So how did everything taste? On the whole, surprisingly good! But before we delve into our detailed taste test, a word about what we were eating. I spoke to Vickie Kloeris, the Subsystem Manager for Shuttle and ISS Food Systems—NASA’s head chef—and she walked me through exactly what goes into the vittles consumed in orbit by our astronauts.

Essentially, NASA does exactly what the army does with its MREs (Meals Ready to Eat), with a few exceptions: MREs are designed to keep an 18- to 22-year-old, extremely active soldier fuelled and ready, whereas space food must be nutritionally tailored to older and less-active adults, so in general, space food is lower in fat, calories and salt.

For space food, the main criteria are spoilage resistance, easy preparation and consumption in microgravity (ie no potato chips), plus storage-space considerations. There are five classifications of space foods: rehydrateable (just add water), thermostabilised (already wet, heat in its metallic/plastic pouch and eat), irradiated (cooked irradiated meats ready to eat), intermediate moisture (meaning dried fruits, jerky, and such) and natural form (better known as junk food—ready to eat without any prep or storage concerns).

On the Space Station, there is a food prep area in the Russian half that has a fold-down dining table along with food package heaters. But soon, as the station is expanded to accommodate a crew of six later this month, a second, smaller food prep area will be added—this time equipped with a chiller, which is a first for the station—refrigeration specifically for food products. Cold drinks in space!

Vickie was kind enough to ship out a batch of goodies that didn’t make it into orbit from the last ISS mission, and we dined on them for lunch. We didn’t have a specialised thermostabilised pouch heater—and you can’t microwave these puppies—so we just dunked them in boiling water for a while until they heated through. We made it through six courses including dessert:

Here, our menu in detail:

First Course: Southwestern Corn, Potato Medley
While it may have looked a little rough in the thermostabilised packet, corn was actually pretty tasty, and had the correct consistency. The Southwest was apparently represented by flecks of red and green pepper and a mild spiciness.

But the potato medley—oh the potato medley. Don’t know what to say—there was a really strange chemical bitterness, from where it came I do not know. But not good.
Rating: Two Stars

Second Course: Breakfast Sausage Links, Curry Sauce w/ Vegetables
Awesome. Fingering pork sausage links inside a packet is not super pleasant, let me tell you, but out of the packet they were perfectly edible—fairly salty and a little stringy and dry, but with good taste. And dipped in the curry sauce? Yes. Sausages and curry go incredibly well together here on earth, and in space it’s no different.
Rating: Four Stars

Third Course: Beef Enchiladas, Baked Beans, Tortillas
Wow. Delicious. As the busted enchiladas slid out of the packet, we were scared. But the flavour was right on—equal to if not better than any frozen enchilada you can get at the store. And the baked beans—oh my—Adam had three helpings. Taste was great, consistency perfect—and wrapped in a tortilla, which Kloeris says is one of the most versatile space foods (understandable), the combination was fantastic. I could fuel my spacewalks with this combo for months.
Rating: Five Stars

Fourth Course: Chicken Teriyaki, Creamed Spinach
Yikes. As you saw in the video, the chicken teriyaki was nasty. I don’t know if we got a bad pouch or what, but the chicken was mushy to the point of being hardly recognisable as chicken. And the smell. Oh the smell. Not sure what went wrong here, but this was more akin to dog food than teriyaki. AVOID!

As for the creamed spinach, that was our only freeze-dried food item. In space, you would use the small tube opening to inject hot water with a syringe and smush it around in the package until it was done, but we reconstituted it in a bowl, and it came out alright. Kind of bland, but edible. We didn’t spend long on it though because we wanted that chicken teriyaki out of our sight as soon as possible.
Rating: Zero Stars

Fifth Course: Chicken w/ Peanut Sauce, Green Beans w/ Potatoes
Definitely an improvement. The chicken here was in more recognisable texture and shape, and the peanut sauce, while not particularly delicious, was certainly more edible than the teriyaki sauce. And the green beans and potatoes were pretty much the same as your typical canned fare, so not bad at all.
Rating: Three stars

Dessert: Brownies, Cocoa, Kona Coffee
The brownies were basically Little Debbie brownies—in fact, they may have been exactly that, as NASA does purchase off-the-shelf snacks to send up after they’re evaluated and repackaged. And the drinks were essentially the same as their earthly equivalents—only in space, you rehydrate with the same syringe-in-bag technique. Both were tasty.
Rating: Four Stars

You may be surprised to see no freeze-dried ice cream here for dessert—the item most commonly associated with “space food.” Well, that’s because actual freeze-dried ice cream was only eaten on one Apollo mission—its flavour is just too unlike ice cream to be enjoyed, and its excessive crumbliness made it especially difficult to eat and clean up in microgravity. Thus, its relegation to museum gift shops and novelty stores everywhere.

So in conclusion, I’d say our lunch was highly enjoyable. We went through what every astronaut does before their missions—a sampling of the available foods to see what they like. If Adam and I were going up, you can guess our containers would be full of beef enchiladas, baked beans, sausages and curry sauce, and there wouldn’t be any chicken teriyaki in sight.

Now I want to try everything on the menu:

Tony Bongiovi, producer of lots of great rock albums and founder of the legendary Power Station recording studio here in NYC and second cousin to Jon Bon helped iHome develop said processing profile, called DPS. Basically, it’s like the “loudness” switch on your dad’s stereo—it boosts high- and low-end frequency, but the claim to newness here is that the software actively evaluates the frequency profile of whatever MP3s you feed into it and provides boost where it’s needed. Dubious? Maybe. And does it sound more amazing than any iPod dock ever? Of course not.

I heard it next to some Yamaha NS-10 studio monitors (playing 160kbps Apple Store MP3s) and yeah, the monitors sounded better. Of course. But the iHome doesn’t sound bad.

Keep in mind you can get a great (and probably superior, soundwise) 2.1 setup for half the cost of the $US300 iP1, but if you need an actual dock input, love the speakers-through-lucite look and have $US300 to burn, sure, why not.

Granted, we also like shooting HD video with every possible thing we own, but it’s nice to see some fairly unique photography-focused features pop up here and there, like in-camera high dynamic range shooting for more balanced exposure in unevenly lit scenes, to remind us that we can use our cameras to take photos too; that’s exactly what Ricoh is going for, and even better, it’s all packed into a nice minimalistic camera body that feels solid and light at the same time and has great style. I like the black one even better than the silver, but the black review unit we received had a faulty lens cover.

Specs:
• 1/2.3″ CMOS Sensor, 9.29MP
• 28-200mm, f/3.3-f/5.2 optical zoom lens (7.1x)
• 1cm macro focusing distance
• 7fps continuous shooting, with 60fps and 120fps 1-second burst shooting modes
• “Dynamic Range Double Shot” mode for in-camera HDR, 12ev stops of coverage
• VGA movie mode
• ISO up to 1600

In-Camera High Dynamic Range
The major selling point of the CX1 is its ability to take two exposures of an unevenly lit scene and combine them into a single shot that more accurately captures what your human eye sees. We did a guide to doing the exact same thing with Photoshop, but the CX1 joins just a few other cameras that do it automatically. And it works.

Granted, you can get much more dramatic results (and way more exposure lee-way) by dumping 7 RAW files into Photoshop, and it won’t work perfectly in every situation (night shots don’t show much effect), but it’s a very cool feature to play around with. And keep in mind, this is HDR of the actually useful, exposure-enhancing variety—no clown vomit colours here.

Here’s an example shot of Matt hard at work making Gizmodo blog sausage:

As you can see, the shot in HDR mode captures detail from out the window above Matt’s head without greatly darkening the rest of the scene, like his face. HDR mode takes an additional second or so to capture and drops your shutter speed down a stop or two, but other than that, it’s indistinguishable from regular shooting. Very nicely done.

Image Quality/Sensitiviy
Overall I found it to be very good—nice colours with a bit of the video-y colour palette many other point-and-shoots have but nothing extreme. ISO sensitivity is OK, but not great: ISO 800 is useable at small sizes, but you’ll want to stick to ISO 400 or below to keep the noise in check for most shots:

One thing that’s awesome is the CX1’s macro-mode, as is the case on lots of newer point-and-shoots. It focuses down to one centimeter, has a movable focus point (many macro modes get caught hunting if what you want in focus isn’t right in the middle of the frame) and is razor sharp. Check out this clementine peel:

Shooting With the CX1
It’s a pretty nice experience, due in large part to the wide range of custom functions available. A “Function” button, one of four on the camera’s back, can be assigned one of nine jobs, from locking exposure to bracketing to setting the macro focus point.

And in addition, four quick-access function buttons that pop up when you hit the main “OK” button can also be custom-defined to whatever you want for immediate access to exposure compensation, white balance, ISO, image size—10 possible options. Super-handy.

The 60fps and 120fps burst modes (limited to VGA resolution) are usable, but they’re not as smoothly implemented as other parts of the camera. It’s really hard to know exactly when recording starts, and the output is a practically useless .MPO file, which you have to open in Ricoh’s software, split the MPO out into 120 JPEGs, then, if you want a movie, link them back together in something like Quicktime. That’s what I did here; the results are nice (although limited to one second), but it’s a pain in the arse since even VLC can’t open these MPO files.

Conclusion
In-camera HDR is not a gimmick here—it’s both usable and useful. Which is awesome. At $US370, the CX1 is in the same price ballpark as most higher-end compacts, so your choice is basically HD video or the CX1’s unique photo features. The CX1 implements the latter very nicely, in a classically sleek, compact metal body. It’s not a huge surprise that tons of Japanese pros carry a Ricoh P+S in their pocket to supplement their DSLRs.

In-camera HDR works well and is handy

Super-sharp macro mode

Deeply customizable interface

Great-looking body

Decent ISO sensitivity

High-speed burst kind of sucks

No HD video capture

No RAW shooting or manual exposure controls

[Ricoh]

Everything associated with this is so deeply stupid I want to cry. From this:

Our Home of the Year sits among the Hollywood Hills, where the stars shine as brightly inside the homes as they do in the night sky.

…to the two flatscreen TVs in the bedroom facing the same direction…

…to the giant plasma screen in the bathroom so the soaking rich fucks within can watch TV instead of looking at the amazing view of the aforementioned gilt Hollywood Hills. It is all controlled by a Crestron automation system, which in turn is controlled by Satan.

But hey, look, one of those three-screened racing simulator things:

And is it a surprise that custom-installer geeks have horrible taste in actual homes? I guess some people like living in a rendered Sharper Image catalog.

But as Silvio Dante once said: “Disgusting” [Electronic House]

At least, I would imagine he got pretty close. We’d have to ask Mars Phoenix to make verify though.

Fournier bases his photography projects around the works of Jules Verne—here, of course, From the Earth to the Moon is the inspirations. Along with these fantastic quasi-martian landscapes, Fournier also photographed many of the world’s most important locations related to space exploration, including some beautiful shots of Baikonur cosmodrome in Kazakhstan that were used in Wired magazine.

Beautiful stuff—check out Fournier’s site for more. [Vincent Fournier via BUILD]

First it was Beats by Dre headphones in the locker room, now it’s Flip Minos awkwardly distributed onstage at the MVP crowning. By the looks of it, Delonte West is pretty used to the Santa LeBron treatment—he’s still waiting for the Range. [Sporting News]

I must say the results are kind of unimpressive. Nothing like heading to North Korea. But hey, it’s May Fourth. [VBS TV via Gothamist]

It’s $20. [Threadless]