P072110PS-0548, originally uploaded by The White House.

Love the digital clocks and how "President" is the second of the times represented.

Wow, can you imagine having these fall into your lap? My wife is a garage sale fiend; I wonder if she'll ever turn up a treasure trove like this.

(via @kabster728 on Twitter.)

Great-looking app. So great that they could easily have charged a couple of bucks and would probably be sitting on a decent pile of cash. A side-effect of being good and free as well as having a server-side component is that the latter is completely slammed, and it's seemingly impossible to add Flickr and Facebook links to it at the moment.

I love the look for browsing pictures.

Tree Bark, originally uploaded by Stmpjmpr.

dailyshoot.com/assignments/246: "Ads promote removing wrinkles, but they often add character. Make a photo of something wrinkled, crinkled, or folded."

Holy cow! Apple sold a record number of Macs in Q3, but I think an interesting point here is that they almost sold as many iPads. So much for the iPad being a niche product.

Very cool. I haven't seen anything like this from Garmin, which should be embarrassing for them. If HTC puts freaking Android phones on their riders and broadcast stats, Garmin certainly can. While its true that their consumer devices don't have radios to broadcast their live status, I'm sure that Garmin are getting live stats from their Tour riders. In any case, they could do some fun things with their Garmin Connect site regarding the Tour. This is about as close as I've seen from them, which is fine, but HTC's live transmission of data from its entire team kicks ass.

The Boston Globe's "The Big Picture" has some wonderful images of this year's Tour de France.

Ouch.

Seeing the UI in action across several tasks, not just in a highly controlled presentation, shows how awkward and unsophisticated it is -- I had the same feeling you get when you got a movie based on a great trailer, only to discover that all the good stuff was in the trailer and the rest of the movie was a mess.

Love it! I've been saying I want Safari to sync its open tabs to the iPad and iPhone. Hopefully Apple implements this pronto.

Jeffrey Friedl, author of many excellent Lightroom plugins, has posted an interesting article on Lightroom's JPEG export quality settings. They're not what you'd imagine, of course, or it wouldn't be so interesting. One of the highlights is the quality comparison widget he uses to illustrate his findings--Lightroom should offer a similar preview to assist in the selection of a value.

Pike U-Turn Air 454, originally uploaded by Stmpjmpr.

I'm not the kind of person who thinks that photographs should always represent "reality" as it was when the exposure was made. But there are cases when it's important that the photograph represent a scene fairly to the viewer. That might mean that it doesn't look exactly as it was, but the viewer gets the mood and tenor of the scene in a way that helps them understand the situation. Here's a case where that should have been the goal, but The Economist's photo editor asked for changes that seriously undermined the reality of the scene. Too bad, too, because it hurts photojournalism when something like this happens at an otherwise excellent source of news.

Great essay. I completely agree that Apple's attention to detail and ruthless exclusion of that which it doesn't feel is up to its standards are reasons that their products resonate so well with consumers. Android is good, and as the article points out, getting better. It just hasn't gotten that detail right to the point where I'm ready to switch. Also good is the point that phone makers aren't particularly good at software and that hurts their phones, even with Android.

Erik on Manzanita-001, originally uploaded by Stmpjmpr.

Great ride!

At dinner with Erik and Elizabeth at Hola Restaurant in Belmont.