Update: Computer Darkroom provides comprehensive coverage of the new features.
James Duncan Davidson has a good overview of the new features in Lightroom. Mikkel Aaland also summarises what’s new. I’ve just had a play with the new sharpening option and it’s much, much better than version 1, here’s hoping the other tweaks are as good!
You can download the v1.1 updater here.
Potential new competitor to Velcro. Apparently it can hold eight times as much weight as Velcro and is practically silent. If it works well that invention’ll be worth billions. (Via Engadget.)
Mars has abandoned plans to use animal products in its chocolate, and has apologised to “upset” vegetarians. I can’t believe they were so stupid to not realise how strong the reaction would be, but I’m glad they’ve seen sense.
Public art at the Cardiff Bay barrage by Swiss artist Felice Varini.
A throughly researched article highlighting Adobe’s rip-off pricing in Europe by Nigel Moore. The Swiss and — surprise, surprise! — the UK are the worst affected, with customers paying up to twice as much as their US counterparts. (And that’s excluding sales tax.)
The O’Reilly Digital Media blog has some good tips to speed up Lightroom. For instance, rendering 1:1 (and standard) previews after import makes a huge difference, it’s well worth doing this first rather than having Lightroom compute them on the fly, as otherwise you’ll be constantly waiting for the app to catch up.
This one’s bugged the hell out of me for ages, but until I started using GNU Screen I never got round to fixing it. Desp has the skinny on fixing the backspace and forward-delete keys in OS X 10.4’s Terminal.app.
Well it’s about time! Engadget has coverage of the Apple & EMI joint event, live from London. In summary, EMI are selling their entire catalogue as a new iTunes Music Store “premium” option: $1.29/€1.29/£0.99 per song gets you a DRM-free, 256kbps AAC track. That’s 30 cents/20 pence extra for no DRM, hence better interoperability, and better audio quality. Apple will still sell “standard” EMI tracks with DRM and 128-bit AAC encoding for $0.99/€0.99/£0.79.
“Premium” albums will cost the same price as “standard” albums, which is great news; along with Apple’s new “Complete My Album” feature this will hopefully redress the “death of the album” that’s been happening since single-track purchase came into existence.
BBC News: 20 Hidden Tourist Gems in Great Britain. (I say GB rather than the UK as the Isle of Man is not part of the UK - it’s a British Isle.) And yes, you really can see England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales from the top of Snaefell on a clear day.