There is some beautiful footage in this demo reel

This late-2006 machine served as my daily driver for about 2 1/2 years, accumulating a lot of flight miles and as you can see by some of the keys, a lot of key strokes. I eventually replaced it with a mid-2009 model and passed it along first to my daughter, and then my son.  

The battery has been effectively dead for more than a year and this week, the graphics chip started flaking out. After opening it up and cleaning what dust was in the heatsinks, the problem did not resolve itself, pointing to a more serious problem. Given it's advanced age, it was not worth repairing. We hit Craigslist and found a good deal on a used late 2012 13-inch Macbook air that Max used some of the money he's earned at his job this summer to pay for. 

I pulled the hard drive and after reformatting, I stuffed into a casing from another drive that died after getting dropped a couple of years ago so Max has some extra storage. I was going to swap the display assembly to my wife's mid-2007 model to replace the cracked (for the second time) bezel only to find that some of the connectors had been changed. 

The bezel issue is a story for another day. 

Ben Affleck is a perfectly capable actor and people should get their heads out of their collective asses. Ultimately the success or failure of his Batman portrayal will probably rest far more on the script and direction than his own acting. If the movie ends up sucking, just don't go see it. Don't create internet noise with stupid petitions.

Some very wise words from the +Detroit Free Press auto critic Mark Phelan in his column today.  Much to the chagrin of engineers and designers most people actually have no idea what they really want before someone else creates it and presents it to them. People are very bad at anticipating. 

While Peter Jackson and James Cameron are shooting all of their new projects on 4K digital cameras at 48 frames per second and in 3D, Abrams is continuing to use film to shoot Star Wars. As far as I know, even movies shot on film today immediately get digitized for editing, color correction and visual effects, so its not clear what the benefits are of shooting on film. Even for distribution the vast majority of cinemas have converted to digital projection, so the potential upside is archiving since people can still look at a piece of celluloid even if all the computers die.