All posts by kirsch

Life of Marcos

Engagement FAQ

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I’ve been receiving a lot of questions, so I decided to post answers to the most common ones here in a convenient FAQ form.

  1. I heard you got engaged. Is it true?
    The rumors (and many many many Facebook comments on our walls) are true. Sorry to make you lose your long standing bet.
  2. Who’s the unlucky girl?
    Shlomit. She’s way nicer than me.
  3. I thought you were already married to a Mac Plus.
    That’s not a question and it’s illegal to marry inanimate objects in most countries anyway.
  4. How did you get her to agree to marrying a loser like yourself?
    Shhh! She doesn’t know. Please don’t say anything yet.
  5. When will the wedding be?
    We don’t know yet.
  6. Where will the wedding be?
    See #5
  7. Did the news break a lot of hearts?
    No, just one.
  8. Is it too late to send engagement presents?
    No it’s not! Please don’t be shy. You can always check The MKX® Wish List for ideas. Don’t forget to bookmark!
  9. So, is that the ring you gave her in the photo?
    It was, but I got hungry and ate it before I had a chance to give it to her. She said yes anyway, but I owe her some candy.
  10. How will this affect the future contents of The MKX®
    Unless the FCC shuts me down, expect the same kind of low quality garbage from these pages. In the pre-nup the only things I get to keep are this blog and my collection of mint Star Wars action figures. I have Lando Calrissian in its original box. What she doesn’t know is that they are rare collectibles and will be worth MILLIONS one day. Don’t throw them away mom!

Thanks to everyone for your kind words on this important step for us. We are very happy and the best is yet to come.

Reality Distortion Field

Flashback Trojan

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You probably heard about the Flashback Trojan infecting Macs through a security hole in Java. Apple has now (finally!) addressed the flaw and even shipped a removal tool.

When the whole thing started, I

  • Manually checked my machine for infection using instructions posted here. No infection found.
  • Downloaded and ran this tool for finding and removing the infection. No infection found.
  • Read an article about how the trojan will not infect machines with Xcode installed. I have Xcode installed.
  • Installed all but the latest of Apple’s software updates to Java which closed the vulnerability.

Finally installed the very last update from Apple, which includes a removal tool. To my surprise I got this message:

Guess there has been a lot of misinformation about this out there. My advice: run Software Update!

Random junk

Supermonet

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Interesting thing I learned today: Not only was Claude Monet a super-painter, but he actually had a super power: The ability to see ultraviolet light. How? In 1923 he had the lenses in his eyes surgically removed due to severe cataracts. Without the lenses filtering out UV light, he could see it. This is known as aphakia.

Here’s a comparison of two paintings he did of lilies. One before and one after he acquired his super power (source).

Neat, huh?

Falafel and more

Israel vs starving photoshopped models

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A man walks past an advertisement displayed on a main street in Tel Aviv, Israel, on March 19, 2012.

Readers may remember (more likely not) my posture towards the use of Photoshop to alter the look of models.

Now Israel has passed a law that:

  1. Bans models with a BMI of 18.5 or less.
  2. Requires that agencies tell their audience if they’ve digitally altered pictures to make models look thinner.

Thankfully my current BMI leaves the door open for me to work as a model in Israel, shall the need arise (my current face and body are a different story).

I’m also glad this gives me an excuse to post an image of a bunch of Israeli models in bikini on my blog.

Reality Distortion Field

The new iPad: impressions

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  • The screen is really, really sharp. Super beautiful. Reading on this is going to be great. The screen is the single most important thing on a tablet, and that’s exactly the one significant update that the new iPad got. It is awesome.
  • It gets warmer to the touch. This means it uses more power. It has a battery that is over 70% larger yet lasts as long as in the iPad 2 so it all evens out. It won’t burn you, don’t worry.
  • Apps that haven’t been updated to use the Retina display look terrible. This is a temporary problem, most apps will probably get updated soon. And every old iPad you see from now on will look blurry.
  • Applications take up more space on disk! This is because they need bigger graphics in order to look good in the Retina display.
  • The Planet Earth wallpaper that comes up by default in the Lock Screen does not appear to be Retina-sized. Maybe this is because I restored from my old iPad. In any case, here’s a high-resolution version I got through a super high-resolution photo from NASA. Feel free to use.

    Download this in your iPad and use it as a wallpaper.
  • iPhone apps run on the new iPad in Retina mode. This could presumably have been the case on the old iPads when the app is blown up to 2x, yet it wasn’t. Now playing Yaniv on the iPad will be more pleasant.
  • The new 5 MP camera is… I don’t know. I haven’t tried it. Who needs a camera on a tablet? The front camera is useful for FaceTime. The back one, not so much.
  • Restoring from an iCloud backup wasn’t as seamless as I would have hoped. I had to sign in to a bunch of things again (iMessage, FaceTime, email, etc). Then I had some issues when downloading all my apps again. I fixed it by signing in to the App Store somewhere. The error I was getting was no help whatsoever.
  • Things aren’t noticeably faster nor slower. About the same. Which is ok, because the iPad 2 performed just fine. More speed never hurts though.
  • Finally, here are two screenshots of The MXK®. The graphics aren’t high resolution but do look better on the new iPad because it’s scaling down the page to fit in the screen. And check out that text… so sharp. Picture every pixel of the image inside a 9.7 inch screen . I resized the iPad 2 screenshot to match the new iPad screenshot.


Reality Distortion Field

The new iPad

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Left: iPad 2. Right, the new iPad and its Retina display. Click to zoom.
The new iPad vs iPad 2 screen comparison by The Verge. 

A new iPad is out. It’s not iPad 3 nor iPad HD. Just iPad. Kind of how Apple used to name the new version of the iPod. And it’s “Resolutionary” – lame pun intended by Apple, not by me.

The biggest change, at least in my mind, is the new “Retina” display. Four times as many pixels in the same area, making each individual pixel so small that you cannot effectively see them anymore. That’s it! The pixel has died, you no longer need to worry about the number of pixels in your iPad; more pixels would be pointless since you cannot see them already!

And so the death of the pixel continues.

And if it’s anything like the difference between the screens on the iPhone (3G, 3GS) and the iPhone 4(S)… it’s going to look amazing.

Tech

Lytro

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T-Rex at the Academy of Sciences

What is Lytro? It’s a “light field camera”, a totally new kind of camera. Instead of recording the color and intensity of each pixel, it records the color, intensity, and direction of the rays of light.

What does this mean? It means that unlike the film and digital cameras you know, you don’t need to focus the light on the film/sensor in order to take a sharp photo. Instead, it captures the rays of light, and when you are viewing the photo, software processes the information to produced a final focused image. This means that you can focus the image after it was taken.

Very cool idea. Lytro just shipped their first consumer product and Amit and I went to the San Francisco Academy of Sciences to check it out.

The camera looks different from most cameras. It’s a stick, has no flash, and a small touchscreen. You need special software to view the images, since they aren’t normal image files. The software is Mac-only: a sign of the times.

Want to see an example photo we took? I thought so. Click on the preview below, let it load and then click on different parts of the photo to see it re-focus.

Impressed? Neither was I. The final image quality is similar to that of a crappy webcam. But don’t dismiss Lytro just yet. Remember that the first digital camera was created in 1975. It took many years for the technology to improve and replace film cameras. As technology progresses, I can imagine light field cameras take over current digital camera technology. This is just a glimpse into that future. We just aren’t there yet.