How much impact does a scratched lens have on quality? The results may surprise you.

An excerpt from lensretal.com.

Today marks the fifth installment of "Photoshop Top 40," the ongoing series that promises to tour you through Photoshop's 40 best features, starting at #40 and eventually working its way up to #1. (Which, assuming I've done my math right, will appear sometime in April of 2010.) Feature #36 is "Black & White," which lets you distill a full-color photograph into the best of all possible black-and-white images, one range of colors at a time.

Today we’re pleased to announce a redesign of our search results page. The changes we’ve introduced make it easier to browse through the billions of photos and videos on Flickr, and to connect to the communities that help make sense of all those photos.

A good way to see what’s changed is to search for something right off the top of your head. Take this search for delicious rhubarb pie, for example.

It's actually more useful than just painstakingly banging out 140 characters on your remote—which you can't do, incidentally, since 1.0 of the app is "read only"—using the metadata from the guide, the Twitter app will show you tweets about whatever you're watching. That's right, see people hate on A-Rod in real time while you watch the Yankees game. It uses search, rather than hashtags, to power the feed. You can also check out the standard trending topics, though you can't see what your friends up are up to—it's just the community-oriented stuff for now, so it's Twitter as pulse checker, rather than Twitter (that's coming later). Reinforcing that is the fact that the channel you're watching never goes away—it's a vertical ticker setup, essentially.

The local and streaming and internet video stuff I saw a year ago is hitting later this month, with the exception of YouTube—you'll get DailyMotion, Veoh and blip.tv. Don't hold your breath for Hulu or Netflix though, since Verizon's got their own on demand stuff they want you to watch (and they think internet video is crappier video quality). Where they see themselves, essentially, is bringing internet stuff to TV for people who don't want to go out and buy an Apple TV or Roku box. No word about that Slingbox streaming feature, though.

Stormy weather approaching the Kennedy Space Center forced NASA launch managers to order another 24-hour delay for the hard-luck crew of the shuttle Endeavour Sunday, their fourth slip since a hydrogen leak derailed an initial launch try in June. The full scrub story.

Live launch coverage

Mission Flight Plan

Hosts: Amber MacArthur, Sarah Lane, and Leo Laporte

Beer fridge speaks, Firefox 3.5, web site story, FriendFeed, Twitter2Flickr, and more.

Guest: Rich Estill and his Twittering Fridge

• Viewer Email: CaptionFish.com "Captionfish helps deaf and hard-of-hearing people find out what captioned movies are playing in their area (which is pretty infrequent and unreliable)." -- from Ralph Loizzo

Amber also has a Video Podcast @ CommandN