27 December 2016
I don’t actually use my phone a whole lot for placing telephone calls. After getting an iPhone 7 about a month ago, this morning I received my first voicemail message on iOS 10. I was surprised to find the voicemail message audio auto-transcribed to text, and transcribed very well at that.
While an obviously useful technology, I presumed that the voicemail had been processed by Apple remotely at some server farm, as most current hip artificial intelligence applications run on servers rather than on clients or local computers, and that this was yet another affront to individual privacy.
Happily, I was mistaken. According to an Apple support article on using iOS 10 voicemail transcription, all transcription is done local on the iPhone device itself. If the transcription was done poorly, you can optionally send it to Apple for the purpose of them improving the transcription system, but otherwise, it appears that the transcribed text is in fact private to your phone!
08 August 2016
Having traced unusually low water pressure in the house to the water softener, this weekend we replaced the softener’s resin beads. Things learned:
- Emptying the old resin beads involves moving around a fairly lightweight water softener made very heavy loaded with water and old resin. It’s probably best done as a two-person job.
- There may be water pressure built up between the softener and the pipes. Be careful unhooking the unit!
- The top of the softener unit might be screwed on very tight. A large wrench may be helpful.
- Spilled resin beads make the floor / driveway surprisingly slippery. Try to avoid spills! Alternately, if you have to move a large, heavy object, sliding it along a trail of resin beads might be a plausible option…
I couldn’t find any local stores that sold resin beads, so I ordered both the resin beads and filter gravel online. With shipping charges, the total came to $200; a local plumber bid $350 to do the job for me. Not a huge savings, but if you feel up to the task, replacing resin beads can certainly be done yourself.
16 July 2016
A couple of years ago, I was contacted by the owner of Eddie’s Sweet Shop in Queens, New York. He had seen my article on searching for tutti frutti ice cream, and wanted to let me know that his shop in Queens has been selling tutti frutti ice cream for decades.
Last month, I was staying in Manhattan, and made the trip over to Queens to visit Eddie’s. Lo and behold, right there on the menu, and even spelled correctly, was tutti frutti ice cream.
I ordered a cone of it, and tried to both relish the long-awaited experience, and analyze what exactly I was tasting. It seemed like a plain ice cream base; I did not detect any vanilla, so I presume just plain ice cream.
It went too fast, and I wasn’t done relishing and analyzing. So, to the surprise of the clerk behind the counter, I ordered second cone. He asked me how long it had been since I last had tutti frutti ice cream. “This is it, right here. I’ve never had it before today. I’ve been looking for it for nearly thirty years.”
There were bits of fruit; I would guess glacé fruit. The flavor of the fruit melded lightly with the flavor of the plain ice cream. The ice cream was pink in color; I do not believe that much pink color came from the fruit, so I suppose that some food coloring was added.
And that’s about it. Tutti frutti, Italian for “all fruit”, seems to literally be ice cream with bits of fruit in it. I feel confident that I could make something at home with a consumer ice cream machine that would be similar.
(If you wanted to buy ice cream off the shelf that tastes like what I had at Eddie’s, I think the closest commonly-found option might be Breyers Cherry Vanilla. Obviously not an exact match.)
I know of at least two other shops in the United States which make tutti frutti ice cream. I hope to someday try their offerings as well, but given the history of Eddie’s Sweet Shop, I feel confident that this was authentic tutti frutti. If the other shops have something different called tutti frutti, then that may well be authentic also.
In the 1990s I learned how to make web pages, and my first web page was to write up what I had learned searching for tutti frutti ice cream. My personal web page has taken on various forms since then, but I have always kept that content around, and added to it from time to time. I have corresponded with people across the planet, many either searching themselves, and some offering help on what they remembered tutti frutti ice cream to be like.
I really don’t even like ice cream that much, and if I ate anything of the sort, which is infrequent, I’d prefer something like a turtle sundae with frozen custard, or maybe frozen yogurt with bits of chocolate candy. But thanks to Eddie’s Sweet Shop, my search for tutti frutti ice cream has come to a successful close. It is good ice cream. Should I visit Queens again, I would certainly want to go back for another cone. And maybe try another flavor too.
13 June 2016
For about a decade, Canon offer SLR camera users two high-quality ultra-wide zoom lenses: the 17-40/4 and the 16-35/2.8. The 16-35/2.8 is a full stop wider in aperture, and also about twice the price. I used the 17-40 for years, which worked great outdoors in adequate light, but, with the f4 aperture, was limited for indoor use, such as for museum exhibits and indoor architecture. The wider f2.8 aperture would help, but what I thought would really be great was image stabilization on the f4 lens.
I must not have been alone in thinking such a lens would be useful, as in 2014 they introduced 16-35/4 ultra-wide zoom lens with image stabilization, for just a couple hundred dollars more than the 17-40/4.
At 16mm
At 35mm
Image Stabilization
The image stabilization works well for moderately dim interiors, like typical museum exhibits:
When the interior lighting is extremely dim, the lens’s image stabilization might not be enough to attain a blur-free handheld photo, but it’s still better than nothing:
Of course, image stabilization only helps motion blur introduced on the photographer’s side. If your subject is moving, having the f2.8 aperture would be more helpful. But for reasonably static scenes, Canon purports that the image stabilization unit compensates for up to four stops worth of aperture, far exceeding what the f2.8 lens offers without image stabilization.
Portraits
One typically does not reach for an ultra-wide lens for portraits, but sometimes the focal length works out, both at the 35mm end:
and at the 16mm end:
I do think that the extra 5mm on the 17-40 lens is more useful than the extra 1mm on the 16-35 lens, but the image stabilization more than makes up for than in overall value.