Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 31 October 2004

# 6:20 PM

Yesterday evening I plugged my camera into my computer, preparing to go through the elaborate rigmarole that has always been required in order to get the photos off the camera.

A dialog box appeared on screen. "Hey, that's a camera," it said. "Would you like to download photos?" I pushed "yes" and got another dialog box asking for where to put them, and then it slurped all the photos off, erased the camera's memory card, and brought up a fairly spiffy thumbnail-gallery window. No fuss, no having to muck around in /proc/bus/usb as root. I'm impressed. I would be a lot more impressed if there were somewhere I could put in that it should not bother me with dialog boxes, it should just automatically download all the photos to a designated location and then give me the thumbnail window. It does not appear that this is possible.

Alas, still haven't found a Web-gallery program that I'm happy with, so I can't actually show you these photos, but allow me to assure y'all that the jack-o-lanterns this year are mighty with artistic creepiness.