Well, another one bites the dust. One more venerable magazine that started back when you needed to actually know something to build and use a computer has ceased its print operation and gone to a scaled-back digital version. It started with an e-mail a few months ago:

As a valued reader, we regret to inform you that Dr. Dobb’s Journal ceased its standalone monthly magazine with the February 2009 issue. The quality editorial coverage you have come to expect from Dr. Dobb’s Journal continues in its sister publication. InformationWeek will now include Dr. Dobb’s Report once a month.

Today, I received another e-mail that reads:

You may have noticed that you stopped receiving your print issues of Dr. Dobb’s Journal as of February this year. Well we are proud to announce that Dr. Dobb’s has gone Green! Going forward, Dr. Dobb’s will be available exclusively in digital format as Dr. Dobb’s Digest! Subscribe Now for your FREE digital subscription!

I still fondly recall the days of BYTE, Creative Computing, and Kilobaud. The personal computer grew up at the same time that I did, and I was happy to be a part of it. I was entering programs into a simple computer one byte at a time in binary using nothing but switches and lights when I was in middle school. My next computer ran BASIC, but the interface was an noisy, mechanical teletype machine with paper tape storage. FORTRAN on punch cards, batch processed on the downtown mainframe was the norm in high school. I was always the most popular guy in my college dorm on snowy, windy nights when people could access the school’s mainframe using my Apple ][ and 300-baud modem from my room instead of trudging down to the computing center to hunt out a terminal.

I know everything, including magazines and newspapers, is going digital these days. I’m the first to sign up for on-line bill delivery and payment so I can stop all that paper from invading our mailbox. But there will always be a place in my heart for page after page of program listings that you had to hand type into your PC, and those back-of-the-book ads showing all the newest gadgets and toys and endless lists of prices.

Several years ago, when digital cameras were starting to make inroads into the film market, old-timers claimed that, while digital was indeed improving, it would never replace film for clarity, color, and sharpness. Well, The Gadget Show, based in England, decided to put the latest technology to the test. They used a pair of Nikon bodies, one digital and the other film, with a common lens, studio, and subject matter. Then they blew the images up to several stories high, hung them outside, and compared the images. There is a clear difference between the two, and the results are both surprising and, for me, extremely pleasing. Give it a watch.

There are some incredibly powerful and beautiful photos that came from 2008’s world events over at Boston.com that I’ve really enjoyed viewing. Go check it out. (Also Part 2 and Part 3.)

One of my new favorite blogs is Photoshop Disasters. They specialize in drawing attention to botched Photoshop jobs, similar to the one where the Iranians tried to pull the wool over our eyes by transforming three missile launches into four. The picture here appeared on the TV Guide web site in a special section about Olympians to watch. You’ve got to wonder how, in the fraction of a second that swimmers pop their head out of the water for a gulp of air, Michael Phelps was able to move his goggles up off his eyes, open his eyes wide, get his chin in front of the water, and manage a smile, all for the camera. )

Ever since I started taking digital photos seven years ago, I’ve been absolutely paranoid about losing them. As the old adage goes when dealing with a hard disk drive, it’s not if it will fail but when it will fail. I started making backups to CDs, then to DVDs, but there is always that time between backups that has me nervous. I’m also bad about remembering to make new discs.

I started making continuous backups to my server machine in the basement, but that drive was getting full. Besides, there is also the threat of a fire taking out all the physical copies stored in the house. With bandwidth to spare and on-line storage costs coming down, I started looking around at on-line backup solutions.

Most of the services have free trials and make perhaps 1 or 2 gig available at no cost, but the cheapest plans that included at least 10 gig run $15 or more per month. When you start adding up the costs, you’ll find that you can buy a lot of large hard drives for that kind of money. That’s when I came across Jungle Disk.

Jungle Disk uses Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3), which is an API that developers can use to create applications that use storage on Amazon’s servers. The best part is the Jungle Disk program that lives on your PC costs $20 and the monthly cost of Amazon’s storage is dirt cheap. I’m able to back up 10 gig of photos, financial, and genealogy data for about $1.50 per month, and the backup store is updated automatically and continuously in the background. It took a few days to upload everything initially, but now it takes just a few minutes a day for the changes to be sent.

If you’re looking for good, reliable, cheap on-line backups, Jungle Disk is it.

Woo hoo! We’re getting closer. A week or two ago, this box was installed at the AT&T pad down the road. I’ve been able to confirm that it’s a U-verse VRAD. I pass it every day, so I’m now watching for signs that it’s being brought to life. Unfortunately, this pad doesn’t directly serve our house, but things are looking promising. Now I’m watching the pad that does serve our house with eagle eyes. I can’t wait to get rid of Comcast.

I continue to be blown away by the free software available from Microsoft as part of their Windows Live suite. One of the things I like to do when I’m somewhere that offers a stunning view is to take a series of photos that, when stitched together, makes a very nice panorama. It results in a photo that is much more striking than you could take with a single exposure.

After I took several such photo series at the Atlanta FRC championship a few weeks ago, I started looking around for current photo stitching software. "Free" was my goal, and after looking at a few hosted on SourceForge, I was starting to get disappointed. That’s when I saw someone mention a feature of Windows Live Photo Gallery that does photo stitching.

I quickly downloaded and installed it and started poking around. With most stitching software, you have to manually assign some common points in two adjacent photos to give the software something to work with. With Photo Gallery, all you do is give it a list of photos and, bam, out pops a nearly perfect panorama. If you know where the edges are, you can find a few artifacts, but the results are better than I’ve ever seen, especially for software that requires no user tweaking. I haven’t even looked at the other features of the program. Go download it and take a took. You may also find my photo set from the championship here.

Good old Reuters. I found this first photo a little over a year ago, but it was the AP that passed it through. Here’s another one with the presidential seal perfectly behind George’s head. Does anybody even look at these things before publishing them?

Hmm. This whole Windows Live thing looks promising. I last wrote about how much I like Windows Live Writer. I now find a news item that SkyDrive provides 5 GB of free on-line storage. I’ve been looking into on-line backup storage for a while now, and I’ve not found any free ones that I like. SkyDrive looks promising, but in my quick look at it, I don’t see any nice synchronization utility that would make regular backups happen automatically in the background. I did find a few forum posts saying that kind of functionality would be nice to have. It looks like Microsoft is actively working on SkyDrive, and it’s in its infancy, so we may see something yet. Here’s hoping….

Hurray! A Hartford Superior Court judge sided with AT&T last week, overturning a DPUC ruling that U-Verse is a cable service and therefore needs a cable franchise license. This is good news for those of us who want an alternative to Comcast that doesn’t involved putting up a satellite dish. I wrote last December that I was looking forward to having service in our area, and I’m still waiting anxiously. VRADs are popping up all over Manchester, and I’m hoping they continue to move eastward toward Tolland. Fortunately, it doesn’t look like our attorney general is going to appeal the ruling, so we may be out of the woods.