My view of the world

US patent number 7,415,666 describes “a method and system in a document viewer for scrolling a substantially exact increment in a document, such as one page, regardless of whether the zoom is such that some, all or one page is currently being viewed”. —IBM keyboards, which were the standard for years, had this feature back when I was running an 8088 chip and a full meg of ram was to expensive for mere mortals even if their motherboard would support it.

Because there exists so much previous art their claim to be the inventors won’t stand up in court. But just in case you think this is a waste of time consider their obvious reasoning. With the size of Microsoft’s legal department(s) and their aggressive anti-competitor approach no one but the major competitors have deep enough pockets to stand against them.

M$ has something approaching 10,000 patents most of which are a pathetic as this one. But each of them gives M$ ammunition for a legal attack that can be used to bankrupt a smaller company.
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What? You really believe M$ invented something? —Fool, even their base os was purchased for about $60k. It was QDOS -Quick and Dirty Operating System. They just renamed it DOS and leased it to IBM.

When IBM first approach M$ about an operating system the company said they didn’t do operating systems, only ports of programming languages.

IBM then went to the inventor of CPM who immediately went off to play tennis or some such, leaving his wife to negotiate. She refused to sign a non-disclosure agreement so IBM went back to Dear ole uncle Bill and company, who by then had figured out an angle.

—And that boys and girls is how desktop computing was lost to the Dark Side.

The Mio Knight Rider GPS features the original voice of KITT from the TV show and also has flashing LEDs to simulate the scanner from KITT.

Sounds cool right? Ummm, well maybe kinda cool if you’re a fan of David Hasselhoff, but it’s not as good as it sounds.

If you think this looks like a cool toy, just picture those flashing lights every time you check you GPS. And won’t the cops wonder what you’ve got on your dash when they see those?

Now picture listening to that overly authoritative voice all day every day.

This is a gimmick designed with impulse buyers in mind. It’s also great for those people who have everything. At last there’s something you can get that car nut in your life that they won’t already own.

Other problems are that it slower than glaciers and the text to speech isn’t built in. This needs to be loaded from a cd. Why you ask.. As near as I can determine Mio intends this to be a multinational unit.

They probably have figured out that the novelty will wear off soon and by making the device language and country independent they can delay the time before it becomes “as seen on TV.”

It’s a rare day here in Las Vegas.

Last night we had wind and rain. Today the sky is clear and the mountains look close enough to touch.
The air is still and temperature is in the high sixties. The birds are noisy and flitting from wire to branch and back.

I know it’s beautiful up in the mountains, everything will stand out in sharp detail. The wildlife will be out and active.

If ever there was a day for that one great photograph, it’s today.

And I had to come to work.

I built myself a pinhole lens for my Nikon D70 out of some old stainless shim stock and a body cap.
I used the finest sewing needle I had, set a 1/2 x 1/2 piece of shim stock on a board and tapped the needle through with a small hammer.

This is my best effort so far.

Click on the image for a larger version. (1500×997)
The original size is 3008×2000 and when I pull it up on the monitor it’s so fuzzy it hurts my eyes.
–I processed this shot by using the clone tool in Photoshop remove the worst of the dust from the frame and then ran auto levels to clean up up the colors and contrast.

So far the problems I have run into with a digital pinhole are dust, dust, and more dust. A pinhole lens on a digital camera can find dust in a laboratory clean room. I even glued a uv filter over then cap when I was done and it still sucked in the dust.

Determining the pinhole size and shape is an ongoing experiment. And while I can buy pre-made pinhole caps or a set of 12 pinholes in various sizes, they are all micro-drilled and I’m not certain that will give me the image I want.
(The rule as I understand it is the smaller the hole the sharper the focus. But each hole diameter represents a give distance from lens to film(or ccd) running anywhere from 3.5mm to several inches.)

The Nikon body caps I have seen for sale seem to have a hole diameter of .0102 which should work out to about the same coverage as a 50mm lens on a full frame camera. This means that for a dx camera I should need a hole about .008+/-.
I think I may even buy some pre-drilled pinholes to play with but I intend to continue to experiment with my needle and hammer approach.

My first pinhole camera was an old Quaker Oats box with a home grown film holder for 120 film cut into 4 or 5 inch lengths and it worked well for what it was, but with my nifty neat and wonderful digital pinhole camera I can test my exposure without wasting a lot of film or even needing to know my f/stop.

If you go to Pinhole Resource they have quite a bit of information. They also have cameras, body caps and pinholes for sale.