Digital Innovations

“At Christmas play and make good cheer, for Christmas comes but once a year.”—Thomas Tusser

Submitted for your approval: Here’s a list of gizmos, gadgets, and gear for the digitally-minded who may have already believed they had everything they wanted but didn’t know they really needed lots more stuff in order to produce the ultimate image. Feel free to use...

“Happiness can be found, even in the darkest of times, if one only remembers to turn on the light.”—Albus Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Updating to Photoshop CS4 was a rude awakening. I’d put it off because the changes didn’t seem substantial enough but over time I finally realized it was a good idea, at least until I tried to make a...

The above quotation makes you wonder about the nature of predictions because a common fallacy is in believing that technology is always going to move in a straight line and not branch out to form a paradigm shift. Or sometimes people, as in the quoted magazine, just didn’t know what was going on in the rest of the world. Bell Labs’ John Bardeen, Walter Brattain, and William Shockley were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for research on semiconductors and discovery of the transistor effect in 1947. Yet even today vacuum tubes are not dead and there is a booming if small market in analog audio components. And in our neck of the woods, witness Harman’s announcement of building a factory to make 35mm film cassettes. It might just be too soon to start chiseling film’s tombstone—or not.

"No good deed goes unpunished."--Clare Boothe Luce

Editor & Publisher recently reported that Charlotte Observer Editor Rick Thames apologized to readers when a staff photographer "inappropriately altered" an image of a local firefighter. The original photograph had a brownish-gray sky, while the enhanced image featured a deep red sky and a...

“Cleverness is like a lens with a very sharp focus. Wisdom is more like a wide-angle lens.”—Edward de Bono

Old news now, but when I started writing this month’s column I’d just purchased an Apple iPad, which may turn out to be a flop like the original Newton—don’t laugh, I had one of those, too—or a runaway success like the iPod. So far, the...