Apple TV lands in seven new EU countries on October 4

You didn’t think Apple was going to bring iTunes music and movie stores to EU countries without also giving them the new Apple TV to watch all that new content, did you? MacRumors claims to have got word seven new EU countries will be getting their hands on Apple’s set top box come October 4th, the same day as the new iPhone event. [read]

The forever recession (and the coming revolution)

There are actually two recessions:

The first is the cyclical one, the one that inevitably comes and then inevitably goes. There’s plenty of evidence that intervention can shorten it, and also indications that overdoing a response to it is a waste or even harmful.

The other recession, though, the one with the loss of “good factory jobs” and systemic unemployment–I fear that this recession is here forever.

Why do we believe that jobs where we are paid really good money to do work that can be systemized, written in a manual and/or exported are going to come back ever? The internet has squeezed inefficiencies out of many systems, and the ability to move work around, coordinate activity and digitize data all combine to eliminate a wide swath of the jobs the industrial age created. [read]

Crop Guidelines for Portrait Photography

I thought this might be helpful.

Here’s a helpful illustration that shows acceptable places to crop when shooting portraits. Cropping at green lines should be fine, while cropping at red lines might leave you with an awkward looking photograph. [source]

Apple Upgrades FCPX with XML In and Out, Xsan Support, Free 30-Day Trial

Apple tried to get in front of user complaints about Final Cut Pro X this morning — and tried to get more users in front of FCPX — by releasing v 10.0.1 of the app. It includes XML in and out, Xsan support, and a new Roles tag for labeling audio and video clips that’s intended to take the place of track-based systems (denoting dialogue, music, effects, etc) for easy versioning and localization. And Apple really wants you to give the software a shot, offering a free 30-day trial version (that doesn’t interfere with a legacy FCP install) for the first time ever. The update is free for all FCPX users, as well. [read]

So it begins…AT&T starts sending out throttling warnings

Reddit user skelatwork shows the text he just got from AT&T.  He was over 11GB (!!) today for the month which is pretty hefty to say the least.  Next month, he’s probably going to get throttled as per the news we broke in June.

Starting October 1, smartphone customers with unlimited data plans may experience reduced speeds once their usage in a billing cycle reaches the level that puts them among the top 5 percent of heaviest data users.  These customers can still use unlimited data and their speeds will be restored with the start of the next billing cycle.  Before you are affected, we will provide multiple notices, including a grace period.

Don’t laugh Verizon users.  Yours is coming too.  Sprint, for the record, says it won’t throttle guys like Skelatwork, if they get the iphone [read]

How to See in Black and White [photography]

The very first photographs were shot in black and white. Decades later, even after the advent of color, many photographers—especially those concerned with creating works of art—continued to shoot in black and white. The format remains popular even today: nearly every consumer-level digital camera has a black and white mode available (for outputting JPEGs directly from the camera in monochrome), and all digital darkroom editing suites have at least one (and usually multiple) means of changing a color photograph to black and white. Indeed, there are expensive plugins available for Photoshop that are entirely devoted to the process of converting a color shot into black and white, and there dozens of groups on Flickr and Picassa and 500px that are exclusive to black and white photography. [read]

3 Penguins Photography on Flickr

The new Kindles: Which to choose?

Amazon’s Kindle product line, which expanded with three new models Wednesday, has come a long way since it was first introduced in 2007.
That original $399 Kindle had a poor design–I bought one and returned it after a couple of weeks. The $359 Kindle 2 introduced in 2009 was better—a lot better—and I bought one and kept it. The 2010 model continued the trend of a rapidly declining price ($189 for a Wi-Fi and 3G version, $139 for a Wi-Fi-only model) and rapidly improving hardware design. (Let’s not speak of the enormous and expensive Kindle DX, please.) [read]

Makeup for Photography: The Basics

I’m not necessarily suggesting you wear makeup yourself, although that might be an improvement for some of you mugs, along with shaving and a clean shirt, but you really do need to understand makeup basics for portrait clients and models.

Software has come a long way and most makeup mistakes and oversights can be corrected in post.  Even at that, it’s hard to beat a really professional makeup artist and I like to capture the best quality product I can in the camera before turning to post-processing wizardry.

I miss the days when a shoot included a hair stylist and makeup artist.  You can still find those on really big shoots on a commercial set, but these days it needs to be a big job. More often models are doing their own makeup and the experienced ones know exactly how to make theirs look perfect on camera. [read]

Facebook Users Beware: Facebook’s New Feature Could Embarrass You

If you didn’t watch Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook announcements last week — and of course the vast majority of Facebook users did not — you may be in for a surprise. Aside from the dramatically redesigned Facebook Timeline profile pages, which roll out in the coming weeks (and which I’ve grown to love), Facebook’s new system to auto-share what you do around the web may catch many Facebook addicts off guard.

In fact, even those people who know exactly how this new feature works may need to be on guard against sharing some seriously embarrassing updates. [read]

Women-Led Startups Are The Key To New Job Creation: Report

So says a new paper from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “If we’re looking for an answer to jobs,” Kauffman vice president Lesa Mitchell tells us, “it’s right in front of our face.”

The country is in a recession, and Washington is tangling over how to create new jobs, but, according to a new paper from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, there’s a fairly simple potential source of them sitting right under our noses.

Women start high-growth companies, like those in high tech, at lower rates than men do, Kauffman-supported research has found. But the reason for this is systemic, rather than due to women’s innate capacity for entrepreneurialism, says the paper, titled “Overcoming the Gender Gap: Women Entrepreneurs as Economic Drivers.” [read]