Oh this is clever:

The White Balance Lens Cap: “

You may think automatic white balance is good enough. But if you’ve ever had to fix dozens (or even 100s) of photos with just slightly different colors, one-by-one, you know the true meaning of pain. The White Balance Lens Cap leaves you no excuse for not properly white-balancing every situation you encounter. Simply flip your camera into custom White Balance mode, snap a photo with your White Balance Lens Cap on, and your camera creates a perfect profile of the actual lighting in front of you. Best of all, unlike a gray card, the White Balance Cap takes no extra room in your gear bag. Just replace your existing lens cap with this one and you’ll always be able to white balance with no additional equipment.

”

(Via swissmiss.)

So I was thinking what have I/We bought in the last year that was new..

Well I think top of the list are:

• Pioneer plasma TV. We already had TVs but this looks and performs about as well as you can get right now.
• Harman Kardon 7.1 surround sound amp. We needed a solution for the bedroom and living room for surround sound so I upgraded to this and kept the old amp for the bedroom. It supports Dolby TrueHD and DTS HD MA and all the lesser formats.
• MacBook – Kristin needed a computer.
• Cables. New installations require many cables.

But come to think of it a lot of stuff we have bought secondhand such as tools, bikes and so forth.

Really interesting talk hosted by Panavision about Digital Camera systems.

http://media.panavision.com/ScreeningRoom/Screening_Room/Demystifying_Part1_480p.html

First part is about pixels and worth watching if you have ever wondered what is resolution and what is a pixel about in the camera domain.

The Palm Pre looks really interesting, not sure it will get me away from lusting after an iPhone – particularly for its OS X integration but I am glad Palm is doing good.

Pity they couldn’t do better with the design though, but it looks like it could be comfortable to hold.

This is what Scoble has to say about it:

Palm did what Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft couldn’t: build a better experience than Apple: “

I don’t think its too late to provide some predictions for 2008, so here are mine.

3D Printers
We are going to be seeing a lot more on the subject, although they have been out for a while I think this is going to be the year that we are going to be hearing alot more about 3D printers and 3D printing methods, and seeing a lot more things they can do. Also the price will drop I am sure meaning that there are more around to play with.

Phones
I think the phone market will see some much better models this year, coming from the increased R&D that the iPhone would have produced. Touch screens are already advancing as proved by new models from Samsung, and software will bound to improve. Microsoft will lag behind as usual. The Samsung model SCH-W559 I am particularly interested in checking out as it has a vibrating touch screen (called VibeTonz) that provides feedback to make it feel like a mechanical device.

OS X viruses or worms.
Apple and OS X are proving increasingly popular due to ease of use and maintenance, but these increase in popularity could mean that we see an increase in nefarious activity on the platform. This is might not be as bad as it seems, it is built on quite a stable secure platform and will lead to increased security on applications and service running on the system.

Facebook backlash.
Facebook is not the elegant social networking site it once was. Too many applications, services and third parties are in on the act and now it looks like a complete mess. It might be just me but it also seems that the hosting is always one step behind. I have heard that the next release they are working on is for collapsable menus and for hiding things, but I have already taken off information from the service.

Well some links to books that I want to read ;-)

http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/007183.html

“Competitive Strategy” by Michael Porter
“Execution” by Larry Bossidy, Ram Charan, and Charles Burck
“In Search of Excellence” by Tom Peters and Bob Waterman
“Good to Great” by Jim Collins
“The Effective Executive” by Peter Drucker

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0735605351/

“Software Estimation: Demystifying the Black Art” by Steve McConnell

“The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable”

I am sure this list will get longer…