Monthly Archive for January, 2008

Colour Calibration with Huey Pro

Published
by
Philip
on January 28, 2008
in and
. 0 Comments

On my last trip to Hawaii I picked up a Pantone Huey Pro as colour calibration has always been a bit of a sticking point with me and the laptop’s not so great LCD screen (which I rarely use nowadays). You can calibrate by eye but it’s probably better to just let a real calibrator do the job for you.

Anyhow, the Huey Pro is a small USB device with stand that plugs in and handles calibration of the monitor as well as dynamic light adjustment which supposedly keeps things fairly consistent across different lighting situations. The calibration is quite straight forward, you simply put the Huey to the middle of the screen and let it display various colours once the monitor is warmed up, it measures and generates a profile to fix any aberrant colour issues.

After calibrating my Dell monitor went from a nasty bright yellow tint to a deeper, richer blue which is what I’m used to seeing now. The best thing is to save your old profile, then switch from the calibrated one to the previous one as a test after a few days of getting used to the new profile to see how bad the old profile was for you.

The Huey Pro software runs under Mac OS X and Windows, however for GNU/Linux users you can get Argyll here which works with the Huey Pro for calibrating under GNU/Linux or Mac OS X. From what I can see you can use the Huey Pro software for simple, fast calibration, or the Argyll software for more in depth (and longer) tests.

Anyhow, worth looking into if you want to make sure those photos and video look pretty close to what you hope they do in real life, unfortunately doesn’t calibrate printers or scanners so you’ll need to get more expensive hardware and software to really get everything calibrated, but for me it’s good enough for the moment.

‘Osaka’ lives in USA?

Published
by
Philip
on January 22, 2008
in
. 0 Comments

OK, whatever reason I type up here for finding the following video is probably going to sound lame, but here goes. On my recent trip to Hawaii I picked up an iPod Touch and decided when I got home to browse YouTube to try out wireless video streaming. Being bored, I decided to cruise out the highest watched videos for the week.

One of them was this:

Now, before you click it’s about 36 seconds of Magi doing… nothing. Appropriately enough, it’s called Nothing 11. I had the sudden image of Ayumu aka ‘Osaka’ from Azumanga Daiou flit into my head and some of the follow up videos (one where she quaffs some shoyuu) would be, well, pretty Osaka like if you know what I mean.

AlterNet: Exposing Anti-Choice Anti-Abortion Clinics

Published
by
Philip
on January 20, 2008
in
. 0 Comments

According to AlterNet, apparently bogus crisis pregnancy clinics are springing up in USA attempting to lure people in where they can then pressure you into not having an abortion, deliberately lying to you until the legal date for having an abortion has passed or conducting a campaign of harassment and whistleblowing.

Read about it from AlterNet here. Warning - some of the tactics may be pretty disturbing.

Hitler on HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray

Published
by
Philip
on January 15, 2008
in
. 0 Comments

Sacolton gives their take on the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray wars… with Hitler giving a helping hand and some nicely rewritten subtitles.

Back at work… with useless USB toys

Published
by
Philip
on January 14, 2008
in
. 0 Comments

I got back at work today after a short night’s sleep after flying back almost non-stop from Hawaii. Anyhow, found this odd dog-like USB dongle plugged into my keyboard, handed it over to the guy next to me thinking it was a mutant USB memory key from Japan (you know, like the sushi ones). I was wrong. This has just taken the top of my list of useless USB gadgets:

Humping USB Dog