Small correction: Nikon doesn't take out the anti-aliasing filter in the D800E. They change the filter stack such that it doesn't act as an AA filter. DPreview.com's preview has an illustration of the D800/D800E filter stacks. It remains to be seen how this will differ in practice from AA-filter-less cameras such as the Leica M9.

William Blackwell has written a nice article detailing his investigations into "camera scanning" at The Agnostic Print. Quote: "I’ve recently built such a system for the University of Vermont Slide Library. [...] we hope to digitize our 150,000 slides in under three months (pre metadata inclusion) with only $3400 in equipment."

With Ctein neatly jumping from one shared geekery to another, I'll share some of my own tea-brewing wisdom. To improve your tea brewing, bear in mind these three attributes: time, temperature, and amount of leaf (ratio to water). Within bounds, increasing or decreasing any of these attributes will correspondingly increase or decrease the strength of the tea. Different teas have different "sweet spots" in this space; experimentation will teach you a lot. Darkroom hacks among you may recall exercises in changing exposures and contrast filters to understand printing controls for a single negative. You can use exercises in the same spirit to master your brewing. A case study: Many people assume that black tea requires sugar and/or milk to be drinkable. Indeed, that's the stereotype from English tea service. Using our framework above, here's a mind-expanding experiment. Start with a high quality black tea, such as the delicious Chinese Gold Yunnan tea. The aroma of this tea when dry has lovely apricot and citrus notes, but none of this comes out in the usual black-tea "5 minutes, hot" brewing. Put only a light dusting of leaves in your pot, perhaps a fifth to a tenth of a "normal" serving. If you think for a moment there's enough tea, then it's probably too much. Now brew it with full-boiling water for ten minutes. The result is astounding; a light, fruity amber-gold liqueur. The apricot notes in the dry tea are present in full-force in the cup. Likewise, the citrus notes typical of a good black tea are present, even strengthened. Sweetener or creamer is redundant. Happy steeping!

If I was reset to zero, I'd be seriously torn. I've got a nice 4x5 setup and a sweet darkroom to go with it. But if I'd lost everything, my priorities are clear. First, restore the ability to produce printed work, as I love photographing to print. Rebuilding a film and darkroom setup is more a labor of time than of money these days. My close second priority would be to ensure I can seamlessly share photographic works online. I'm also an accomplished a fiber artist, so the ability to shoot my works for online presentation, do quick photo/video tutorials, and so forth are critical. Given those two constraints and other preferences, I'd lean towards a Panasonic GX1 and lenses. In my case, I'm willing to trade off raw image quality (vs. current DSLRs) for sheer portability. The GX1 would actually be a quality upgrade from my current entry-level DSLR body, so I'd win on two fronts.

I have both a Boxwave model like the top one and a Pogo Sketch Pro (http://tenonedesign.com/sketchpro.php). The Boxwave is fine and inexpensive, but I find it far too short for any significant duration of stylus use. It's like using a nubby pencil. In contrast, the Sketch Pro has good length and just enough weight to handle well. It has the best handling of any capacitive stylus I've tried. In fact, it's the first non-writing stylus I've used aside from Wacom's offerings that feels like it was designed for more than casual use.

It's not clear that anyone has yet debunked the "multitasking" misunderstanding perpetuated here. There are precisely zero technical limitations on the iPad or any iOS system (whether 3.x or the new 4.x series) to multimedia presentations. Witness the plethora of educational and entertainment applications that provide a full audio/visual experience on iPhone and iPad. Put simply, iOS systems are full multitasking systems at the OS level. There is, however, an application level limitation that two full-blown applications must not be resident at the same time. iOS 4 now provides explicit support for certain kinds of limited background tasks, such as the ability for third-party media players to continue to play audio when another app is running. The only practical limitation this presents to Lenswork Extended on iPad is that one would not be able to listen to Lenswork Extended audio content running in a third-party app while using another application. Once iOS 4 is out for iPad, even this limitation vanishes. But that's a very different issue from any fundamental OS-level obstacle to presenting Lenswork Extended content as intended. To me the much more interesting questions are: 1) whether or how PDF support on any current application on iPad handles the Lenswork's PDF media embedding (I gather it doesn't), and 2) what are the parameters of supporting publication via some other packaging if PDF isn't a suitable path. The 'parameters' include the usual matrix of platform support, feature support, assessment of authoring workflow, and so forth. Last but not least, I'll call out Blio Reader as a publication platform worth evaluating when it ships this August. It's not yet clear whether the 1.0 release will support Lenswork Extended's multimedia needs, but Blio's design goals make it a much more likely to support a publication like Lenswork Extended than any other current ebook format aside from PDF.