Some cool top 10 laptop brands images:
PopTech 2010: Geeks at the Opera – 84
Image by Ed Yourdon
Note: this photo was published in an undated (mid-Nov 2010) iinetbrush-dot-com blog about Powerbook computers, with the same title and detailed notes as what I had written here on this Flickr page. It was also published in a Nov 25, 2010 Cheap Smart Phones blog, also with the same title and detailed notes that I had written here on this Flickr page. And it was published in a Dec 16, 2010 blog titled "How to Get an iPad Repaired," even though there are no iPads to be seen in this photo.
Continuing on with the theme of "what the heck does this have to do with iPads?" in 2011, the photo was published in a Feb 8, 2011 blog titled "The Dugout – 60 seconds with Sam Allardyce – ipad how to." It was also published in a Feb 2, 2011 blog titled "How to watch movies in full screen on iPad?" And it was published in an Apr 14, 2011 blog titled "How ling [sic] will it take for an ipad to ship to Colorado?" It was also published in a Sep 10, 2011 blog titled "Laptops for All Your Needs."
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For approximately the 7th time since 2001, I attended the annual Pop!Tech conference in Camden, Maine; it’s always held in October, and this year it took place on Oct 21-23. People often ask me what Pop!Tech is all about, and the simple answer is that it deals with the interaction between technology and society — most often in the form of lectures and presentations about the innovative ways that people around the world are using today’s technology to make a positive impact on a wide range of social problems. But rather than depending on my summary of what it’s all about, I recommend that you visit the Pop!Tech web site for more information.
As I did last year, I photographed almost every Powerpoint slide presented by each of the speakers throughout the conference. Combined with the photos that I took of conference attendees, as well as a couple musical presentations and miscellaneous odds and ends that resulted in some 2,000 images over the course of three day conference — which I’ve separated into different sets, and will upload in bits and pieces over the next week or two.
I decided to separate the photos of attendees from the straightforward photos of speakers and their Powerpoint slides; the speaker/presentation slides, and photos of the speakers themselves, will appear in separate Flickr sets. This set contains about 50 images of attendees at the conference, and it will give you a good sense of the kind of people who invest their time and money to trek all the way to Camden, Maine to sit on uncomfortable seats for three days indulging in a sensory overload of materials from dozens of impassioned speakers. The attendees are from all over the U.S., and from several other countries too; they include both young and old; men and women; students and professors; academics and practitioners.
Aside from the energy, enthusiasm, and commitment to social change (with or without technology), the other thing that is obviously shared among all of these attendees is the gadgetry they use to stay in touch with the world. You’ll see an overwhelming predominance of Mac laptops in these photos; and you’ll also see a lot of iPads (which did not exist in last year’s conference,) iPhones, and other "smart phones." Keep in mind that people were generally not chatting on their phones during these presentations; instead, they were using their smart-phones to email, Twitter, IM, and browse the Web.
A couple of technical notes: I used a Nikon D700 for all of these photos, mostly with a 70-300mm zoom lens. I sat in the balcony section of the Camden Opera House, where the conference took place, so I was primarily photographing other people in the balcony section. An equally large number of attendees were seated on the main floor of the building, but I didn’t see much point in photographing the tops of their heads. Because I could increase the ISO setting on the camera all the way up to 25,600, I was able to get reasonably good images without a flash. The lights were turned on while I was photographing, but it was fairly dim in some areas; I did my best to compensate with an appropriate "white balance" setting on the camera.
backpack
Image by sparky_vision
The contents of the backpack, minus the magic box that allows me to pull anything I need for any given situation out of thin air.
From (roughly) top to bottom, left to right.
1. Wegner Gear backpack. The heart and soul of the whole operation.
2) Various pens.
3) Various Sharpies. The little ones I got myself, the big ones were a gift from mom² and my little sister Eva.
4) Lighting folder which contains a set of French curves, lighting tech sheets, set lists, and patch sheets.
5) Current Rose Brand and Dazian Fabrics catalogs.
6) Sewing kit.
7) Gel swatchbooks, Apollo and Rosco. 
Laptop / iPod power.
9) The Pocket Ref. Everything you need to know in life, and then some.
10) Moleskine notebook for set / lighting design ideas.
11) Bag for misc cables / adapters.
12) Bag for DMX / audio adapters.
13) Sekonic L-558 Cine light meter.
14) Various notebooks for audio, lighting, general, and sketching.
15) Artwork box with markers, Liquid Paper, pencil sharpener, sketching pencils, and kneaded erasers.
16) USB floppy disk drive.
17) Calculator.
18) Basic first aid kit.
19) Surefire G2 flashlight.
20) Bandit Technical Reference Disk.
21) China marker.
22) Replacement Surefire lamp.
23) Laptop screen cloth.
24) Small Fuji camera.
25) iPod
26) Mechanic’s gloves. (My SetWears are in another bag.)
27) Box of Lithium 123 batteries for flashlights.
28) Tube of Superglue.
29) Passport.
30) Crappy ear buds.
31) Various USB thumbdrives, WYSIWYG dongle, and Calibug.
32) Sunscreen.
33) Tin of mints.
34) Fluke distance meter / laser rangefinder.
35) iPhone 3GS.
36) Surefire E2L LED flashlight. (worn on left hip.)
37) Gerber knife.
38) Leatherman Wave (worn on left hip.)
39) Set of earplugs.
40) Logitech travel USB mouse.
41) 15-inch MacBook Pro.
Home Office – My Desk – Old 2005
Image by fensterbme
UPDATED: This photo is over five years old and is out-dated. If you are interested in seeing what my half of our office looks like Click Here. I’ve switched almost entirely over to Mac and things are a lot simpler overall.
Old Description of Office as it Was in 2005:
I spend a lot of time here. It’s my half of our home office (my wife has the other half). I work out of my house about 40% of the time, and my wife works out of the house in the evenings and weekends. We both work a good bit… so we are in this room more than any other in our house.
Anyways, my side of our office is filled with tech stuff. I have two large tower cases (one is a server, the other is my desktop), my work laptop, my personal laptop and my Macinotsh G4.
These machines connect to another group of computers in my basement (I have six runs of CAT5e cabling between my 2nd floor office and basement). I run my firewall (Smoothwall), two test linux systems, and another Windows XP machine running next to my music/audio stuff, all out of my basement to avoid the complete geek overrun of the office. In fact soon the server and desktop machines will also move to the basement and into a custom rack enclosure (along with my other mess of boxes downstairs) I will then build another AMD dual core system to be my desktop computer. As my current desktop is headed to be a virtualization server (VMWare) which will act as a test bed /home lab for me.
All the fast stuff connects via gigabit ethernet (Server, Main Desktop, G4 Macintosh, downstairs XP machine and my wife’s HP nc8230 laptop), the other stuff has to stay in the slow lane with fast ethernet connections, or wireless connections if I feel like walking about.
Click here to see a photo of our book case on the other side of the room.
Here is a link to the photo of my real office which isn’t nearly as exciting.
NOTE: This photo made it into Flickr’s ‘Explore" as one of the top five hundred most interesting photos on a particular day. You can see all of my photo’s that have made it into the Flickr Explore pages here.
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