Michael Molino

I received my passport on Thursday. Everything is officially official.

I updated the Home Movies page. You need a password – just ask.

I don’t remember when it was that I learned I was eligible for Italian citizenship, but it was years ago…. during college I think.  Although my father naturalized (and gave up his Italian citizenship), before I was born, my mother didn’t naturalize until several years after.  In the eyes of Italy, this makes me an Italian citizen.  Since the Italian government was never made aware of my birth, for all practical purposes, I’ve always been a citizen of only the US.  This summer I finally got around to getting together all my paperwork and asking the Italian government to recognize me as a citizen.  It’s not the easiest process and involves a fair amount of research and dealing with various governments, but I kind of enjoyed the process.  I had an appointment with the Italian consulate in Newark on September 8th and they processed my request.  By mid November, I should have a legally issued Italian passport…. in addition to my legally issued US passport.  Contrary to popular belief, neither Italy nor the US have any laws against being a citizen of multiple countries and although I am having my Italian citizenship recognized, I have absolutely no intention of ever renouncing my US citizenship.  By being an Italian citizen, I have the rights of any other Italian citizen – including the right to live and work in any European Union member country without the need for any special visa.  In all likelihood, I will probably never utilize any of the benefits, but I enjoy having citizenship as a way to strengthen my Italian heritage and I will pass my dual citizenship on to my future children, potentially opening up opportunities for them.

As a child, getting the NES was probably the single greatest moment of my life.  However, since then, I have not really been into video games.  I’ll occasionally play a flash game on the web to waste some time.  I played Return To Castle Wolfenstein when it came out because blowing up Nazis is fun (and I was in college when it came out with a lot of free time).

My roommate bought a Wii and for a long time, it went pretty much unused.  I finally crawled out from under the rock I was living under and discovered Rockband 2.  It’s awesome and totally addictive.    My instrument of choice is the drums since it provides a relatively accurate experience of really playing the drums… It’s fun to rock out and practice when I have nothing else to do, but the real fun is setting up a band when friends come over and jamming together.

Laurina and I mock the Snuggie relentlessly when we see the commercials.

Yes, the actors look like cult members.

Yes, you look ridiculous in one.

No, it’s not as hard to keep a regular blanket on you as is depicted.

However, when I saw the Snuggie for sale at Staples, I had to have not one but two.  I can’t explain my desire, it just came over me and I’m so glad it did.

It’s poorly made and nothing more than a glorified robe worn backwards but it’s amazingly effective.  When flipping channels with the remote, reading, or using my laptop, it keeps me so much warmer than a regular blanket because of its built in arms.

Highly recommended product.

LogMeIn is a great and free (for non commercial use) tool.  It lets you remotely access computers through the web.  This is useful if you always leave your home computer on and want to occasionally access something on it from work or if you have family members that you constantly provide phone support for…  rather than try and walk them through a complicated process, you can take control of their computer and do it for them or demonstrate how it’s done.  I can’t tell you how much easier this has made my life.

This is the most important post I’ll make about cameras, feel free to ignore the others.

Having more megapixels only matters if you’re printing photos. As long as you have at least a 2 MP camera, you won’t notice a difference on your computer screen. The optics of your lens and the quality of your image sensor are much more important from a technical point of view. Overall, the most important thing is how good a photographer you are – no amount of megapixels will fix that. (Of course, in the real world you probably can’t find a 2 megapixel camera that has an awesome lens, but the point is a 7 megapixel DSLR can take far better pictures than a 10 megapixel point and shoot).

That being said, megapixels do matter when printing. If you plan on printing your photos, here is a handy way to figure out how many megapixels you’ll need. Take the size of the print you want to make. At the most, you’ll want a camera with as many megapixels as the smaller dimension of the print you want to make. At the least, you’ll want half that.

Huh?

Let me try explaining that with an example. If you want to make an 8×10 print, you’ll want anywhere between 4 and 8 megapixels. I figured that out by taking the smaller of the two numbers (in this case 8 is smaller than 10) using the range from half of 8 (which is 4) to 8. So…
For 4×6 prints you want anywhere from 2 to 4 megapixels.
For 5×7 prints you want anywhere from 2.5 to 5 megapixels.
For 8×10 prints you want anywhere from 4 to 8 megapixels.
For 12×16 prints you want anywhere from 6 to 12 megapixels.
For 20×30 prints you want anywhere from 10 to 20 megapixels.

Since hard drive space is cheap, I always keep my camera at the highest setting. Even if you’re only planning on printing at 4×6, there is no harm in taking the photos at 12 megapixels in case you change your mind later.

And since I want to make this the most important post chock full of good info, I’ll give you a tip on printing your photos as well. Get your prints done at Costco. I am not happy with WalGreens, Target, or CVS. Wal-Mart is OK, but half the time I’ve tried picking up prints, there has been a problem with their machine. Costco are the best. I always choose lustre (or matte) over glossy, I think prints look much better that way. You can get a 12×16 print in store for $3.

There are 3 main reasons I hear for why buying an SLR camera is a bad idea…  The first two I already covered in Digital SLRs Parts 1 and 2 and I’ll discuss the last one now: Price.

A lot of people say it’s just not worth the thousands and thousands of dollars you’ll spend when point and shoots are so good and so cheap.

You don’t have to spend more than $500 for a decent SLR set up.  This may or may not be expensive for you, but it’s certainly not unreasonable considering a point and shoot is about $200.  Many SLR owners are professionals or tech junkies that always have to have the latest offering, so you can probably score a used set up off of ebay and get a very nice used SLR for not much more than you’d spend on a new point and shoot.  One thing to note is that beginners tend to by SLR kits that come with a lens, but bodies and lenses are also sold separately.  Lenses that worked on film cameras still tend to work with modern SLRs but not everyone realizes this, so sometimes you can get an old lens at a great price because the owner thinks it’s obsolete.  Lenses are just pieces of glass, they don’t become obsolete the way electronics do.  Of course if you have the cash, $2000 could score you a real sweet SLR with a couple of different lenses and some handy accessories.  If you spend more than $2000, you should probably be a professional or really not care about wasting money.

Now that we know that equipment does help you take better photos, you don’t need to be a genius to operate an SLR, and you can get one for about $500 you might be interested in making a purchase…  my next couple posts will talk about how to pick the right camera.

Another thing I read constantly online is that SLRs are really complicated and you’re better off with a point and shoot unless your some type of super photography genius.  Anytime a deal comes up for an SLR on a website like slickdeals.net, you get an inexperienced photographer asking if it would be an appropriate camera to make the leap from point and shoot to the SLR world.  Inevevitably,  several “photographers” will chime in and say SLRs are a waste of money for most people and they’ll get better results with a cheaper point and shoot.  Maybe it’s because they are intimidated by SLRs themselves and want others to feel intimidated too.  Maybe they own a bright and shiny new SLR and want to be special so they don’t want other people buying one too.  I don’t know, but I do know this: modern digital SLRs make excellent point and shoot cameras.  Don’t get me wrong, if you get an SLR, I stronly encourage you to learn how to use it, but you don’t have to.  On auto mode, it will take better pictures than your cheapo point and shoot.

Having completed several video projects, the question came up if I could copy protect one of them.  I assumed this was no problem.  Adobe Premiere even has a simple check box to apply CSS or Macrovision encryption.  Unfortunately, neither of those options work with DVD-Rs apparently.  There is no simple method to copy protect home made DVDs.  The copy protection used by big movie studios involves writing to an area of the disc that is inaccessible to standard DVD burners; it has to be done at a DVD pressing factory.  It also involves licensing fees which aren’t cheap even if you had the equipment.

Googling has turned up a number of options, none of which are ideal, but may be useful to some.

1) If it’s really important, send it out to a plant.  This will probably be expensive and I have no recommendations for you.  Also note, that this will be just as easy to defeat as it is to defeat the copy protection the film industry uses.

2) Clearly print “DO NOT COPY” on the disc and packaging.  While this doesn’t stop anyone from doing it, it at least makes your intentions clear should you ever want to press the issue in court later.

3) I have not tried this, but apparently scratching or using a sharpie marker on the unused portion of a DVD will cause most burners to throw a “Damaged Disc Error” when attempting to copy the disc while still allowing DVD players to flawlessly read the actual movie.  If you really want to try this, hold up the data side of your DVD at an angle to the light.  Unless it’s completely filled or has very little data, you should see a circle in the middle that delineates where your burner stopped recording data.  The data is the portion closest to the center, and the outer area is the unused portion that you should damage.

4) I have not tried this either, but it is very similar to the previous recommendation.  Burn a copy of your movie to a DVD and note where the data ends.  Then burn another copy of the DVD, but add however many minutes of black video to the end of it to fill up the whole disc.  On this new copy, scratch up the portion that contains the black video (use your original dvd as a guide) or use a sharpie marker to mark it up.  Again, apparently DVD players will play the video just fine until the damaged area, but burners will see the disc as damaged and throw an error.

Since DVD-Rs are so cheap, and sine I enjoy twiddling around in front of the computer, I’ll probably try ideas 3 and 4 at some point just to satisfy my own curiosity…  I’ll post about it when I do.   Even if they do work though, none of the options are going to stop anyone with a little patience and/or smarts.