Saw this at filmmaker IQ. Sounds like Magic, but it adapts Canon EOS lenses to APS-C, and because it uses all the light and the whole frame it is actually added a stop of light and making it sharper. Almost magic!
Too bad they don’t have it for EOS to EOS for ES lens to APS-C instead of for SONY NEX.
You can pre-order from Metabones.
Wow, am so impressed with this diet. One week now. Lost another pound and a half yesterday, bringing me to an impressive 9 pounds lost in 7 days! WOW!
And with such impressive results I don’t want to stop. It would be great to get under 200 pounds in the next 6 months, and that no longer seems hard! In fact I could get back to 175 by years end if the weight loss effect does not significantly slow down. I mean even at 5 pounds a week that would be 15 weeks! Wow! One can only hope.
Will keep updating, but so far I am so impresse by this diet, and think it is the perfect thing to start losing weight after a septal myectomy, especially because it is so easy! I wish I had gone right into when I started really eating again in my recovery so I never gained the weight back I initially lost!
VideoCopilot announced the free update to Element 3D, v1.5 which includes a real-time glow feature and will be out next week! Woohoo!
And they say 3D shadows won’t be till version 2, but this still sounds awesome.
Just having started playing with this plug in recently I have been blown away by it’s power! This makes Invigorator Pro 3D seem useless, with it’s antiquated interface and slow as can be rendering.
So I had mentioned in my last surgery update that I was starting the 8 Hour Diet, and I wanted to give a little update on it. I don’t want to get into the controversy over the book, as it seems that the diet might have been stolen from a Martin Berkhan at leangains. Even if the initial diet was, there is a whole lot of research in this book, and so far I am very impressed, especially with my results.
Post surgery I had lost some weight, but I have managed to put it on, and more, and gained another 12 pounds over the holidays! Youch! So I had actually gotten up to 258, by far the heaviest I have ever been! I had been around 235 for while, which was way too much (would like to get back to at least 200, and 175 would be better, though my face did look a bit gaunt last time I was around there, though I still had a belly).
Anyway, I have been doing this diet for 6 days now, and have already gotten down to 250.5. And while I was mostly eating well , I lost 1.3 pounds on Sunday and had a footlong Subway sandwich for lunch and a small dairy queen ice cream cone, and gumbo with rice for dinner! Now I did walk a lot around the mall, but still! So far I am blown away.
And I used to not eat breakfast, but it has been since my wife convinced me I should eat breakfast that I started to, and since she comes home from work so late also eating late that I have really packed on the pounds! I just hope that as the book says your body does not get used to this diet and stop, it just keeps going, because I can see myself staying on my diet for the rest of my life!
I mean you should still eat well, but you can eat some bad things too and still lose weight, and if even half of the benefits it claims are true, lowering cholesterol, helping diabetes heart disease and even cancer! I am so in, and will continue with this diet.
And I am going 7 days a week, while it says you can get a benefit from only 3, but I would rather get my body back used to the no breakfast at all thing (I was mostly just having smoothies with protein powder, but I still do think if I ate breakfast I was hungrier all day).
Now I going to eat a little more at work, as I was bringing a salad and a half, but am now bringing 2 salads, 1 for noon and 1 for around 4, as I get pretty damn hungry, and 3 apples. Been chewing a little sugar free gum too as I get really hungry from about 11 AM till 12pm when I have my lunch, but so far the results are stunning.
THIS IS THE BEST DIET I HAVE EVER SEEN!!!
So I am having problems with Amazon Cloud Player. I had wanted iTunes Match, but am way over the 25,000 song limit (the Big Finish Doctor who stories I listen to add so many tracks), but also wanted streaming.
Now there are a couple of problems with it for me, the first and foremost being it’s inability to do anything but try and match songs ripped in Apple’s Lossless format, as that is most of my library that I have ripped from CD (and the reason I have an 120GB iPod Classic so I can carry a lot of music, though not even close to all) and it doesn’t seem to match all that well. The addition of Auto Rip has been a big help with this as I have gotten most of my music since 1998 from Amazon, so I hope they keep ripping and keep filling in albums.
Also the music uploader crashes ALLOT! Now maybe that has to do with my library size, but if it is going to crash that much it needs to be smarter, as it has now duplicated all of my playlists 9 times, and I have a hell of a lot of playlists! And I can barely manage my playlists via the web interface. I can maybe delete one playlist before either it stalls out (allot in Chrome, though I have tried it in Safari and Mozilla as well both on my Mac at home running 10.8.1 and on my work computer running 10.6.8) or gives an error message about not being able to do that now.
At least I could do most of the deleting with the keyboard if I could get it to work in the web interface, but it stalls out or gives me this message all the time. I can delete the tracks via the iOS interface, but it slow and a pain using the slide. I need a batch edit or delete feature, or a duplicate finder. Heck I would even like a way to reset the playlists and re-upload them from iTunes.
I tried e-mailing Amazon about that, and they said to contact them, so I did an online text chat. Now they are putting in a technical note, especially since I am having all the crashes in uploader, but basically it sounds like they can’t access your personal cloud player, so you have to deal with the playlists, so I have to go through my thousands of playlists times 9 and delete them myself!!!! And I pay for this service? YOUCH! Not like I added the multiple playlists, Amazon Uploader managed that little doozy for me. Now they say they will contact me via e-mail in 2-3 business days, so I will upload again.
UPDATE: Well so far Amazon has been less than helpful. I was trying to contact via e-mail, but first had to switch to chat, and then phone call, and then they tried to get me to call in again, but it was because they could not get the logs I sent them repeatedly. And these are simple text files being sent to an e-mail address they gave me. I eventually had to put them on DropBox to get them to be able to download them. And since they got the files I haven’t heard anything.
As for the horrible responsiveness of Amazon Cloud Player, I moved to Chrome beta to see if it would help, and it seems to let me delete 2 playlists before it crashes!
Honestly if they don’t fix this soon I am going to have to give up on Amazon Cloud Player and figure out another solution!
Weekly Photo Tips has a post on some of the newly announced cameras at CES, mostly point and shoot, but some cool looking cameras.
Parrot, the makers of the awesome AR.Drone 2, quadcopter that is controlled with an iOS or Android phone has announced a GPS with 4GB’s of memory to record your flights and video and a new director’s mode for their app to make better videos. Now you can record your flights via GPS and upload them for others to see.
A new battery with 50% better battery life.
And a new director’s mode for the app, which will let you program in moves that are equivalent to dollies and camera cranes.
Very cool. I so want one!
Photo Rumors has the news from CES on the new 14mm t3.1 and 135 t2.2 lenses. And around $5000 each. Still out of my price range, but very reasonable, just wish they were a little faster!
So I am about 8 months out from my surgery and thought I should give an update. Overall I am doing great. I am much less sore than I have been, though with occasional twinges of pain, but much much better than it has been. I did have to take a break from work for a little while at the beginning of December because I was so sore and run down, but am doing much better now.
The scar is doing pretty well, though as you can see is still pretty red most of the time. Hopefully that will improve, though it is much less sore, but I am still using a pillow bellow the seatbelt when driving.
As for the results from the surgery, well that has been phenomenal. The most telling thing was a couple of trips to museums over the holidays with my mom and wife, and I never had to stop from being tired (when I would have previously had to stop many times). It is an amazing difference! And I have been doing an average of about 7000 steps a day, and lately that has included 15-18 flights of stairs (taking the subway has not only added steps, but also flights of stairs to my daily exercise) and that is in addition to a walk on the treadmill in the morning. And once it warms up a little I plan on doing the 2.1 walk around the veterans center near me again (did it with my mom while she was here, and since, but 41 degrees is pretty cold, especially with how much I am sweating). Still seem to be overly sweating. Especially once I stop I sweat a lot! In fact I am bringing deodorant, a new t-shirt and a towel to work so that I can dry off and don’t smell at work. Embarrassing, but at least I am getting exercise.
I had lost weight after the surgery, but gained it all back and more pretty quickly, and the recent holidays didn’t help. Have been trying to eat lots of salads and very healthily lately, and for a few days now have been trying the 8 hour diet, where you only eat in an 8 hour period in day. It actually seems like a diet I can do (as I never used to eat breakfast and have gained most of my weight since I did start eating breakfast). And you can supposedly even eat fatty foods, though I am trying to eat as healthily as I can while doing it. Right now 11AM I am starved (as I am eating at noon till 8 PM), but so far have been able to to it. Once I get used to it, I could see doing this forever.
Now the brain thing. Well I still have it. My memory sucks compared to pre-surgery! Things like I need kleenex at work and I have it in my car with my bags, which I get when I park, and I keep forgetting the kleenex. Even when I thought about it earlier in the morning. Memory is just not what it used to be. I really hope that improves. Creativity seems to be coming back, though a big hard drive failure which lost me a lot fo a current personal project has thrown a monkey wrench in things. Hopefully this will all be better in the next few months. One can only hope!
Back is still out, and I do need to go to the chiropractor again soon. Haven’t been much as the activator helps, but not like a real adjustment and my chest has to really heal before he can do that. Not sure if he will wait till a year for that, but I am having some serious back pain!
So overall I am doing great, and am so happy I got the surgery and it is behind me. Have also talked a bit with someone who had the surgery after me and read my blog, and it helped. So I am so happy about that. Glad my experience could help someone else! Awesome!
I have been interested in the new top of the line Graphics Card for the new 2012 iMac, which is an NVIDIA Geforce GTX 680mx, and was wondering how it faired against my Desktop GTX 670. Everyone has been claiming it makes the iMac the most powerful Mac Editing machine out there, but I doubted it, as I have not seen any speed test against equivalent graphics cards. The 680m is actually a 680 slowed down.
I found a EuroGamer review of the GTX 680m, which tells me what I wanted to know about a 680M, but not a 680MX, but I found a review of that at Notebook Check.
Here is some of what they have to say:
Compared to the GeForce GTX 680M, the GTX 680MX features 1536 instead of 1344 CUDA cores and higher memory clocks (720/2500MHz vs 720/1800 MHz)
the graphics performance of the GeForce GTX 680MX should be 15 – 25 percent above the GTX 680M and similar to the Desktop GTX 580.
And specs on the GTX 680mx from NVIDIA’s site.
CUDA Cores – 1536
Core Speed – 720 Mhz
Memory Speed – 2500 Mhz
Texture Fill Rate (Billions per second) – 92.2
Max RAM – 2GB
And as for the GTX 670 from NVIDIA’s site.
CUDA Cores – 1344
Core Speed – 915 Mhz
Memory Speed – 2500 Mhz
Texture Fill Rate (Billions per second) – 102.5
Max RAM – 4GB
So the iMac has more CUDA cores, but it’s speed is not as fast, and it’s memory speed is less than half the speed.
So basically the 680MX it is a really powerful mobile graphics chip, but not as powerful as it’s equivalent Desktop GPU the GTX 670, and is more in line to a last generation GTX 580.
And yes it is not the easiest thing in the world getting a new generation NVIDIA card running in your MacPro, but it is not that hard, but should put your speed above that of the top of the line iMac GPU, and have more processing power, making it still champion, even though it is such dated technology at this point. Have to love expandability though as an old machine can still hold a performance edge, which is something the iMac will never have.
Lets just hope Apple makes a really good new MacPro this year.