about quality. Is it midday and the person's eye-sockets have dark shadows? Is someone standing with a bright sky behind them and shadows on their face? Look for a little lightning bolt that turns on fill-flash. This photo was taken at midday, and without flash their faces would have been filled with stark shadows:  2. Flash as quick shutter control: Some of the lower-end cameras don't give you any control over the speed of your shutter at all, which can be a problem in situations where these cameras have trouble giving proper exposures, like a school play where the subjects are lit and the background is dark. If your photos are overexposed and blurry, try turning your flash on and covering it with your finger--your shutter speed will drop to around 1/60th, which might work out better for you. 3. Make your flash (appear to be) bigger: Want to make the flash less harsh? Use something that will act like the clouds on an overcast day. Holding a piece of tissue paper in front of the flash (but not, of course, the lens) will give you softer shadows. Translucent plastic can also work wonders. Just keep in mind that this reduces the power of the flash, which wasn't very powerful to begin with. --Ryan Brenizer Kitchen Tools, Really
by The Hammer Times at 5:01 AM PDT, June 13, 2007
 Chefs are finding that power tools can provide efficient and often cost-effective solutions in the kitchen. The Wagner Wide Shot Power Painter seems to be particularly popular among chefs--who prize it for the high-quality precision with which it hurls chocolate, egg washes, glazes, melted butter, and more.
The Power Painter is especially useful when a large volume of food is being prepared. Caterers and enterprising cafeteria workers have been using it to spritz trays of mass-produced meals for years. Kevin Sousa at the Bigelow Grille in Pittsburgh uses it in conjunction with a bowl full of liquid nitrogen to make ice cream pellets as part of his "Alchemy" menu. The Phoenician Resort in Scottsdale even fired up a Tool Time Desserts class at a local hardware store. It is important to note that any and all tools used in the kitchen should be reserved for that purpose. In other words, don’t wander out to the tool shed and then go experimenting in the kitchen. --Cherie Know Konono No. 1?
by Chordstrike at 12:46 PM PDT, April 30, 2007
 Konono No. 1 expands on traditional Congolese Bazombo trance music by using homemade microphones, amplifiers, and megaphones salvaged DIY-style from car parts. Featuring three likembe (thumb piano) masters playing the typical bass, rhythm, and lead guitar lines you'd likely hear in rock, Konono No.1's music is distorted and complex, and packed with irresistible chimey melodies and hypnotic call-and-response lines. The result sounds at different intervals like experimental electronica and at some points even like prog rock.  Last Friday I got a chance to see their live show here in Seattle and was riveted by both their sound and musicality. Lately, Konono No.1 have collaborated with Björk and are featured on her latest album, Volta (the track, "Earth Intruders" features KN1 and Timbaland). They'll support her on several dates on her tour and as of this post, have just wrapped up an appearance at Coachella.
Konono No. 1's "Lufuala Ndonga"
PCs Going Green
by Amazon Current at 9:35 AM PDT, April 19, 2007
 The Minneapolis Star-Tribune reported this week on a joint initiative between the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency to tackle one of the biggest causes of e-waste: corporate computers.
The 16 companies include most of the heavy hitters--Apple, Sony, Dell, HP, and Gateway. The article also notes that just from purchases made by the federal government, EPEAT-registered computers could reduce enough energy to power 72,630 households for a year (saving $71.4 million in energy costs) and reduce toxic materials by 75.1 metric tons. PC and electronics makers are going greener bit by bit, with Dell a good example here in the U.S.--its Dell Earth program is voluntarily moving toward compliance with the European RoHS (Return of Hazardous Substances) standard, which EcoGeek notes has "virtually eliminated the use of lead on their motherboards, power supplies and chassis." Dell is also jumping on the carbon offset bandwagon to help assuage your guilt with planted trees. You can also go to the Dell Earth Web site to calculate energy consumed by several iterations of Dell PCs (along with connected peripherals). But if you really want to go green with your new PC, ExtremeTech suggests going the DIY route. It offers recommendations on individual components--from a power supply that complies with 80 PLUS efficiency requirements to an energy-sipping Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 processor. But if you're not so adventurous (I can barely manage construction of an Ikea bookshelf, so this project is not in my scope), the article also notes some greener peripherals you can add to your current system as well as settings for optimizing Windows Vista. ~Agen G.N. Schmitz, Amazon Current
Be Hip to Unique Recycling Ideas
by Amazon al Dente at 4:28 PM PDT, April 17, 2007
 With Earth Day right around the corner, new ideas for saving our planet are popping up at every turn. Check out Lifehacker for some interesting tips on reducing, reusing, and recycling, including:
Check these tips out now and get your homework done before Earth Day! ~KitchenMaus, Amazon al Dente
Let There Be Light: Our list of some of the brightest starts in the world of light
by The Hammer Times at 1:16 AM PDT, March 27, 2007
This continues the post I started earlier today that referenced what I believe to be the world's most powerful consumer light, the  Black and Decker 20 Million Power Series 3335 Lumens Spotlight, but there have been some truly nifty lights popping up lately. So, without further adieu, here's our list of the best. Best Camping/Book Accessory: Zipka LED Headlamp  Petzl Tikka Plus Four-LED Headlamp. Since this is Amazon.com, shy not start with something book-related. I got the original Zipka 3-LED lamp a couple of years ago for use on camping trips. Since then, it’s become my late-night reading light of choice. Clip-on lights are not terribly useful for small paperbacks or magazines. The Zipka puts a book sized circle of light exactly where I’m looking, It’s very lightweight and comfortable, and both bulbs and batteries last seemingly forever. If I turn over on my side, my wife—generally out a couple of hours ahead of me—doesn’t even notice it (except for the time I accidentally turned it on strobe).Best Emergency/Travel Light: Hand-Cranked 3-LED light  Considering the fact that batteries are expensive, take up a lot of space, and ultimately end up as toxic landfill, the hand-cranked light is really a beautiful invention. At around 10 bucks each, the Garrity Power Lite 3 LED Crank Light is a super value. We’ve got about a dozen of these things scattered around various parts of our home. We keep them in bedside tables and kitchen drawers in case of a power outage. We’ve got a couple in our backpacks for camping and night-hiking, and we’ve got four more in our disaster kit. It takes about 30 seconds of cranking to get about 10 minutes of light, which is usually more than I need. Note: If you don’t have a disaster kit, please go get one. You can find everything you need in our Emergency Preparedness store. I’ll have more about Emergency Preparedness resources in an upcoming post.Best Light That Should Have Been Invented A Long Time Ago The  Stanley MaxLife Tripod Flashlight has been out for a couple of years now, but it still reigns as one of our best-selling items. This seems like a clear example of adding that one more thing to an existing product that makes people sit up an notice it. The benefits of LED flashlights are pretty clear. They are cool (a in not hot), bright and their low power draw makes batteries last a lot longer. It’s not like LED flashlights haven’t been around for years, though. On the other hand, worklights are notoriously hot, so giving an LED flash the ability to stand on its own increased its usefulness exponentially. Photographers, party planners and campers across the world rejoice. Quien Es Mas Macho? If you absolutely have to have the baddest, beastiest, most insanely macho flashlight around, this is it. The  SureFire M6 Millenium Guardian Tactical Combatlight w/crenellated bezel 250/500 lumens is pretty much indestructable, puts out 30 times the light of a 2 D-Cell Mag light, and is built to mount to your favorite automatic rifle, with, "a shock-isolated bezel/lamp assembly that can withstand the repeated recoil of a  large caliber weapon." Of course if you don't need a gun-ready light and don't want to drop the close to 4 bills this baby will run you, you can get plenty of mean and performance with Surefire's Surefire E2D Executive Defender Law Enforcement Style Personal Safety Flashlight Xenon 60 Lumens at $120, or their  SureFire G2 Nitrolon Xenon Tactical Flashlight 65 Lumens. Actually, at around $40, the G2 may be the best bang for your  light buck anywhere. It's still built like a tank and is exceptionally bright. All of these lights, by the way, are much smaller than you would expect, fitting easily into a shirt pocketThe one downside to the Surefire's is that the suck up battery life, which leads me to my last category Best high-performance LED If you want a bright, small, durable flashlight that will run for hours, it is hard to do better than the
 INOVA X03-WB X03 Police/Military 3+ Watt White LED. In addition to the body being incredibly sturdy, the LEDs, unlike bulbs, don't break when you drop this.Let There Be Light: A Sports Introduction
by The Hammer Times at 3:50 PM PDT, March 26, 2007
Today was the day, back in 1931, that John McGraw, manager of the mighty New York Giants teams of the 1920s, declared in one of sports most famous gaffes, that, “night baseball will never take off.” Of course, considering the effectiveness of lighting technologies available at the time, McGraw was not entirely unjustified in his opinion. In fact, the poor quality of the lights themselves plays a part in an interesting bit of baseball lore. The first team to attempt night games was the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro League. The system was12 truckloads worth of extra baggage, but the novelty made it enough of a draw to be worthwhile. During a game against the Homestead Grays, the Grays' regular  catcher, Buck Ewing lost the ball in the dim lights and broke his finger. A local sandlot player named Josh Gibson was pulled out of the stands to replace him. Gibson went on to become a hall of famer and potentially the best home-run hitter ever. Nicknamed the "Black Babe Ruth," with 962 home runs and a .373 career batting average, Gibson was agruably better than Ruth. If you want to learn more, you can find great books on Gibson (for adults and a great  one for kids called Coming Home: A Story Of Josh Gibson, Baseball's Greatest Home Run Hitter), as well as on McGraw and the history of night baseball itself at Amazon.com. Since then, of course, lighting has come a long way, and in the Tool Shop blog today, I'll be writing about some of the coolest lighting options I've seen this year. Starting with one I've got to include here. Even if you don't need one of these, you need to know about it. The
Black and Decker 20 Million Power Series 3335 Lumens Spotlight #VEC192 is so insanely bright, that had the Monarchs been able to mount a dozen of these around the park rather than their 12 trucks worth of incandescents, Gibson might never have gotten his chance. This thing is visible from a distance of 8 miles. It's one of a suite of products that Black and Decker picked up when they acquired a small Florida company called Vector last year (another one was the Simple Start Battery Booster, a box that fits in your glove compartment, jumps your car, and was an enormous hit this past holiday season). B&D will be bringing out a handfull of interesting products from the Vector acquisition later this year, and we'll be reporting on them in the Tool Shop blog, along with the rest of our rundown of cool lights.MAKE Weekend Project--Space... on a Budget!
by Amazon Industrial & Scientific Editors at 9:02 AM PST, March 8, 2007
 Have you ever wanted to go up into space? Well, you don't have to win a golden ticket, or be a millionaire or an astronaut... you can send your own payload into space.In this MAKE Weekend Project, you'll learn all the details of how to put a weather balloon up into space. Our weather balloon will make it up to about 100,000 feet--that's almost 20 miles up, and more than twice as high as you'll ever get in an airplane. It's high enough that the sky is black, and you can see the curvature of the earth. Why would we want to send a package into space? To take pictures and temperature readings, of course! We'll be using the Make: Controller to boss around four Canon SD cameras, set up to take a spectacular panoramic pic  ture every seven seconds for two hours! It will also have thermistors on it to measure the temperature as it goes up.We'll be tracking it with two different systems. The primary system is a GPS module connected to a Tinytrak, which makes the GPS data into APRS ham radio packets and then sends them out on 144.39 MHz. Those packets will get picked up by our receivers and repeaters, and then routed to the Internet, where anyone can watch on Google Maps and Google Earth in real time. It took 16 people working on this, countless cases of Mountain Dew, lots of take-out food, and a lot of sleepless nights. This project took a bit longer than a week. It's worth noting that the only way we could make this work was to use a wiki. Each team member posted anyt  hing they learned, or links and info they found, on the wiki. All this research and work is now compiled on the wiki and it is now the resource for people who want to do amateur ballooning. The entire contents of the wiki at this time are embedded into this PDF for you to download, but the wiki is a constantly evolving document. Make sure you check it out!As always, for more cool projects, check out Make: Magazine. ~Bre Pettis, MAKE Magazine Amazon Industrial & Scientific The Themed Home Theater
by Amazon Current at 3:33 PM PST, February 23, 2007
 Ten years ago people were going nuts for big-screen TVs and 5.1 surround sound audio, but where can you go from there to outdo the Joneses next door? Well, plenty. You could turn a room in your house into a themed home theater based on your favorite movie or TV show. Take a look at these in-home movie palaces:
~Porter B. Hall, Amazon Current Reports from the International Builders' Show--It's Not the Size of Your Block of Concrete That Counts, It's How Little You Shake It
by The Hammer Times at 5:15 PM PST, February 22, 2007
 The "who's got the biggest block of concrete" award goes to Hitachi. While Milwaukee, Makta, and DeWALT all had respectable chunks of masonry stationed prominently at their booths, Hitachi's was a veritable wading pool of aggregate. Hitachi is also the only manufacturer that let us try the big rotary hammers. In fact, they insisted, because they wanted us to try their new anti-vibe technology. Anti-vibe seems to be the thing at this year's show, which is a good thing, because the vibration produced by consistent use of jackhammers and rotary hammers can lead to serious long-term health problems. Europe will be rolling out standards for maximum vibration levels this year, and although the U.S. is lagging behind in addressing this safety issue, some manufacturers are addressing it with their American tools now, either because they are anticipating similar action in the U.S., or because they just want to protect the health of their customers. You can make that guess. Particularly striking are the "counterweight" technologies deployed by Makita and Hitachi, which take advantage of Newton's third law of motion, "every action has an equal and opposite reaction." They are each installing internal moving mechanisms that absorb movement in opposition to it and thus absorb the shock of the hammer action. Makita was first to the table on this, rolling out a piston-based anti-vibe mechanism, but Hitachi has taken it to a new level with a "floating ball" that dampens vibration in every direction. I'll have a full rundown on this technology soon, and Hitachi has promised me a diagram of how it works, but I can tell you that after testing hammers with and without the technology, the difference is palpable--much less fatigue.
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