Screenshots

Thanks be to the good people at Mabusse, developers of Photo Extractor, the free windows application that can extract otherwise lost photo data from a corrupted SD Card.

Enjoy the software author's webpage:

Do You take a digital camera with You to the holiday? Have You ever seen a message on the display about the flash card is unreadable and will be formatted now?

Google is awash with crappy demo versions of similar products that do the same thing, only for money. Photo Extractor is free, functional, and saved the day. If you have a damaged memory card, before you give up and send your photos away into the ether, try Photo Extractor. Some of the photo rescue programs I saw while hunting around wanted as much as $90 for a functinoally identical product. Worse, some of the photo rescue programs show you your unrevoverd photos and stamp "DEMO VERSION" across the top of them, effectively holding your photos hostage for $30 in blood money. Screw you guys.

Photo Extractor just works, works well, and doesn't try to exploit my panic over my lost photos for their financial gain.

I don't have any eGold, but if I did, I'd, as the author of Photo Extractor suggests, "transfer 10 USD to my e-gold account 1324912. "

Do I have to point out how this is broken? Today It struck me as particularly broken, and given that today is Festivus, a day set aside for the airing of grievances, among other things.

I know that I am probably asking too much, but I wish that Amazon would spend less time telling me what else I should buy and instead create a teeny tiny script charged with noodling out that a "larger" image doesn't really exist. Don't show me the same image in a larger frame and pretend that it's larger. That just irritates me and confuses people who don't understand that Amazon isn't a store, it's an unintelligent collection of computer programs running in crystal box stuffed under Athena's bedroll.

Seriously, though. If I'm going to buy this incredibly awesome Kramerica Industries T-shirt, I need to know what the t-shirt says, and I'd like to get a good view of the artwork. The case for this Vandelay Industries shirt is even stronger, but at least the stupidity extends (and to be fair probably starts) at the source shop.

Clicking on the "See Larger Image" button should give you a higher resolution image, not just an embiggened version of the photo you've already seen. Here's a ridiculous brick-and-mortar analogy. Imagine asking for a clerk to get some jewelry out of the case so you can see it up closer, and the clerk dutifully hands you a 1/4 scale replica of the jewelry for you too look at.  It's not a question of bigness, it's a question of fidelity.

Transformers Cartoons are the best Joost has to offer? Please. There is also GI-JOE. LOOK MOMS! THE INTERNET IS NEW and MODERN! I CAN SEES MY CARTOONS.

I guess if I had to pick a locked down, DRM'd, not-really-tv-on-demand client, I'd pick the one that has a huge selection of Anime and didn't have an absolutely baffling user interface and pop up advertising windows.

They say that the real value in Joost is the Social aspect. You can bring up chats based on the channel you're watching.Maybe I just don't get it. But I don't need TV to be a social phenomenon. I watch TV because I like the stories. I don't need special Internet TV buddies.

Joost doesn't bring me anything that Miro + TV-RSS doesn't. Except legality. Crap.

At the December Web414 meeting I gave a presentation on Prism (Don't call it Webrunner.) Thanks to the instructions on this fine post I did a meta-meta thing on my presentation by installing prism into a fresh virtualization of Ubuntu and using GoogleDocs to show my presentation. You can check out that presentation here. What I didn't have in my presentation was any kind of data about the difference between Prism's system footprint versus FireFox's system footprint.

So, here's a non-scientific comparison of Six Tabs in Firefox vs. Six instances of  Prism all doing basically the same thing. First, I launched and logged in to six instances of prism. One each, running Google Docs, Gmail, Google Reader, Twitter, Last.FM, and Flickr.

And here's the System Resources window.

Then, I launched and opened the same six web sites in tabs in Firefox.

And here's the system resources window in that case:

Summary:

It would appear that reducing your browser's impact on your system is not a significant reason to use Prism. Again, I didn't really study any kind of significant benchmarks beyond these basic screen shots, so if anyone has any scientific data that can prove me wrong, I'd love to see it.  

That doesn't mean, either, than there aren't non-footprint-related reasons to use Prism. Separate processes, easy Desktop integration, reduced UI, and easy deployability are all reasons to put Prism on your machine.

These are all good reasons to encourage Prism's use, but it would appear, unscientifically, that reduced footprint ain't one of them.