Pete's Eats

Battery Park Billboard. Circa 2001. Think Different., a photo by Pete Barr-Watson on Flickr.

I took this photo way back in 2001. At the time, I was one of the few mac users in my circle of friends – who all use macs now; such was the excellence of Apple’s vision with Steve Jobs…

The Apple App Store is a great way of staying up to date with your apps. Not so great for the developers necessarily, as they lose revenue to Apple when you buy through the store as opposed to directly (perhaps this is balanced by greater exposure to users though…).

It also means some different ways of doing things. I’ve been a mac user for some 12+ years and I confess to not really having a clue where to start when flattening down an existing Apple machine and installing a bare copy of Lion onto it; the lack of DVD’s to install/recover from is a departure from the existing methods. I didn’t want to go to the hassle of creating a bootable USB stick etc so figured out the process a different way.

Anyway… Here’s how you can flatten a machine that has Lion installed on it, purchased from the App Store.

1) Back up/copy whatever files you want to retain, of course.
2) Restart your machine. As it restarts, hold down COMMAND and R.
3) Start Disk Utility from the top menu; select your main drive and ‘erase’ it.
4) Close Disk Utility to get back to the installer screen and select ‘install Lion’ (can’t remember the exact wording)
5) Follow the onscreen process.

Lion creates a Recover Partition when you install it for the first time. You don’t normally get to know about it’s existence, but it’s a useful way to install a fresh copy of Lion…

I just updated my Ubuntu installation to 11.04 and hit some issues. I’m still resolving some of them, but I managed to get Unity working in the VM despite it not being properly supported. They key is to install a 2d version of Unity and use that rather than the 3d version. Here’s how…

Open up a terminal window and enter the following:

This will install the 2d version of the Unity UI that doesn’t require hardware acceleration. Then you need to log out and when you enter (or click) your username to log back in select ‘Unity 2d’ on the bottom menu if not already selected.

FWIW, it’s probably all too much trouble anyway. The Unity UI is awful, ugly and horrible to use.

I have one image, taken in Tokyo, of some lighted and coloured windows, in front of which a JR Line Tokyo subway train is speeding into Akihabara station that has been hugely popular whenever people have seen it. I’ve been asked on many occasions to license this photograph for many different purposes, but I’ve never done so because it happens to be one of my favourites too and no one has ever suggested a use that I like the sound of. This week I was asked by a UK newspaper if they coud use it to headline an article about Tokyo and how the earthquake has affected city life. Again I said no thanks, but it did spark an idea which was further enflamed by Brian Scott Peterson, a fellow Magnesium photographer, auctioning a print via Flickr…

Click for larger version...

So, I’ve decided to have this image printed large onto photographic paper (20 x 16) and then mounted underneath an acrylic glass and sell them here with the proceeds going to the Red Cross for Japan. This image looks absolutely great when large (it’s been exhibited previously) and a computer screen does not do it justice sadly. I’m going to have 3 prints made in total and I will cover the cost of printing and shipping. The Lumasec printing will be done with Whitewall, a quality supplier of art materials.

I will sell each Lumasec print for £500. If you’d like to buy one, please leave a comment on this post – I will not publish any comments relating to a purchase – and I will get back to you to discuss the arrangements. Please remember, that the full amount will be going to the Red Cross for Japan.

If this photograph is not your thing, then I implore you to have a look at Brian’s as well. If that still doesn’t do it for you then please consider giving a donation to the Red Cross anyway…

Please also help me to get this post out there, please link to it on Facebook, Twitter and wherever else possible (buttons and links at the top of this post).

Thanks.

UPDATE: 2 prints left… 1 print left…All gone…

There seemed to be a shortage of really nice wallpapers for the new 11″ MacBook Air. I found one nice link here but that’s about it. Of course, you can resize any image to fit but it’s a botch job to simply resize because the ratio is not standard at 1366 x 768 and to start messing around trying to crop intelligently is too fiddly.

Anyway, I selected a few of my own photos that seem to be popular on Flickr etc and I’ve resized and cropped them to fit the Air’s 11″ screen. I’ve licensed them under a Creative Commons BY NC ND UK license.

Please respect the terms of the CC license, and don’t use my photo’s in ways that are not covered by it. I am open to anyone contacting me in order to arrange any other licensed use, so please do contact me if you would like to use them in any other way. You can leave a comment here and I won’t publish it openly if it’s such a request, from there we can talk by email.

You can find them here

*Note: This is not a scientific review of Apple’s decision to not ship the Flash player with the Macbook AIR range; this is a short note about my personal experiences with that decision and what I did about it.

Over the last 10 days I’ve had the pleasure of using an 11″ MB Air as a second machine to my 17″ MBP. I’ve loved it, it’s a brilliant little device and has easily wrenched the title of ‘all time favourite laptop’ from my 12″ MacBook from about 6-7 years ago.

The first time I tried to view a site that required Flash on it, and was reminded that Apple decided to not ship the Flash plugin as standard, I thought that I’d try to live up to that decision and not install Flash until I absolutely needed to. I gave in today and installed Flash Player 10.2. The only reason it took so long for me to cave in was stubbornness and I regret it because during this time my internet browsing has been less entertaining, less engaging and at times devoid of the information I wanted. This is not because of the ‘misuse’ of Flash on websites; most of the information I wanted, but didn’t get, was because Flash was the ideal and possibly the only medium capable of delivering it.

Slideshare for instance. I’m building some Facebook integration for our player and I was told about a great deck available on Slideshare. I went to look, and despite there being some noise on the web recently about Slideshare and html5, I could only view it in Flash. How about Youtube? There is an html5 player available on Youtube of course, but it’s not set by default and as a dip in / dip out site for me, finding it and changing settings is not something I want to do. So, in the last 10 days, whenever someone has linked a Youtube video and I’ve been on the AIR, I’ve missed out as a result.

Now that I have installed Flash, I can honestly say that I’ve not noticed any performance issues, whether in terms of battery life or graphics. I’m sure that if you were to monitor this kind of thing at the chipset level then you may see some difference but in all honesty as an everyday usage issue it’s non-existent.

My conclusion:

1. Flash does not impair the day to day performance or experience of the new Macbook AIR range
2. The lack of Flash does impair your browsing experience and will prevent you from seeing a lot of great content

So Apple. You’re wrong about Flash and not shipping the plugin on the AIR is the wrong decision for your users. It’s a stupid decision whatever your reasons.

I’m an avid user of Adobe’s Lightroom photo management software, and over the years (well, since V2) I’ve developed a good number of presets that I use on my photos like these:

and:

I’m thinking I may bundle a few of them together and put them up here for others to grab and use.

Most of my presets tend to be quite subtle and not stray too far into the x-processing territory that’s quite fashionable at the moment. I use them to enhance my photos more than artistically alter them generally. That said, there are some that are quite far from ‘subtle’ like:

If this is something that would be interesting to you, then please leave a comment or shoot me an email if you have my address? I don’t want to take time out if folks think there are enough Lightroom assets out there already.

Copenhagen Airport Train Station

Originally uploaded by Pete Barr-Watson

On a very cold and windy Friday morning… I quite like how the lighting turned out on this – I had expected it to be a bit too dark for much detail…

Land Rover L2B 2010-2

Originally uploaded by Pete Barr-Watson

One of my remaining vices… Land Rovers.

This little series example was very likeable indeed

Photograph taken at the annual London to Brighton Land Rover run.

Oh my. This is a thing of beauty (not to mention functionality, practicality etc).

The concept of a photographer really having got his hands dirty designing a bag of this quality and practicality is very appealing. I’m a self-confessed bag whore and if this was available for shipping to the UK I’d be writing a review here instead – sadly, it’s US only and therefore I have to make do with the dedicated mini-site and video that Ari Marcopoulos made about the bag too:

Incase, if you read this – please make this available in the UK too? After many years of trying I still have not found the perfect day-bag for my Leica and other necessities – this looks very promising…