A while back, I talked about the idea of a customizable travel guides (Lonely Planet to be exact) and commented on how the publishing industry probably was not capable of creating customized books with how the printing presses were set up today. Mike Masnick over at the infinitely more popular Techdirt recently took a tour of the Wall Street Journal's Palo Alto printing plant and found out that most of the technology and innovation had gone to streamlining the printing process and saving cost, but not really at creating a better product (in this case, a customizable newspaper). A customizable newspaper is probably more complicated than a customizable book due to the numbers involved and the delivery method (paper boys versus mail).

I'm not sure if customized newspapers are the solution (I'm more sure of customized travel guides), but there is probably a easier way of accomplishing this. Imagine a web service that will tabulate the top stories from different news sources (online newspapers and blogs) every day and provides a .pdf which you can print (or even prints for you, but that would probably require some kind of software). All you need to do is specify the sources (in my case, Engadget, Gizmodo, BoingBoing, Techdirt, etc.) and print. You could even specify the printing frequency (i.e. once a day, twice a day, etc.), or the target number of pages. There's clearly a business opportunity here for advertisement since by knowing someone's reading habit, you can also provide targeted ads (same for a customized newspaper too).

Labels: book, customization, newspaper, techdirt

It's tempting: buying a 8GB memory card with your digital camera so you can hold 2,500 pictures and never have to worry about switching cards. You can go days, even months without connecting your camera to the computer and show pictures of Christmas parties at Halloween balls. That is, until something goes wrong with your memory card and you lose everything on it. The ability to store 2,500 pictures means you can also lose 2,500 pictures, at once.

That's what happened to me the other day when I was shooting my cousin's wedding (don't these things happen at the worst possible timing?). Two thirds through the reception, my camera gives me a "Card not formatted" error. This was a split second after I took my 250th (roughly) picture of the day. I panicked; here was someone's once in a lifetime (hopefully) event, and I just lost 250 pictures portraying it (for those that don't know me, I used to shoot for a newspaper in college, and still shoot as a hobby). Luckily, besides the 1GB card that died, I also had an old 256MB card which allowed me to keep shooting, albeit conservatively (I once shot 360 pictures in a 2 hour span, and that was on film).

Fortunately, this story has a happy ending. After trying the 1GB card on numerous card readers, I took it to a professional data recovery service, and they were able to salvage all the pictures except eight. They charged by the MegaByte, so recovering a 1GB card cost me about $70, the cost of many GigaBytes of CF cards, but it was worth every penny (or in this case, yen).

Having learned my lesson, I will now go purchase two or three 512MB cards (or 1GB, if the price is no different) and be adamant about changing cards during a shoot. I carry my camera in a camera bag so holding several extra cards is no problem. As for the criminal 1GB card, I will ceremoniously destroy it by driving nails through it. Actually, I'll label it as risky and only use it if all my other cards spontaneously combust and I'm hundred miles from the nearest electronics store.

As for the images above and below, the data recovery service had an interesting side effect of recovering pictures I deleted long time ago. Many of these reappeared, and some of the images were garbled together. None of these pictures are edited in Photoshop. I'm simply uploading them as I found them on the recovery CD. The one on the top is actually a mix of two weddings, one of my college roommate back in December in Kansas City, and my cousin's in Japan two weeks ago. Call it accidental art.

Labels: accident, advice, art, digital, photography