In part 3 of this article series, I described my application migration story. In this part, I'm (finally) finishing up the tale by talking about my various pieces of hardware that either worked or needed to be replaced. All of the work I'm describing here was actually done in October and November, but I'm just getting around to writing about it now.
Ideally, I would like to just swap the computer and leave everything else unchanged. But life is not ideal. Over the years, Apple has changed the port configuration of the Mac mini, so not everything can just plug in. At least not without some adapters. And some devices that were perfectly great 9 years ago are old and slow by today's standards. So it's time to change up several peripherals.
Many of us are spending more time videoconferencing than we’ve ever done before. And that situation probably won’t be changing anytime soon.
One thing that’s become painfully obvious to me during the past few months is that some people are more conscientious than others about how they present themselves. The worst offenders position themselves in front of a window, forcing others to view them in silhouette and making me wonder whether I’m in a business meeting or watching “Mystery Science Theater 3000.”
I try to avoid such obvious videoconferencing faux pas. But there’s one fundamental awkwardness that no amount of strategic laptop positioning can solve: not being able to make eye contact with other participants because they, like me, are looking at their screens rather than their Web cameras. Everyone appears to be casting their gaze downward, as if bored or perhaps telling a lie. It’s nearly impossible to avoid that annoying tendency—not without some drastic action.
The action in my case was to construct something I’d seen featured on Hackaday, a gizmo designed by a video blogger that makes clever use of a semitransparent mirror—basically the same strategy used for teleprompters but at a fraction of the cost and with materials I could easily scavenge or order. With such a mirror, you can view the screen straight on while also looking directly at an external webcam. This contraption, which I’ve taken to calling my Zoom Box, allows me to look other people right in the eye while in a Zoom or Webex meeting with them.
Awesome bit of geekery. A must-have device for anyone that regularly uses video conferencing.
Your nose isn’t actually as big as it looks in selfies, says facial plastic surgeon Boris Paskhover. So maybe hold off on that nose job — at least, until you’ve seen a decent portrait photo of yourself.
Last year, more than half of plastic surgeons were approached by patients who wanted to look better in selfies, according to a survey by the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. But selfies don’t actually reflect what people look like in the flesh, says Paskhover, who works at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School. “They take out their phone and they say, ‘Look at this picture, look how big my nose looks,’” he says. “I went out to prove why selfies don’t look like the real person, why they’re distorted.”
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Most smartphone cameras have wide-angle lenses, says The Verge’s creative director James Bareham, and close-ups with wide-angle lenses cause distortion that makes objects closer to the camera — like, say, a nose — look larger. “It’s kind of one of the basics of photography: don’t shoot portraits on a wide-angle lens because you will look terrible,” Bareham says
Seems pretty obvious now, but I'm sure I'm not the only non-photographer who was unaware of this fact.
I think phone manufacturers should take this into consideration. It's probably not best to use a wide-angle lens for the front ("selfie") camera, the way you do for the normal (back of the phone) camera. On the other hand, if you're holding at arm's length (or less) for taking a selfie or for video-chatting, a portrait lens might not be able to capture you're entire head.
I wonder if the advanced image processing software of a modern smart phone could correct these wide-angle lens effects. Given that there are already software packages for other kinds of lens corrections, this might be a viable option.
Is anyone at Apple or Google reading this? If you are, please take this article as a feature request on my part.
I'm not very familiar with products already available to those making movies with phones, but this device looks really awesome. I'm sure this kind of steadicam tech has been around for a long time, but this is the first I've seen of it in a (relatively) inexpensive device integrated with a smartphone, and I'm very impressed.
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The Hasselblad 500 sold over the weekend is described by Vienna auctioneers Galerie Westlicht as part of the equipment carried by the 1971 Apollo 15 mission -- and the only camera ever bought back from the
moon.
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I am a bit disappointed that NASA decided to sell it. This camera really belongs in the National Air & Space museum, or possibly in the Kennedy Space Center museum - alongside the other Apollo artifacts.
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