Invisible flash

New Scientist has an article about invisible flash, which is a use of infrared and ultraviolet light to come up with a picture similar to a regular flash, but without the flare.

The photos in the article are interesting to see, though I would like to see exactly what they are doing with their software to get this to work. It sounds more complex than it probably is.

Tulips in Princes Street Gardens

I took this photo back in April, 2008 while visiting Scotland. It's at Princes Street Gardens in Edinburgh and I am very pleased with how it came out. After some processing, of course. Other sizes can be found at Flickr.

HTML Validator

HTML Validator is a Firefox add-on that lets you validate pages from within the browser. This is great if you don't want to have to rely on sending data to an external validator or if you need to validate pages on an Intranet. It's also great if you are working on web pages without a network connection.

Zevia review

I'm tasting Zevia's Natural Cola for the first time as I write this. I actually ended up finding it at the local Whole Foods and they had a few other flavors. The only other flavor I can remember is root beer.

One thing you will notice when you look at the ingredients list is that Zevia contains more erythritol than stevia (2nd ingredient versus the 5th ingredient). It also contains 45 mg of caffefine from coffee.

As for the taste, I am not impressed. It does not have as much of a cola flavor as I would like. There's a little bit there, but it is a bit too subtle for me.

I might try root beer or one of the other flavors, but I would not have much of an expectation from it, and I would have to find it at a good price - while it was on sale at Whole Foods, the normal price comes close to $1.00 a can.

An American Airlines Rant

I had a business trip last week and had chosen American Airlines as it had the schedule I preferred. I was a bit reluctant with the checked-in baggage fee, but was willing to put that aside more a more agreeable schedule.

About a month or so before the flight, the flight times changed. My flight out went from 7:30 a.m. to 7:00 a.m. Annoying, but I could live with it. The trip back, however, was obnoxious. It changed from 8:10 a.m. to 6:00 a.m. Combine that with the check-in time plus transportation to the airport, and you're getting up before farmers even get up. That is what bothered me the most.

I was also a bit bothered by their lack of consistency on the flights. I had one layover each way, for a total of four flights. One of those flights actually had a free small bag of snack mix. But not on the other three, even though they were pretty much identical.

At this rate, flying American Airlines is going to be a last resort for me.

Gentoo Linux Not Seeing All CPU Cores

I noticed a couple of days ago that emerge was running slower than usual and that the rest of my system would come to a crawl while trying to do other things. After looking at gkrellm and dmesg, I find that the kernel only activated one CPU, even though I have a quad core system and the kernel has SMP activated, the correct CPU, and the correct number of max CPUs/cores. I'm going to upgrade my kernel now and hope that this fixes the problem.

Update: After upgrading the kernel (and a few recompiles of the kernel), it looks like the problem was not having ACPI support compiled into the kernel. dmesg did show a message saying there is a bug in the BIOS, that it would be using some kind of default hardware profile, and to contact the hardware vendor on the BIOS bug. A search did show someone else who had this problem that apparently had it go away after compiling ACPI into the kernel, which appears to be the case for me.

A Quick, Easy, and Effective Way to Enhance Contrast in Photoshop

It's a very easy process to follow and I admit that the photos I did try it out on do look better. I was also able to do this in GIMP.