Apple’s latest update for the RAW camera support in Aperture and iPhoto adds several new models, and, rather surprisingly, a Minolta camera that was released seven years ago, the Dimage A200. This is a cost-reduced version of the A2 that I own, which these days is part of my book scanner.

These were great little cameras at the time, and the A2 in particular is an excellent studio/still-life camera, but there aren’t a lot of them available on the used market, and of course Minolta got out of the camera business a long time ago, so there’s no service.

(and, actually, book 10 started; I just didn’t have time to write anything about it earlier)

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Between the product page that focuses almost exclusively on vague descriptions of bundled apps, the extremely weak coverage of yesterday’s press conference, and the distinct lack of detailed product reviews based on actual shipping hardware, one might wonder if you’re not terribly excited about releasing the ThinkPad Tablet, even with the real digitizer hardware that makes it possible to use a stylus for more than fingerpainting.

I managed to find confirmation that it supports the regular Android Market as well as the Lenovo App Store, but does it work with Amazon’s App Store? Can you cleanly delete unwanted bundled apps, such as McAfee for Android? Does the note-taking app include all of the optional handwriting recognition languages, such as Japanese? If not, are they available as add-ons?

The product doesn’t seem to be really getting launched, y’see. Most of the press coverage is still from over a month ago, and is a mix of direct quotes from press releases and handwaved comments about how good it will be when it’s finished.

Which suggests that until this week, it was still so rough that it couldn’t be sent out for real reviews. This might have been okay if you’d been the first company to launch an Android tablet, or perhaps even if you hadn’t already shipped a similar one (without the pen) in the IdeaPad line.

[Update: the ship date keeps slipping on lenovo.com, and I don’t think it’s due to a huge number of orders…]

I make fun of Amazon’s recommendations a lot, but they do put a lot of work into improving the system, and the latest effort seems to be the interactive betterizer.

[Update: sample output; it doesn’t know me very well yet.]

[Update: with a bit more training, it offered me the complete Incredible Hulk TV series on DVD for $29, so I can’t complain.]

Google Earth now has layers for Japan Tourism and Kyoto Tourism, linked to pictures and English text provided by JNTO. Good stuff, although of course the national-level layer is pretty sparse. Fortunately, we’re going to Kyoto.

Korean girls should never rap in Japanese.

Okay, neither should Japanese girls (or, well, anyone, in any language), but somehow it’s particularly bad when the gratuitous rap break in the middle of a bouncy pop song is delivered phonetically.

Also, why such harsh autotune in a video that’s full of cuddly cuteness?

And is it just me, or does Hyuna look like a tiger cub in a room full of kittens, particularly in the dance scenes?

And why, since it sounds like very-nearly-17 SoHyun is the only one who actually speaks Japanese, does she get so few lines?

Sorry, girls, but the awful rap and autotune will keep me from buying your albums, because I don’t know if I’ll be able to listen to them without pain; I’ll stick to watching the video with my hand over the mute button (not a euphemism). Hyuna’s solo effort Bubble Pop, on the other hand, is pure eye/ear candy.

In OS X Lion, it is no longer possible to manually create 802.1x profiles. You must use the iPhone configuration tool to generate a .mobileconfig file for users to download and double-click.

…but I can now state from experience that a mosquito bite on the eyelid is quite annoying.

Also, unrelated, never run an application that’s located on an NFS file server at the other end of an OpenVPN tunnel. That hurts, too.