WhiBal - easy white balance correction

I've taken to carrying around a RawWorkflow WhiBal card when I've been out and about practicing my photography, and had a few people ask me what it's for and how it helps.

One of the nice things about how we see is that our brains are adept at adjusting our perception of what we see according to the lighting conditions. If we know that something is white we perceive it to be white, and can generally ignore the actual lighting conditions. For example, if you put on a pair of tinted sunglasses for a few minutes everything appears to take on the tint of the glasses. And then your brain adjusts, and everything appears to be the normal colour again.

Cameras don't do this.

Smylers’ “Beginners guide to talking at conferences”

I ran in to Smylers' Talking at Conferences: A Beginners' Guide the other day. It's a very useful distillation of things you should consider if you're thinking of giving a talk at a technical conference, such as YAPC Europe 2007, where the talk was delivered.

One recommendation in particular struck me, in re ordering the material in a presentation effectively.

But there is one metric which can be applied to a talk safe in the knowledge that following it would have taken exactly the same preparation time: would the talk have been better had exactly the same content been presented but in the reverse order.

I'll be keeping that in mind next time I have to present something.

TripIt

If you're a frequent (or even semi-frequent) traveller then you may be interested in a website that I've been using for the past few months.

TripIt exists to make it easy to manage one or more travel itineraries, and to share those itineraries with other people (who can be passive viewers, or active collaborators).

Signing up is easy, requiring the minimum of personal information. Once you've registered and activated your account you can start adding to your trip itineraries. It is possible to do this the tedious, manual way, by typing in the details of you trip -- flights, car hire, accommodation bookings, and so on.

However, TripIt has an ace up its sleeve.