Our friend, Amit Gupta, was diagnosed with Leukemia. He needs help in a major way.

I got a call from my doctor, who I’d gone to see the day before because I’d been feeling worn out and was losing weight, and wasn’t sure why. He was brief:
“Amit, you’ve got Acute Leukemia.

“You need to enter treatment right away.”

I was terrified. I packed a backpack full of clothes, went to the hospital as he’d instructed, and had transfusions through the night to allow me to take a flight home at 7am the next day. I Googled acute leukemia as I lay in my hospital bed, learning that if it hadn’t been caught, I’d have died within weeks.

I have a couple more months of chemo to go, then the next step is a bone marrow transplant. South Asians are severely under-represented in the bone marrow pool, and I need help.

There’s a few things you can do to help. Are you of South Asian descent? Swab! Or help organize a drive!

[more info Amit Gupta Needs You]

Cats are basically the official currency of the Internet. Combine them with science, and it’s equally amazing. Lately, I’ve been getting an absolute kick out of Chemistry Cat.

Science puns are awesome!

[via I Can Has Cheezburger?]

  This piece was originally posted on gdgt. Check it out, here.

Alright, I meant to post this awhile ago — here are my impressions of the Fuji FinePix X100 after using it for a week.

Pros

• The viewfinder displays all sorts of awesome live data.
  Holy awesome, I don’t know why more camera manufacturers haven’t done this yet, but the X100’s viewfinder has a live histogram. For me, it’s totally key when trying to nail a photo. I absolutely love using histograms to try and get proper exposure. Plus, there’s all the usual information (aperture, exposure, ISO, grid view).

  Another cool aspect of the viewfinder is that it shows a rectangle that shows the actual field of view of the image that will be captured. This means you can see outside this area and use it for anticipation, planning, or lining up your shot. I love it.

• The lens is fast! It’s a fixed 35mm lens with an f/2.0 maximum aperture. The bokeh at f/2.0 is nice. It’s super sharp when stopped down to around f/4.
• Hybrid viewfinder: So, this camera does something kind of interesting. It has a regular old optical viewfinder, but it also comes with an electronic viewfinder as well that can be manually engaged (or automatically engaged when in macro mode) that shows what your camera sees directly from the viewfinder. Sadly, there are cons to this (see down below!).
• Design: The design is awesome. I love that retro style, and the camera is comparable in size to most micro 4/3’s cameras. Except it has an APS-C sensor inside!
• The camera sensor: It’s an APS-C sensor — this is the same type of sensor you’d find in most DSLRs. Micro 4/3’s cameras (which are all the rage right now, and roughly the same size at the X100) have a slightly smaller sensor.

Cons

• I wear glasses now, so when I put the viewfinder up to my face, I can’t actually see all the information displayed in the viewfinder. I can see the field of view of the image, but that’s about it.
• Focus = slow: Oh, man. I lost a number of shots while waiting for the lens to lock focus. It’s actually pretty slow! And this is a problem that I notice happens a lot in low light environments (which the camera should actually be really good at shooting in!).
• Hybrid viewfinder: This camera does something particularly annoying every single time you take a photo using the optical viewfinder. After you take an image, the electronic viewfinder pops up and shows you the most recent image you took. There’s no way to turn this off. Are you in the middle of trying to capture a series of action shots? Too bad! “Snap — view photos for 1 – 2 seconds — snap! — view next photo for 1 – 2 seconds — snap! — oh, my God, just let me take photos and look at things later!”

  The other issue I have with this (and all electronic viewfinders in general) is the general poor quality and low resolution of the image you see.

• Slow to try and setup for a shot: This might be my limited amount of time with the camera and inability to truly get used to it, but I found it a pain to try and setup the camera properly for shots as I walked around Austin and San Francisco with it. Changing lighting conditions (which normally don’t phase me, even on my DSLR), wrecked havoc on my ability to take photos. There’s not really an automatic mode (for better or for worse) — this camera is for really seasoned professionals who know their stuff (do you know your Sunny 16 rules? If so, you can probably be comfortable using this camera).

  This piece was originally posted on gdgt. Check it out, here.

Apparently, my computer is going crazy because I have ZERO disk space left. What in the what?! Turns out, my problem stems from iTunes insane backup system. I have multiple redundant multi-gigabyte iOS backup folders eating all my space.

A few minutes ago, I had 0 bytes free out of 120GB SSD. (After deleting the iOS backups, I now have 12.5 GB free).

For the longest time, I’ve used the infamous Blue Screen of Death from Windows as the lock screen wallpaper on my iPhone. It’s always elicited awesome (and even perplexed) reactions from people who see it.

In light of recent events, I’ve temporarily updated my lock screen wallpaper to use the almost-as-infamous Sad Mac background. The BSOD wallpaper will be back soon!

According to Foursquare, as far as the last 6 months are concerned, I’ve been to more unique airports (11!) than bars (10). And even more unique coffee shops (13) + cafés (11).

Is this what being a grownup is like?

Looking up! The view from the lobby at SF MOMA. Photo by Dave Schumaker

Earlier today, team gdgt took a field trip over to the SF MOMA, to check out the Dieter Rams exhibit. Known for his minimalist design aesthetic, the exhibit showed off timeless looking products that he has designed and influenced over the past 50 years.

Numerous quotes from Dieter Rams were posted around SF MOMA. Photo by Dave Schumaker.

One part of the exhibit was dedicated to his 10 principles of good design.

1. Good design is innovative – The possibilities for innovation are not, by any means, exhausted. Technological development is always offering new opportunities for innovative design. But innovative design always develops in tandem with innovative technology, and can never be an end in itself.
2. Good design Makes a product useful – A product is bought to be used. It has to satisfy certain criteria, not only functional, but also psychological and aesthetic. Good design emphasises the usefulness of a product whilst disregarding anything that could possibly detract from it.
3. Good design is aesthetic – The aesthetic quality of a product is integral to its usefulness because products are used every day and have an effect on people and their well-being. Only well-executed objects can be beautiful.
4. Good design Makes a product understandable – It clarifies the product’s structure. Better still, it can make the product clearly express its function by making use of the user’s intuition. At best, it is self-explanatory.
5. Good design is unobtrusive – Products fulfilling a purpose are like tools. They are neither decorative objects nor works of art. Their design should therefore be both neutral and restrained, to leave room for the user’s self-expression.
6. Good design is honest – It does not make a product more innovative, powerful or valuable than it really is. It does not attempt to manipulate the consumer with promises that cannot be kept.
7. Good design is long-lasting – It avoids being fashionable and therefore never appears antiquated. Unlike fashionable design, it lasts many years – even in today’s throwaway society.
8. Good design is thorough down to the last detail – Nothing must be arbitrary or left to chance. Care and accuracy in the design process show respect towards the consumer.
9. Good design is environmentally friendly – Design makes an important contribution to the preservation of the environment. It conserves resources and minimises physical and visual pollution throughout the lifecycle of the product.
10. Good design is as little design as possible – Less, but better – because it concentrates on the essential aspects, and the products are not burdened with non-essentials. Back to purity, back to simplicity.

It was pretty awesome and inspiring stuff. Check it out at the SF MOMA. The exhibit runs until February 20, 2012.

  This piece was originally posted on gdgt. Check it out, here.

A number of third party browsers have been developed and released for Apple’s iOS. Despite the requirement that they must use WebKit, most of the browsers have executed some pretty interesting ideas and provided a lot of enhancements over the basic Safari browser found in the iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch.

Some of the browsers off the top of my head:

• Atomic Browser
• Dolphin Browser
• iCab
• Mercury Browser

What I would love to see is them offer some extra enhancements that would seriously make me switch. What are some of these enhancements?

• TextExpander support: A number of applications (mostly text editors) have been released for iOS that take advantage of TextExpander. I would love to see this added to browsers! I do most of my work in a browser window each day anyway, and on the desktop, TextExpander has been a completely critical feature.
• 1Password: If 1Password could find a way to allow other applications to user their database / keychain for passwords (similar to how other apps can use TextExpander macros), this would be huge! I use it all the time to ensure that I have completely random passwords, and if any one site is compromised, I don’t lose access to everything. The 1Password app on iOS is well done, but I don’t want to use their built-in browser. If there was a way I could access the passwords from another browser, this would be huge!
• Xmarks: Xmarks has been an important tool for me when keeping all my browser bookmarks in sync between Chrome, Firefox, and Safari on the laptop. Why not bring that over a third party browser in iOS? If this was available in any third party browser, it would instantly become my go-to browser.
• Ability to set a default browser in iOS: (Sadly, it will take Apple to build in this feature — there’s no way developers or users can do this short of jailbreaking) I’ll admit, having the option of running third-party browsers in iOS is pretty damn nice. But it still feels like a kludgy hack when you open a URL in any other application in iOS. It always goes to Safari, without fail. If there were a way to set a custom default browser in the system preferences, this would be awesome!

What sorts of other features do you want to see in third party browsers that they don’t currently offer (and aren’t offered in Safari)?

  This piece was originally posted on gdgt. Check it out, here.

Been using various iOS 5 betas (and now the GM) for awhile now. One of my favorite features (besides proper notifications, of course) is Safari Reader. Basically, it strips away all the cruft from a webpage and simply displays the content you want to read. It works similar to things like Readability.

It’s especially nice, since it presents the content in an eBook like format and you can dynamically resize the text.

Something I find interesting though — I haven’t really been using the “Reading List” feature. Basically, it’s a way to temporarily bookmark articles and websites you want to read late. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t do offline access though (so, I’ll still be sticking to Instapaper for my offline needs).

More info on Apple’s website.

  This piece was originally posted on gdgt. Check it out, here.

A friend of mine (see Marcie Lynn Photography) rented a Nikon D3x this weekend for a photo shoot. She took it along on a wine tasting trip a number of us went on, and I had a chance to play around with it.

The photos that came out of this thing were absolutely incredible. That said, it’s a beast of a camera and you probably need a Sherpa or two to help you carry around the camera and lenses.

It’s a 24.4MP full-frame camera. Coupled with a 50mm f/1.4 lens, this thing practically had night vision. It also absolutely nailed the focus on photos and the images were tack sharp.

The really interesting thing about 24.4MP is your ability to crop the image and still maintain high enough resolution for multiple uses. That was the most impressive thing, in my opinion. You could take a group photo of 10 people, then zoom into any one of them, and there was enough resolution and fidelity for a flawless 8 x 10 portrait. Incredible!

The other impressive thing was the image quality at ISO 6400. Properly exposed, you could barely see any grain! Seriously, that’s insane.

This is totally going on my “WANT-but-probably-not-ever-own” list. Anyone have $9,000 laying around?