Despite remarkably inconsistent remarks about the pictures (many are labelled with “sharp” which are not very sharp, and some are labelled “unacceptably blurry” which actually look reasonably sharp) this gallery is the first I’ve seen which tries to compare many different models of phones on a standard test scene.

You can see why I’m less than completely thrilled with the imagined 1.3 megapixel camera in my Motorola MPx220.

This phone produces pictures which might be in the ballpark of what a reasonable $150 digital camera could produce.

Josh, one of the guys who convinced me (by example) to record my podcasts on my PDA scored a new Phone PC at PDC. It seems like quite a cool gadget that runs Windows Mobile 5, it even includes Skype (although Josh didn’t mention it in his brief preview). They were apparently being offered to a limited number of conference goers for a mere $150, which is probably too good to refuse. I would have jumped at the chance too.

My Motorola mpx220 needs a replacement as soon as my contract wears out in November. I can only hope I’ll find as good a deal around that time.

Looking forward to seeing some camera and video samples from Josh.

A crazy story I found while using Stumble Upon: Press Your Luck.

As someone once said:

The generation of random numbers is far too important to be left to chance.

Heh. Domain Rookie — Hilarious Domain Name Mispronouncings

The most amusing: PenIsland.com.

DigitalGlobe, the supplier of imagery for Google Earth and Google Maps will make freshly updated satellite images of New Orleans in the next few days. Link

Update: Here is a Quickbird view of New Orleans, showing some of the flooding.

NASA has released a pretty amazing picture of Katrina as it approached landfall, with resolutions up to 6800×8000 pixels, and 250m per pixel. Click on the image to the right to be taken to the 2km per pixel version: the 250m version didn’t work in my browser.

Lisa WIlliams provided an interesting link to this Science article which suggests that most people are very poor at detecting liars. Catastrophically, most people actually think they are good at detecting lies.

Kind of like how more than half the drivers on the road think they are above average in skill.

Or, in the same vein:

“Thus, those who are skilled think that they are skilled because they are competent to judge. Those who are unskilled think that they are skilled because they are incompetent to judge. Therefore, whoever you are, you think that you are skilled, and there is no internal way of finding out if you are deluding yourself. The possibility that we are, in fact, all duffers goes a long way toward explaining the sorry state of so many things in the world, in spite of the fact that we each think we could do better if only we had some say in the matter.”

Jef Raskin

I got 14 out of 18, from PBS.

More Flying Spaghetti Monster links courtesy of Boing Boing.

There is even a button:

I also found this one from here:

Everyone is running articles about Google Talk this morning. Apparently Google has settled on the Jabber protocol for instant messaging (gasp, a standard) and has released a pretty nice little client for Windows. Following their instructions, I’ve actually connected to the server using gaim as well. I have yet to try any of the audio capabilities, but the base functionality seems fine, and unpolluted by vast amounts of advertising (ala AIM, which I just can’t stand anymore). Nifty.

As an experiment, anyone wanting to IM me can invite me (brainwagon at gmail.com) and I’ll try to respond.

Addendum: Make already already has a cool hack:

Yes, it is possible to broadcast music, MP3’s, Podcasts, etc. from your itunes, computer cd or whatever. Don’t limit yourself to a boring microphone… share your music!

Basically it is just what you imagine: you can send an mp3 out by configuring the recording inputs to GoogleTalk to listen to the stereo mix device. Still, a cool idea that might be useful to us podcasters.

Sometimes when I wake up in the morning, I just know I’m gonna be grouchy. Everything that I have to do (like go to work) just seems like an incredible annoyance, or alternatively incredibly boring. Logging in and seeing Dan’s cool photos from Alaska reminds me that the world is a big place, and I should be seeing more of it.

Hack A Day has a link to an article about constructing a rig to take macro photographs. It’s a cool gadget which uses a pair of lasers as a trip sensor. His pictures are really cool.

From one of our internal mailing lists at work, here is a link to some of the work of English street artist Julian Beever. His drawings are unique anamorphic views: when seen from certain angles, they look normal and three dimensional, although from other views they seem oddly distorted. The geek in my wants to turn this into a treatise on the homogeneous 4×4 transforms we use in computer graphics all the time, but instead I’ll just leave the art to speak for itself.