A note from the underground: pollution in China

For the past week, Beijing has been deluged under the worst pollution I've ever seen. Here's a terrifying photo a friend of mine took this morning in Guomao, the trade center of Beijing:

A beautiful "art hotel" in Beijing [photos]

The Jiangtai Art Hotel in Beijing is one of the most amazing places I've stayed in my life. The "art hotel" name is more than symbolic: the entire hotel is covered with art of various sorts. The lobby:

Too many contacts? Contact Remover Plus [review; non-China]

Smartphones are great. But one annoyance thereof, concomitant with the ability to centralize your contacts from many different sources (Facebook, Gmail, Skype, telephone contacts, etc.) is that you end up with a lot of duplicate contacts.

A great way to remove them is an app called Contact Remover Plus (only available on Android). Here's how it works:

1. First, the app loads all of your contacts (or those from a particular account if you prefer):

2. You tell it what criteria to use (phone number, email address, name, etc.), and it looks for any duplicates:

China's insanity [photos]

Although I miss Taiwan and want to go back as soon as possible, I'm returning to China next month. (I've been back in America for the holidays.) People have been asking me why I prefer to return to China and I've been having a hard time answering. I know that I find China more exciting than any other place I've ever been, but why?

I've finally settled on using the word "crazy" to describe China. By itself, though, this word doesn't convey enough. Here are some photos of a few of the crazy things I've seen in China.

The do-it-yourself garbage truck

The beautiful street with hundreds of lanterns and no people

Why you should use RAW photos [non-China]

I've been getting into photography in the past few months - buying a used DSLR, experimenting with different lenses, taking pictures in different settings, etc. Most recently I've been learning how to edit photos on a computer. I remember reading Ken Rockwell's rather persuasive post on why RAW photos are unnecessary and not bothering.

However, after watching this tutorial I decided to try using RAW + JPEG mode with my Canon 350D, and the results were pretty convincing. (I use the freeware Lightroom replacement program Photivo.) Here's what five different processings of the same RAW file - a simple photo of a pie - look like: