The picture doesn’t do it justice, it really is a cool looking lens.

Lensbaby description says this:

High refractive index, low dispersion, coated glass doublet allows tack sharp sweet spot

Um yeah. What that means in people speak is the lens gives you a window of in focus picture and the rest out of focus. It’s surprisingly flexible. Literally.

The lens body bends and gives. It can be compressed and bent in any direction. Area of focus moves accordingly. In case you’re still confused, the lens comes with an instruction book. I might add a rather upbeat sounding booklet at that.

Notice how the Guinness text is clear yet even the cap is slightly out of focus. Radiating out from that center, the photo becomes increasingly blurred.  Caps aside, this allows for some interesting portraits.

Spot on! by Tojosan, on Flickr

Notice the blur effect out from the center. Distance and angles play an important part in crafting the shot with this lens.

Click on the lens picture above, affiliate link, to buy yours today. Why get one now? Drastic price cut on Amazon for the Lensbaby 2.0 Canon EF Mount SLR Camera Lens (LB2C). Today it’s less than half the normal retail price.

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• Lensbaby turns 6 and you get the presents (crunchgear.com)

Found this gem via a great blog, PR Squared.

Scrivener Trial NaNoWriMo message

Every day I see this message pop up. It’s the Scrivener NaNoWriMo 2009 Trial message. This software is my success story for this year’s National Novel Writing Month.

Scrivener is a Mac native application geared especially towards novel and scriptwriting. It allows easy organization of work into projects, manuscripts, parts, and subdivisions, such as chapters or scenes.

Research notes are kept in the Scrivener as well. The same interface allows not only keeping text in your research section but also images and links. It’s as handy as drag and drop.

Search has a Mac native feel, a la Spotlight.  Start typing in the search bar and the left hand bar immediately responds by only showing subsections (in my case chapters) that have that search word included. In turn, the search word is highlighted in each section. I’ve found this feature especially useful for name use. Don’t want two characters with the same name right?

Search has more than just simple text searching. Here’s a snapshot of the search drop down.

Full Screen mode is nice. A single column down the center of the screen is the initial set up. Configuration is adjustable to place the column, set the column width, and the transparency of the background. Many writers will find this their preferred mode I think. It blocks out distractions well.

Document exporting is robust. Microsoft formats are selectable, as well as PDF, RTF, and plain text. Selection is allowed at differing levels, allowing any part of the document to be exported. This feature allowed easy email off to my wife of the novel.

Scrivener has other features I’ve been enjoying. It doesn’t have a couple of features I’d love though.

• Web publishing
• One click email sending

Will I be purchasing Scrivener at the end of the trial? Right now it seems a sure bet. Its interface is straightforward. There are plenty of ways to customize and export. Support is built in for CSV version management. (computer geeks will get that)

Find the Scrivener NaNoWriMo deal.

Find me as tojosan on NaNoWriMo.

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• NaNoWriMo: Half way (thinkingsofalili.blogspot.com)

Twitter has had retweeting since it began.  Sure it’s only been formalized over the last year.  Lots of the clients didn’t incorporate retweet(RT) behavior selections until recently. But soon that may all be for naught.

Twitter staff are hard at work designing in retweet functionality.  That’s right. The age of RT @name may soon be replaced by a little symbol and the Twitter user name doing the retweet.

Here’s what they have to say about why:

Retweeting is a great example of Twitter teaching us what it wants to be. The open exchange of information can have a positive global impact and the more efficient dissemination of information across the entire Twitter ecosystem is something we very much want to support. That’s why we’re planning to formalize retweeting by officially adding it to our platform and Twitter.com.

But what will it look like?

hand sketch of what Twitter retweet might look like

The short explanation:

Imagine that my simple sketch is your Twitter timeline. You’d see @ev’s tweet even though you don’t follow him because you follow me and I really wanted you to have the information that I have. (The star, reply, and retweet options only show up when you hover over a row on Twitter.com which is why you don’t see them all the time.) Also, if you find my retweets annoying, then you’ll be able to turn them off.

Seems like a long overdue feature based on current usage of the retweet. Lots of folks are going to love this, especially the folks writing clients. No more copy/paste/prefix etc.

Pros

• Easy to understand
• Easy to use
• Provides visibility to who originally tweeted and who is retweeting
• Preserves the chain of original person tweeting and follow on retweeters

Cons

• Easy to use – what I envision is folks that would have thought twice about retweeting something will no only have to click a button and go. No complexity = easy spamming.
• Loss of visibility to who is retweeting.  This sounds contradictory to the visibility pro listed above but it’s something different.  As it stands now, you’d see a retweet as a tweet by me for example and then the retweeted text.  In the future state, my name would appear in small text and though visible would be easy to ignore.
• Customization might decrease.  Currently each client can choose their own way to handle inserting retweets.  With the API option, it seems likely that client creators may opt to use the built  in functionality instead of something creative.

Either way, I welcome it as something new and hopefully something that brings more folks in that were put off by the whole concept of a retweet. No more confusion about who posted the original is a big plus for folks protective of their Twitter stream.

Cheers @ev and @biz.

BTW, I’m @tojosan on Twitter.

We’ve all lost data before due to lack of backups, and it’s quite possibly one of the worst feelings in the world. (With that in mind, when’s the last time you backed up your system?)
TweetDeck does not offer a backup option, so I was on a mission to find out how I could backup my groups. I’m a big TweetDeck user and have all of my tweeps very organized, and to lose my groups would be devastating.

Backing up Tweetdeck is important to me. It’s my primary Twitter interface. This article, by James Shiner, walks through backing up your groups. It covers Windows XP, Vista, and Mac OS X.

Tinker Gives Twitter Its Long Awaited Events Firehose

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