How to get pictures off a Vivicam 55 under OS X

Grandpa got his grandson a $10 digital camera while they were on vacation, and I got annoyed at having to boot up the Thinkpad to get photos off of it.

Since Vivitar does not make drives for the Vivicam 55, and only made the 55B OS X compatible… I had to go do some digging to get it to work.

From Google groups I ended up in digital-products.info and grabbed 905C OSX10.4.zip. Inside are a PKG file, and a Quicktime component,

Copy the Quicktime component to /Library/QuickTime/, then install the PKG. Reboot. grumble.

Open Image capture or iPhoto.. and it works!

Anyone want 20 snapshots of the frame around our living room window?

living_room_window_frame_01.jpg

Dermal tissue of broad bean (Vicia faba) leaf



This is a close-up of the unstained dermal tissue from the underside of the leaf of Broad bean (Vicia fiba). Taken through the ocular of Olympus EX microscope, with 40x objective lens using Canon PowerShot A75, scaled down. Little donut shaped structures are a two guard cells (halves of the donut) surrounding a dark oval of stomatic pore (or stomata). Jiggsaw puzzle pieces are epidermal cells. Little “bubbles” of salad green are chlorophills, both in guard cells, and in the epidermal cells. Stomatic pore actually has a bunch of small groves, similar to fingerprints, but they were lost due to camera shake.

Photos of bacteria.



This is just an example of many photos I took in the lab of a Gram stained bacteria. 100x magnification, Leica microscope.
Part of the reason the focusing is not all that great is because I forgot to reset the diopter correction back to neutral (I am slightly near-sighted). Essentially, the idea is to take a camera (I used Canon PowerShot A75), turn off flash, and hold the camera lens right up to ocular of the microscope. You might (or might not) get better results from turning on macro mode.

Overall, not too bad, although this one was taken with exposure of a few seconds, so it shows some hand shaking too.

Sunset chaser

BoingBoing uses unicorn chasers after annoying or disturbing imagery.
I am going to follow up those counterfit Windows images with a sunset chaser. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, view from Wellington St, along the Rideau Canal locks towards Ottawa River. In the distance is the bridge to Hull, Quebec, and Museum of Civilization. On the right is Chateau Laurier and part of Major’s Hill Park behind it. Taken on May 5th, 2006.

Body Posture

Adrian Lima, or so I

I am being told that this is a photo of Adriana Lima.

Beautiful girl. But this is not an article about her beauty, at least not directly. To me this photo is exceptional because it clearly shows her posture.

I guess I should pay more attention to my own body posture, as too much time in school and in front of computer made me hunched over. Not quite a new year’s resolution, but something to keep in mind….

P.S. This photo was shamelessly stolen from here, however I am sure that a goodle search would find many more pictures of her.

My high end Apple service department….

I’ve mentioned cobbling together iBooks a few days ago.

Adam asked me to look at an out of warranty iBook that had a dysfunctional screen, and another one with dead logic board (magic smoke run out). I had an iBook without screen and without power distribution board.

After a long day I had 2 functional and one totally dead iBook.

One might ask what a high end iBook repair facility such as mine looks like.

Well, ask no longer.


Here you see my hightech repair facility (living room’s floor) with one functional iBook and 3 dysfunctional ones. Well, 2 dysfunctional and one mostly functional.

Mostly functional iBook in process of undergoing hardware tests.

Motorbike vs. Car

dAVE is complaining that all I write are boring technical articles, without any human touch. So the folowing is an experiment in blogging about “human” issues. Wish me luck…

Sunday night I were coming home, and noticed that the corner of Bronson and Gladstone was blocked off – in some directions a block away. Being curious, I wandered out there, and saw half the intersection closed off by “Do Not Cross” tape, lots of police, a car stopped half way through, and a motorcycle laying on it’s side.

From chatting with the bystanders, I learned the following:
A woman driver, going from west to east on Gladstone run a red light, and was hit by a motorbike going south to north on Bronson.
Bike rider was supposedly alive when he was taken to the hospital by an ambulance, but his right knee was totalled by a bike falling onto it.

In Soviet Russia bikes had roll cages. Even motorollers had leg protection. Statistics are against bikers – biker will fall at some point. However in North America bikes are considered to be a macho thing – people ride basically in shorts and tshirts, often without helmets.

I am as pro auto-darwination, as the next guy, however think of the police and ambulance workers that will have to scrape you off ashphalt – at least wear leather coat and pants, to keep the pieces together. Have roll cages – have you thought of the nurses? Do you know how bloody hard it is to bandage someone who has a smashed knee cup? Why make someone remember you with a curse, as you are moving on in the world?

*sigh*

As an aside, again, in Soviet Russia some bikers tended to wear really narrow thin knee high riding boots. They were a sort of indicator – during death body would relax, so quite often boots would fall off, no matter how tight fitting they were. In fact rescue/ambulance workers used that as an indicator to see if they should attempt to hospitalize a victim, or if they das alles tod.

(Above photos are licensed under licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial ShareAlike License v.2.5. If they make someone think before running a red light, I’ll be happy).