Brad just made me aware that today, January 10th, is National De-lurking Day. What does that mean to you? Well if you visit this site, and read the articles, without commenting, then you are a lurker. Nothing wrong with lurking, it’s what we do. But since today is the official “De-lurking Day”, that means you should at least leave a comment and let us know that you have visited and come out of the shadows.
How about a little “howdy”?
With Christmas comes all kinds of new “toys”, for both adults and kids. This year was no exception, with Santa determining that we must have all been pretty good boys and girls this year. With all the great things received, and given, who would think that we’d have the most fun with one of Delaney’s gifts? She received a VTech Kidizoom digital camera, which is essentially a low quality digital camera in a durable construction. She loves to play with our camera now so our thought was to get her one of her own and see what she produces. Who knows, maybe she is the next Ansel Adams?
It turns out that not only does she love her camera, but EVERYONE else did as well. For the most part she wasn’t even the one using it as all the other kids had a great time taking pictures of everything possible. Then the adults got ahold of it (ok, so it was me) and you knew it wouldn’t turn out well.
Some images didn’t need any extra effects!
To see all the pictures, not just the ones that the adults took, you can check out Delaney’s Album. As she takes more pictures, and trust me she takes a LOT of pictures, we’ll continue to add them to her album so be sure to check back from time to time. All new pictures will be added to the beginning of the album.
The camera is a hit so now time to see what kind of eye, and patience, she has. Hope you enjoy them as much as she enjoys taking them.
There are times when you find something that you find interesting if for no other reason then its different. That is the case when I stumbled upon a program called Metapixel. It is an opensource program, available for different Linux distros (it is in the repositories if you are running Ubuntu), and basically it takes your pictures and creates a mosaic out of them. So what does that mean? It means that it takes all your pictures, in our case that is around 7000 different pictures, and creates miniature versions of those pictures, as part of the preparation phase. It then takes the “library” created and uses them to create a mosaic out of your input picture.
Clear as mud?
I’m sure this means NOTHING to most people, but for those one or two people that this would actually be something they’d like to try, I’ll go through the steps.
Above and beyond everything else, of course you’ll have to have metapixel installed and in your path. I normally run Ubuntu, on different machines, so I just added it via the repositories.
First, we need to prepare all your pictures. This will not touch your originals, other then reading them in, so fear not. You’ll designate your input directory and your output directory:
metapixel-prepare -r /source_directory /destination_directory --width=30 --height=30
This can take some time, depending on the number of pictures you have in your library. The one positive is that you’ll only have to do it one time, regardless of how many mosaics you end up creating.
Second, once the library creation is completed, we’ll now need to determine what image we want to create the mosaic of. I recommend images that are in bright light, just from my testing; the dark pictures tend to show up with some strange colors. Once you have determined what you want to create the mosaic of, it’s time to kick off the second step of the process.
metapixel --metapixel /source_directory/input_picture.jpg /destination_directory/output.png --library /destination_directory --scale=8 --distance=50
What this does is take your input_picture.jpg and create the output.png file as your mosaic. It uses the images from the destination_directory, which you created the previous step. The scale directive is stating how big of an image to create, depending on how big your input image is; in this case we are creating an image that is 8X bigger then the original. Be careful, I got carried away the first time and it created a HUGE file that you cannot do anything with. If you input file is 1MB, your output file will roughly be 250+ MB. The distance parameter indicates the minimal number of pictures between the first usage of the image and the second; there will be 50 different images between the first use of an image and the next time the image will be used in the mosaic. The larger the distance, the longer it’ll take to create the final output. If you do not care about the distance, remove it completely to speed up the process considerably. Depending on the speed of your machine, the scale you’ve set and the distance set, this could take a while.
So what do you get out of it? Here is an example of a mosaic I created (clink on the image to see the full size):
I had to reduce the image WAY down as you’d never be able to open up a 266MB file; well not quickly anyway. Obviously reducing the image size also reduces the ability to zoom in and see the images used to create the mosaic, but zooming in on the larger image and you’ll start to see the individual images.
The usage is where the question comes in; what exactly do you do with something like this? Depends. My thought was to take and build a library of sports images and create a mosaic of something like Arrowhead Stadium or Kaufman Stadium, at which time I’d have it professionally printed and framed at the larger size. First I have to build the library, which could take some time.
So the challenge now is for you to create one and share your work.
By now, unless you’ve been in a cave, you’ve heard about the Michael Vick situation. It has taken an interesting turn this week, with a plea agreement forthcoming. When I originally heard of the investigation I knew that it would be a case of a celebrity getting away with something that the average “Joe” would not. Then the proverbial “it” started to roll downhill, gathering speed, to a point that you did begin to wonder whether there may be justice. Given the circumstances, nothing could please me more, I thought. What was rubbing me the wrong way was the fact that more attention was being given to the racketeering, over the dog-fighting. Not that we should turn a blind eye to racketeering, and how that typically relates to organized crime, but the concept of illegal dog-fighting (like there is a legal dog-fighting) is beyond what most of us can comprehend as rational thought. In response to the recent events, HBO recently had a segment on Inside Sports regarding the underworld of dog fighting. It is definitely disturbing, but something worth watching when considering the Michael Vick situation.
No I do not have the written consent of HBO to replay this, so lets keep it on the down low…
Before and after, what are your thoughts regarding the recent turn of events?
Let’s face it, mobile phones have changed our way of life. As phones become increasingly more powerful, so does your ability to do more from your phone. I can essentially work from my phone now, as my calendar and email are always just a fingertip away. But work is not really a whole lot of fun, so the time comes to find new ways to use your phone for actual fun. Camera phones are fun, or are at least a start. While the quality of the images taken with a mobile phone is not usually stellar, it is good enough to normally capture the moment. Plus with a camera phone, there is never an excuse to not have your camera with you. But what to do with your pictures once you take them? Most carriers offer you the ability to upload your pictures to their service, but then you really are at the mercy of that carrier; change carriers and kiss your pictures goodbye. I want a way to get the pictures from my phone directly to my photo gallery, specifically to my Pictures on the Go album. Can’t be that hard, right, since you can send the pictures, via email, to anyone. So, what to do?
Let’s start by setting up a generic email inbox to receive the picture emails. Next we will set up a backend script, that runs every couple minutes, to go to that inbox and check for new emails. If we find emails, we then want to check to see whether it is a picture email, by looking at the source code. We are looking for a specific string, at which point, if we find it, we will use that URL to receive the full size image from the carrier’s picture service. Download the image and upload the image to a specific gallery album. Finally, delete the email to both stop from pulling the same image twice as well as keep the inbox nice and clean. Easy enough.
Ok, sure there is a bit more logic in there, such as setting it up to check multiple email addresses, for different users, and uploading to different albums based on the email address. But really, the core logic is there. To run the process on your own sites, you simply need a database, php access, and Gallery. But what is the end result?
How about the ability to capture, and share, moments at any time?
It is all technical mumbo-jumbo if you are not a nerd, like myself, but you start to see how those things you never use, but always have with you, can start to come in quite handy.
In the KC Metro area, at least us “Northlanders”, we missed the “big storm” that rolled in last week. All the preparing and sadly hoping (I grew up in Michigan and love snow) was all for naught as we received a piddly inch out of the deal. The farther south you go, the more snow. It was a strange storm, dumping 9 inches in areas not 20 miles away. Delaney was a bit bummed by the fact that she couldn’t use her new sled (although she did find that if you load it full it will go down the stairs really fast!). I guess we should probably be happy as the same storm rolled through St Louis and Chicago, causing widespread power outages and claiming thirteen lives along the way.
It appears that we didn’t complete miss out on the fun. At the lake, they received 16 inches of the white stuff. In upstate Michigan we may have just considered this a “dusting”, but keep in mind that Missouri is not necessarily accustomed to it nor do they build in preparation. Does anyone have any idea how much 16 inches of snow weighs? How about 16 inches deep spread across the span of a large roof? Let’s just say that it is actually quite a bit, as evident in the pictures of our dock at the lake.
It would appear that there is definitely a limit to the buoyancy of foam. It would make pulling the WaveRunner onto the dock a far more easier task.
So when the dock lowers, but the boat continues to float on the lift, it does raise an issue; eventually the two are going to collide. Currently there is a nice crossmember resting comfortably on the support for my windshield. I’m not much of a betting man, but I’d go on a limb and guess that if it comes down any further, the windshield is going to lose the battle of support the weight of the dock.
In the end, things could be far worse. This is our neighbor across the cove, whom apparently did lose the battle of “the bulge”. The local authorities are telling everyone to remain clear of the docks, due to the current stability issues. Around the lake you find boats just floating freely in the coves due to the unplanned departure of their homes. Apparently you can’t just pick any boat and stake a claim either. Believe me, I’ve considered it.
