funwithstuff

This deserves a yay.

Make sure you take some stills next time you're on a video shoot. In the near future, you might be able to use photographs to enhance your videos out of sight. Some fantastic, gobsmacking work here. Automatic retouching, resolution enhancement and high dynamic range for video.

Hazel's starting to speak. Her spoken vocabulary now includes "boobies" or just "bbies" along with "mummy", "daddy", "yum" and "yayayayayyayaya". This morning, though, she gave us a fresh example of learning in action. We told her that the flat thing at the edge of the room was called a "wall". Then, after being read a tiny alphabet book which she likes, she pointed at the "Ww walrus in the waves" and said "wall".

She hears, she says, we smile.

Oh, and she's walking almost everywhere now. Still with a fair likelihood of falling over backwards and often with her hands in the air like she just doesn't care.

iPhones are awesome gadgets: really, really impressive. One thing that's less than impressive is sync time. Every time you connect, it performs a "backup" that takes (for me at least) far too loooong. Given that all the details it's syncing (nearly) are on my Mac already, I'd really like to skip this step. However, should something go wrong during a sync, if you don't have a backup it's a pain to rejig everything. Solution?

Use the Sync menubar widget to "Sync Now". That takes care of bookmarks, mail accounts, contacts, calendars and all the stuff that changes frequently. Interestingly, the iPhone doesn't tell you this stuff is going on, but if you have the developer tools installed, look in Developer/Applications/Utilities for Syncrospector, with which you can track all the sync updates to your iPhone or anything else.

Managing larger media is easy too. In iTunes, select your iPhone, turn off "Automatically sync when this iPhone is connected" and turn on "Manually manage music and videos". Now you can update your music, ringtones and podcasts by dragging them to the iPhone directly, which you'd likely have to do anyway if you have a music collection of any reasonable size.

I'm still going to run a full sync once a week or so, but it's good to be able to update bookmarks etc. very quickly without going through the full backup. One last thing: if part of the sync process seems to be taking a long time, make sure there isn't a tiny dialog sitting behind other windows asking for your permission. Nothing proceeds until you say yes.

I'm much happier now.

If you also ordered your iPhone from Optus over the phone, don't believe them when they say it can't be activated outside of business hours. They were only talking about the SIM card and the phone account attached to it.

The iPhone itself, after inserting the otherwise useless unactivated SIM and hooking up to iTunes, works fine. Wifi works, downloading applications works, syncing works, and all is well with the world. Awesome, awesome box of tricks.

You know what's almost worse than not having an iPhone yet? Having just received your iPhone and not being able to activate it until Monday morning.

That's right, if you ordered from Optus by phone, you can only activate it during business hours, Monday to Friday.

What's worse it that they refused to deliver to anybody but the named account holder during the day today. No spouse or other authorised person is allowed to receive the package. So I went to the damn airport courier depot after work, then got home all excited and spent half an hour on hold with four separate people to eventually be told to wait 2.5 days.

My iPhone is inviting me to make an emergency call, but that's all.

If you've finished work or study for the day, try making a Fantastic Contraption.

I have to agree with 37 signals that Madewell is a great example of how clothes should be sold online. Videos of people (well, a model) actually moving wearing the clothes are markedly different to a single-angle still photograph.

Yesterday, Hazel managed to say "Hello Daddy" with all the diction and clarity of Scooby Doo. We know what she meant.

Today, though, was a milestone of a different sort. She took her first steps.

You know when you've been waiting for something forever, and it arrives? And it's not an iPhone? Just like that.

Haven't convinced you to see Star Trek: The Experience yet? Here's Wil Wheaton's experience of it. Warning: Contains spoilers and the article is on Suicide Girls, which isn't really safe for work.

If you can, get to Las Vegas before September 1, when Star Trek: The Experience sadly closes. It was awesome, but I'm not telling you just how why until you can't experience it for yourself. It's all about the surprise.

NSFW Gummi Lighthouses?

So sunny, so happy, such a simple way to while away a few minutes.

Vote for me! Vote for me! Vote for me! Vote for me! Vote for me! Vote for me! Vote for me! Vote for me! Vote for me! Vote for me! (Please?)

Joe Cocker, translated with captions. Enjoy.