I ran across an Aperture Export plugin that interfaces with Pixelpost – it’s free as in speech and as in beer – and it works nicely. This takes yet another step out of my process of exporting photos to the various places online I put them.

The other weekend, I actually went to Lowes and purchased a bunch of wood to make my bookcases. Last weekend, I actually made the first one, and now I’m working on the second. They aren’t the prettiest, but they are damn solid and pretty structurally sound. Pics on flickr soon.

Have you ever wanted to know why your car had it’s Check Engine light turned on? Now, for $100 + the price of an android device, you can. As it’s a bluetooth device, there may well be an iOS client at some point.

It’s always been a weird thought that once you send a piece of email from your client that it belongs to the owner of every server it spools on. Strange? That’s how the courts had ruled in the late 90s, if I remember correctly. Now, the judge ruled:

Given the fundamental similarities between email and traditional forms of communication [like postal mail and telephone calls], it would defy common sense to afford emails lesser Fourth Amendment protection…. It follows that email requires strong protection under the Fourth Amendment; otherwise the Fourth Amendment would prove an ineffective guardian of private communication, an essential purpose it has long been recognized to serve

It looks like the EFF had a lot to do with the ruling, and that’s just excellent. If you need someone to donate money to, the EFF is a deserving group.

Looks like I spoke too soon – there’s an application that drives the Kiwi ODBII hardware module available for the iPhone as well. It’s called “Rev”, costs $39.99, and uses WiFi to connect. It was last updated on January 4th, 2010, which is somewhat worrying, but the price of the app is a lot lower than the price of an Android device, so it means a huge savings to me. If I ever put the hammer down and get it.

Now with %100 less FAIL: Google Latitude now is available to iOS users as an app, and it runs in the background! Whoo hoo! There will be much rejoicing. Even more interesting – it appears to update location information even when the application has been closed, and I don’t mean put in the background. I tried this by killing the App in the background process tray, and the “location data” arrow remained in my toolbar. I was then able to be followed all the way home without opening the app again. We’ll see if this is a feature or a bug, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

My 50mm f/1.4 has a hard focus stop at infinity. This is really handy when it comes to focusing on the night sky, and trying to take pictures of the stars. My camera, however, looks like crap at night when you get past ISO 400 – noise rules the scene. Either you can do a dark field capture (in camera) which destroys detail, or you can power down the camera after the RAW file is captured, and get a “clean”, but noisy file. Ironic, isn’t it? What’s equally ironic is my first and last shots tonight were my best.

Photos on flickr.