I’ve always secretly thought I would end up with complete amnesia some day, and forget everyone I know. It’s not much of a secret though, because I probably advertise more than is healthy the fact that I don’t remember any of my childhood, and in fact, do not remember any of my life before a year or two ago (and that number moves with me, so I won’t remember today two years from now, etc.). I’ve decided to essentially combat that problem by using my good friend, technology.

When I have downtime at home, and I’m just loafing around reading blogs or somesuch, I’ve taken to tagging friends’ names into photos of them in my Aperture library. This is comparatively easy with people I only recently met, or for those I’ve only met once (and taken pictures of them at that time) because their pictures are all in one place. But for people I’ve known for the past 3-4 years, esp. close friends, that means they’ve got pictures scattered all over the 62,000 shots I keep in there currently. It ends up being less boring than I thought it would be, because seeing all these times with friends ends up being pretty enjoyable, even if we all tend to look somewhat bored in the pictures. Refreshing all this regularly might help me remember stuff better, but even if not, I can at least check the metadata on a shot to see who my friends are.

As an aside, check out this guy Eric’s blog. He’s genius with sounds.

News to any of you stumbling on this website because of my occasional mentions of Aperture. Picturecode’s Noise Ninja, long since my favorite noise-reduction utility very recently came out with an Aperture plugin for their software, which is great news as per Aperture having seemingly useless noise-reduction functions integrated into it. It lacks a few features that the full photoshop plugin has (like auto-selecting camera profiles) but it still has the main features I found myself using, which typically was auto-profiling, and then adjusting the amounts where needed. If I’m reading it right, it can only be purchased with, or as an upgrade to, any existing noise ninja license. (The cost is $20 as an upgrade). I suggest getting the pro bundle, which while costing a bit more, allows for edits on 16-bit images so you’re not ditching any color information, plus multi-core and batch support for when you need to noise-reduce a big swath of images at once.

Even without the Aperture plugin, anyone using Photoshop who ever shoots above ISO 800 has use for this product, so take a look. You can download any of their software at any time, to try it out, but will just be saved with watermarks or grid lines without purchasing a license.

Keep it real, folks.

This is a pretty unexpected use for an iphone, at least for me. When I was a kid, I used to read like a fiend. I was in 8th grade doing book reports on 1,300 page books, and teachers kept suggesting that I split them into multiple book reports, but I always did them as one so I could go through more books. By the time I was done with high school however, I could barely read. I’m not totally sure if it’s stress or if a bunch of goo leaked out of my brain stem or something but basically I quickly became extremely dyslexic. My brain moves fast, or at least fast enough that usually when speaking I can replace words that I screw up before I speak them with the proper words. Ironically, this makes me generally pretty good at word games, as I often see words that aren’t there yet (which, in the case of scrabble for example, is how you play the game).

However, in reading, it’s very problematic for me. There are a few tricks that normally help me in reading on a computer (using icons, for example, but also sometimes highlighting lines so I don’t lose my place, increasing text size, adding my own line breaks, etc.) that sadly aren’t available when normally reading a book.

But then, the iphone 2.0 software came out, and I found myself wandering through the App store, stumbling across all the individually sold books that are spamming the store. Everyone was complaining about them, saying that 1. they don’t work right, 2. they’re cluttering the store, making it hard to find things etc. So I thought yeah! There has to be a free book-reading app for the iphone. Maybe it won’t be that cool, but I’d like to see how it manages multiple books.

So I downloaded Stanza, and next thing you know I’m up and running, reading War and Peace (if you’re going to go, go all out, I say). But the thing that surprises me immediately upon checking it out, is that it’s working. I’m actually reading through this book, crazy Russian names, French phrases and all. But the most interesting thing to me is that it didn’t really solve my problem with mixing up words or letters, but it brought it down to a scale that was manageable. For me to look at an entire page of text on a blog or website requires a bunch of workarounds like the ones I mentioned above to try to keep it all sorted out in my mind, and even then I often find myself needing to reread an entire paragraph because my brain jumbles up what my eyes just panned over. But with a book on the iphone, there are only 5-6 lines on a page. When I get mixed up, it’s very easy to find where I lost myself, and reread it, and move on without taking too much additional time. Many might think that taking a 1500 page book and turning it into like 6,000 pages to be problematic, but in my case, that’s exactly what I needed.

So yeah, for my few quibbles about the iphone earlier, this little feature easily makes up for it.