A pro photographer friend of mine stopped using Tilt/Shift lenses for architecture, he says the image quality is noticeably better if you correct the perspective in photoshop/lightroom afterwards.
Depends. Extremely good lenses like the Fujifilm GF 30mm f/5.6 will definitely outperform correcting perspective in Photoshop. Of course, that costs many thousands of dollars.
But comparing older Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5, or the Samyang/Rokinon 24mm f/3.5 against any decent wide angle lens nowadays is a wash.
Barrel distortion is automatically corrected for any given lens by Lightroom.
There’s no logical reason why a TS lens should be sharper at the edge of its (moveable) image circle than an ultrawide should be at the edge of its fixed image circle. They both offer around the same angle of view, just at different focal lengths.
I used to own the TS-E 24mm II. It was a great lens, and using it was a process that made you slow down and consider things.
But I think your pro photographer friend is right. Modern DSLRs and a really good wide angle (say 9mm or 12mm) will let you correct in post for any shift you want.
Tilt is still not possible even in post, but I found that to be rarely useful at 24mm. For macro it would probably be useful all the time.
Shift shifts which part of the image you are implicitly cropping to. (Every photo is a crop: you’re taking a circular image plane and cropping a rectangle out of it.). Tilt tilts the focal plane.
I occasionally wish someone would make a camera with a circular sensor that captures the entire usable field of view from the lens. If nothing else, a professional camera like this could skip the extra side grip and save some bulk because there would be no need to ever hold the camera sideways.
> I occasionally wish someone would make a camera with a circular sensor that captures the entire usable field of view from the lens.
I've had the same thought, though I wanted just a 1:1 square camera sensor. It could perhaps be "oversquare", so that the corners are slightly rounded off. That wouldn't be so wasteful, since a sensor needs some shaded pixels to measure noise anyway.
Theoretically, it should be possible to create images from a static video feed that have higher resolution than the video.
Also, it would be interesting to see if an upscaling model can de trained on a specific high-res image (taken e.g. with a dslr) to upscale a video feed of the same place.
> it should be possible to create images from a static video feed that have higher resolution than the video
You can resolve past the compression artifacts and noise, but you can only do higher resolution if the video is not static. Specific techniques from astronomy are things like Bayer Drizzle, to push past the resolution of the sensor itself via slight motion, but a perfectly locked off shot won't get you extra information.
Looks great! Just last week I tried to use Calibre again and fell into the black hole that is its UI.. Thought of donating some UI/UX work but felt like that would be a multi-year project. Perhaps I could support you with UI/UX instead?
My understanding of the calibre project from watching it over the years, is that improvements are typically not welcome. Kovid Goyal already has what he wants, and if you any everyone one else want something else, you’ll need to fork (and then maintain)
He’s done amazing work, but he’s one of those very opinionated people that can quickly and arbitrarily become weirdly hostile to things, even when others offer to do the work.
I had the same impression. Calibre is immensely powerful but highly opinionated. A bit like a chaotic work bench, where you know exactly where everything is, if you are the originator of the chaos.
I don't use Calibre long enough to be bothered by the UI. I use it for at most 10 minutes every few months. Import Epub, update metadata and send to device. Spend a couple of months reading the books then repeat import process again.
Just to offer a different opinion: I never had any issues with the Calibre UI and usually get stuff done quickly and efficiently in it.
Honest question: Are there any examples of native smartphone apps which are offering such a functional wealth as Calibre does in a much better/easier way?
In Firefox's about:config switch dom.event.contextmenu.enabled to false to always allow right click. Though it is a bit unnerving on sites with custom right click menus, like discord or google docs.
Judging a message by the messenger has its downsides. Personally I try to learn can even from people I generally feel negative towards (Thiel, Hilton). It is especially egregious when the topic is science: accepting disagreement is one fundament of scientific thinking.
I thought the quote was insightful:
You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. —Ayn Rand
Putting your head in the sand likely won't help you.
Sure, it's a harmless observation, which doesn't explain much about the intent in selecting it. Here's a similar quote from Phillip K. Dick "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." There are lots of others. But this is a paper about intelligence, so choosing Rand seems important, and in fact makes it worthless.
PKD is a strange choice to quote about reality! Much of his fiction is about exploring unreal situations: that reflects a little on reality but he usually cares more about the story than hard sci-fi. E.g.:
So I ask, in my writing, What is real? Because unceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. I ought to know. I do the same thing. It is my job to create universes, as the basis of one novel after another. And I have to build them in such a way that they do not fall apart two days later. Or at least that is what my editors hope. However, I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build universes which do fall apart. I like to see them come unglued, and I like to see how the characters in the novels cope with this problem. I have a secret love of chaos.
Face value? More like facetious value. I think you missed the supreme irony. It took the author quoting Ayn Rand in a paper about how stupid people miscalibrate financial expectations as deliciously snarky. (Her delusional followers will indignantly disagree, but that's kind of the point, isn't it?) Using Ayn Rand's own words to call her and her followers idiots.
The persons child can be seen as an interface to them. The same thing happens when people meet a person with their dog - they often interact with the dog first, as it is the easier interface than telling directly to an unknown human being.
The method for extracting sugar from beets was discovered only in the Renaissance (most typically attributed to the French agronomist Olivier de Serres (1539-1619), so medieval people wouldn't have access to beet sugar even if they had beets.
