Happy Landfill

Have you seen my friend Joe Lifrieri’s new website?

Wow, it’s been a while.

Well, see you in six months.

If you’ve not checked out Hopkins, a new six-part series on ABC, I highly recommend it.

I find it perplexing that Apple still ships notebooks with default color profiles that are absolutely horrendous. This is especially apparent on recent MacBooks; the displays on those machines are bad enough, but they look like hell with the incorrect default color calibration.

I wonder if Apple knows about this issue, or if they just don’t care. In their product literature, they always mention how “gorgeous” the displays in their notebooks are, but have they actually taken a look at any of their shipping products?

This issue appears to be the result of having multiple suppliers for a single component: the LCD panel. These panels can come from a number of different OEMs (many are sucktacular) and there may even be significant variations from panel to panel within the production run of a single model. Trying to use a one-size-fits-all color profile for these displays can lead to a wide range of results. Lately, it seems, the results have been all bad.

The sad part is that most Mac users don’t know about color calibration or realize that the colors displayed on their screen are distorted, or that there is a way to correct it.

Luckily, there are numerous ways to correctly calibrate your display’s color, such as the built-in calibration tool Mac OS X offers or third party applications such as SuperCal. Then there are the pricey software/colorimeter packages.

That said, I’m still using the default color profile that came with my MacBook Air. The display on this machine is one of the hardest I’ve had to calibrate. In the several times I have tried, I always wound up with mixed results. It’s been so difficult, in fact, that I keep switching back to the default “Color LCD” profile. It’s passable for the interim, even if the display does look somewhat faded and warm.

During my daily commute on the subway, there is often someone near me listening to headphones with the volume turned all the way up—enough so that I can actually hear their music when I am listening to mine. I wonder if they realize that they are killing their hearing, or if they just do not care.

Enjoy your tinnitus, kids.

I think I caught myself just as I was spiraling into another rant about how stupid kids are these days. That post will come later in the week or day.

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