DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Thanks to HP and Office Depot, you can unload your junk computers, monitors, televisions, etc., without worrying that they’ll end up poisoning generations of children in rural China:

Free hardware recycling at Office Depot

Note: it’s only free through Labor Day! HP usually charges $20 - $40 for recycling electronics, per item.

Qualifying Products:

• PCs, Mice, Keyboards
• Handhelds/PDAs
• Monitors
• Flat Panel Displays
• Laser & Inkjet Printers
• Scanners
• All-in-Ones
• Digital Cameras
• Fax Machines
• Desktop Copiers
• Cell Phones
• TVs (27'' and smaller only, no consoles)
• TV/VCR combos 27'' and smaller

More terms and conditions are listed at the Office Depot site (link above).

Read more about e-waste.

WordCount™ is an artistic experiment in the way we use language. It presents the 86,800 most frequently used English words, ranked in order of commonality. Each word is scaled to reflect its frequency relative to the words that precede and follow it, giving a visual barometer of relevance. The larger the word, the more we use it. The smaller the word, the more uncommon it is.

Besides being an “artistic experiment,” Wordcount is an intriguing interactive word-popularity research tool, guaranteed to shave seconds off your attention to the mundane matters of the day. (intriguing: rank 10104; attention: rank 715; mundane: rank 12164)

Hmm, it’s also very likely to crash your browser if you type in too many words. Fortunately you’d be smart enough to not be composing something like a blog entry in another browser window at the time, because that would force you to rewrite the thing twice. (idiot: rank 9547)

[Thanks to Bim for the link.]

Sylvetta is the “new” arugula.

I guess I waited too long to hang the yellowjacket traps this year… in two days I’ve caught about a whole season’s worth.

Last Fall I took a picture of a Greek church in Ia, Santorini, lit up by the setting sun. It’s my favorite picture from that trip.

My original correction, shown above, is too orange. In reality, the church was lit by an orange-red sunset, but I think this version is not believable. My eyes would not have perceived that color; the human brain has, in effect, a realtime DSP doing advanced curve corrections on the input video stream. A human observer would have “seen” a white church, not an orange one.

Here’s the original image, as saved by the camera. Note that this is no more genuine or real than any corrected version; the camera is far worse at perceiving color than even a human with poor eyesight, e.g. me. But that’s where Photoshop comes in.

Last weekend I opened up the original image with the intent of making as large a print as I could. I began to tweak the colors, and experienced a disturbing deja vu — I’ve worked on this image too many times. I didn’t want to do it again.

I opened up a corrected version, saved for a calendar we made last December. The colors were great! The church walls appear white, with still enough red in the walls to suggest a sunset. The color of the dome was particularly appealing; that is the exact shade of blue I remember from Greece.

But this calendar image was too small for my current project; I had reduced its resolution prior to saving. This time, I needed the full frame. And I couldn’t imagine trying to rewrite whatever curves might have yielded this image. Knowing what I could achieve didn’t really help; it would probably take longer to reproduce this result than to make an all-new correction… but if the new one wasn’t as successful, I’d be able to see it immediately. Not good.

“Wouldn’t it be nice,” I thought, “if I’d saved the correction curves last time?” As it turns out, I had. This was a lucky break, and a big relief; it saved me from doing something I’d done twice before.

A smarter way to work would be to save max-resolution images in .psd format, using Adjustment Layers for corrections. This makes it even easier to edit curves, because the loading and saving happen automatically. I’ll have to change my workflow.