tech: July 2006 Archives

One project I've been working on for the past year or so is the digitization of the UW Simpson Center for the Humanities' big lecture series: The Solomon Katz Distinguished Lectures in the Humanities.

Most of the work has gone into encoding the video recordings (into WMV, QT and Real... sigh...), but I also wanted to see if we could set the content up as a podcast. After all, most of the video is just talking heads -- you might as well listen while you're walking or driving rather than watch them at a computer. Here's the actual link to the podcast page, and here's a screenshot of what it looks like (for those who don't have iTunes):

There are some caveats to using the 'podcast' distribution model with these lectures:

• There are only 3-5 Katz lectures every year, so this is kind of stretching the limit of the notion of "subscription." No weekly or daily updates here.

• There's no centralized directory system for podcasts (that I know of.) While I appreciate the frustration of those who point out that 'pod' is a misnomer since the audio files work on any device, not just Apple mp3 players, the fact remains the Apple iTunes Music Store is a popular place for people to go to look for spoken-word content. So I developed our XML files for that target audience first, with other podcast directories (Yahoo!, etc) to come soon.

• On that last point, these public lectures given at a state university are, obviously, free and not for sale by anyone. Thus putting them up on the "iTune$ Mu$ic $tore" seems a bit odd -- but as the screenshot above demonstrates, there's no money changing hands. Luckily, the overwhelming majority of all podcasts are free (and/or ad-supported) so I think people understand that the iTMS works in a non-commercial manner for this kind of content. All the audio files are actually hosted on UW servers -- Apple just parses our XML file.

Notwithstanding the above factors, the actual people giving these lectures are pretty interesting -- Judith Butler, Marjorie Perloff, Alain Badiou, etc. Later this summer I'm going to be adding a lot more in, as we digitize the back catalog. For now, if you have Apple iTunes installed, click here to see a selection of what we've put up so far.

Performance is going to be a bit sluggish, but I'm happy to report I've successfully installed Aperture 1.1 on a vintage 1.2Ghz iBook G4:

This person's blog entry contains all the relevant info -- best to read from the bottom up as there are some corrections later on.

I've have my Canon 10D since May 2003 -- more than three years, which is kind of shocking. In the first year alone, it travelled with me to Germany, Denmark, Russia, Sweden, France, and Amsterdam. I've also taken it to Nevada and Utah nearly every year, sometimes twice.

The desert, especially, is a rough environment for cameras. This shot required changing the lens to a zoom with a cloud of dust still surrounding our car, which had screeched to a halt:

(Check out the unfortunately accurate EXIF timestamp at the bottom.)

An open camera means the CMOS sensor eventually accumulate bits of dust on its protective glass plate. You can see this best if you shoot a white wall at f/22 with the focus purposefully set wrong:

This looks worse than it actually is -- in reality, any in-focus detail would overwhelm the small dust particles and you'd never notice them. Only in large areas of single color (sky, for example) would you need to use Photoshop to stamp them out. Here's a picture from Mt. Rainier this January -- the dust spot is at the far right, just above the horizon:

There are a number of methods you can use to remove DSLR dust particles, ranging from simple air pressure to brushes and even mini-squeegees. Many people are very worried about attempting a cleaning, since if you bork the sensor you've essentially killed the heart of the camera. My friend Sándor has a Rocket Air Blaster, which looks like a refugee from a 1950s comic book. I gave the Rocket a cursory try when we were in Utah, but the dark hotel room wasn't exactly the best place to gauge sucess. Now that I'm home, I set aside an entire evening to the task.

Earlier this week I bought a synthetic (nylon) artist's brust at the UW Bookstore -- which incidently has an amazing selection of art supplies. Nylon acquires a static charge when air is pushed through it, so that plus a can of compressed air was all the tools I needed. For the actual cleaning, I followed the excellent instructions on Petteri Sulonen's photo website -- every single article has is insightful and worth a read, especially his lens reviews. Why do these Finns speak such good English, anyway?

Picture of Helsinki in homage to Petteri

I'm only slightly embarassed to say I followed all of Petteri's obsessive-compulsive recommendations, up to and including the cold running shower to suck the dust out of the bathroom before I began. Here's what the sensor looked like before any cleaning:

After a nerve-wracking few minutes, trying not to let muscle spasms jab a $5 paintbrush through a $1,500 CMOS, I achieved nearly perfect results:

This is the point where the evening began to resemble a turn on Let's Make a Deal: do I go away satisfied with my winning a reasonbly-clean sensor, or risk it all on what's behind the curtain? Except here, behind the curtain is either a really clean sensor, or an enforced upgrade to the Canon 30D.

Luckily, I got the Hawaii Vacation Courtesy of Holliday Inn rather than a goat:

I'm already contemplating just how many months I can go never changing the 50mm prime lens, so that no dust creeps in to sully my pristine sensor...