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Macro Mystery #3

Last time was a little too easy. The shape of the tine and the metal gave it away, but if it was just a picture of scratched up metal it would have been too generic. This time there’s no dead giveaway and I got an old 24mm manual focus lens off Ebay to reverse and give me more magnification. Good luck! If you missed the first 2 Macro Mysteries click “Photography” over in the sidebar. If you don’t want to know what it is don’t click through to the comments. I’ll have to devise some way to let people hide their answers so others can comment without it being ruined.

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Hawaii Panoramas

Finally got some of the panoramas I took in Hawaii stitched together and there’s 2 I want to share that I really like. The shot of the river was kind of by accident, we were driving on the bypass road south of Lihue and happened up a turnout with a nice view of the Menehune Fishpond and the river going into Nawiliwili Bay. The canyon shot is Waimea canyon over on the west side of Kauai; the drive all the way up is well worth it since it ends in a view of the Napali Coast. Enjoy.

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Macro Mystery #2

Hope you are already for another brain buster, just not quite as difficult as the last one. If you missed out on Macro Mystery #1 check it out for a little background on how I actually took the photo. This time around I used a reversing adapter that let’s me mount a 50mm lens backwards, giving me the magnification I need. I also used a tripod so I could fine tune the focus. So here goes.

Update: The image covers about 1/4 inch square and to keep people guessing longer I’ve made the text of correct answers white. So if you get stuck highlight the comments with blank spaces.

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Right-Click Taskbar Atrocity

I’m on the computer pretty much all day and I consider myself a power user; I need my system to behave the way I expect to maintain productivity and sanity. Every so often something comes along that throws a wrench in that smooth operation and makes me want to flip off my monitor. Lately that wrench has been programs that decide to reinvent the wheel and change the order of the options of the taskbar right click menu. What am I talking about? Right click a program in your taskbar and look at the order, close is the bottom option right? Well let’s try another scenario, hit F1 to bring up the Microsoft’s Unhelpful Help and right-click that. You’ll probably see the same atrocity that I see below:

SERIOUSLY WHAT THE HELL! Thankfully only a handful of programs were developed by morons who thought this modification to the standard Windows experience was a good idea. One principle I follow when I do user interface design is don’t make the user think. With this right-click scenario I instinctly click the first option to close. When it doesn’t close the program I have to stop what I’m doing and figure out why my computer decided to do something different than I intended. Sorry for the rant, but these flaws are the kind of things I try to avoid in my own applications and have become more aware of.

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Finding Amazon.com products on Amazon.com

The last few times I’ve gone to buy something on Amazon I’ve run into the same problem; it is becoming more and more difficult to actually buy products fulfilled by Amazon and try to meet the $25 required for Super Saver Shipping. There is no straight forward way to tell Amazon’s search to only search products sold by Amazon. Some categories have an option to filter Amazon only products on the left, but that seems pretty hit and miss. Problem for us consumers who don’t like wading through third party products is Amazon is making too much money to care. Anywhere from 30-50% of the units that move through their site are through third parties. The only good solution I’ve found is a site, Amazon Light, that uses Amazon’s web services to search and filter out the third party results, leaving you with search results that are nearly all eligible for free shipping. This will come in handy during the holiday shopping since I despise going to the mall.