Panorama
Posted by Lee in Photography on November 11, 2009
Panoramic photo stitching used to be the realm of proprietary bundled software that came with various cameras that always seemed to generate horrible seams. Today there’s a wealth of packages of all shapes and sizes. On my trip to China in 2008, I took a few sets of photos expecting to run through the paces. The following example is some more fall foliage from Jiuzhaiguo.
But it’s really a far more exiting in a Google Maps Viewer form.
Using Photomatix with Picasa
Posted by Lee in Photography on November 5, 2009
Suddenly 2 months go by and I don’t have any posts to show for it. For shame.
My current project is to finally sort through all of the photos that I’ve taken over the years. The side benefit(even if I don’t finish) would be to have a few images with getting a print of to decorate my house. I also had the foresight(or pure masochistic desire) to take many multiple image sets for future postprocessing via HDR or panoramic stitching. Using Google’s Picasa for a cross platform management software, the most notable limitation was that I couldn’t easily pass sets of photos to Photomatix. A bit of research on Google’s API enabled me to create a button that will automagically open Photomatix with the files in my Picasa tray.
You can install my little button using this link(assuming that you have Picasa installed). Ironically the link doesn’t actually work with Google’s Chrome browser.
But since no one actually cares about my ramblings, here’s a nice HDR photo from my trip to Jiuzhaiguo in 2008:
Housewarming party
People are always polite and won’t say to the host that they didn’t enjoy a party, so I’ll delude myself into thinking that I did a good first attempt. Living in a tiny apartment has made me develop a massive hosting debt which I shall have to struggle to work off. Regardless there’s always room to improve. Read the rest of this entry »
Food storage model
Stove/Oven = Register
Countertip = L1 cache
Pantry/Refrigerator = L2 cache
Wegmans = Virtual memory
Home online
Took a couple of days to get a Verizon FIOS tech over to my new place to get my service installed. I opted for one of their bundles, which was probably more service than I need, but they were giving away netbooks alongside them. Even after the tech supposedly got it installed, I had to spend 2 days on and off the phone with Verizon tech support to clear up some issues on their end before I could finally get the following results:
Decent speeds right?
Home Network
Since the house is pretty much movein ready, potential home improvement projects are rather limited. The first one that I had originally planned on doing was wiring the house with ethernet. But low and behold after walking through it as an owner, I noticed that there are RJ45 jacks in various rooms around the house. After the initial bout of enthusiasm, I plugged my MacBook Pro into it and it didn’t detect anything on the other end.
Looking around for a bit, I eventually found a mini wiring cabinet in the garage. Turns out all of those RJ45 jacks are connected to a OnQ Phone Punchdown. After a bit of research, I believe that this problem can be “fixed” by splicing the cable before it hits the punchdown, attaching a patch panel both to the punchdown and walljacks, then using patch cables to connect each jack to either a switch or the phone punchdown. Looking at MonoPrice, I can probably do all this for about 60 bucks(I already have a switch).
The main worry that I have about this plan is having network equipment in a non-climate controlled garage.
Closed
Or perhaps open for visitors…
Finished all of the settlement wackiness in about an hour and a half.
No way out
Been a while since my last posting, but I’ve been busy being sad about my WoW guild shutting down. This post is about the process of removing the last few contigencies on my home purchase offer – home inspection, HOA documents, and lender agreement. Read the rest of this entry »
House selected
So I finally decided upon a place. It’s in Fairfax, and is a short walk to Wegmans, and about a mile away from Fairfax Corner and Fairfax Government Center. I can’t lie, the close walking proximity to Wegmans was a huge deciding factor for me(as well as being <20 minutes away from work). The community’s kind of a horrible cluster of townhomes, but this is an end unit on the edge of that area, so it escapes a good deal of that feel.
Behind the cut are pictures that I stole from the various online sites before they all go down from the house no longer being on the market.
48 hour film project (Baltimore 2009)
Last weekend I participated in the 48 hour film project in Baltimore, which meant for a lot of playing with cool gear, a bit of logistics, and a lot of sleep deprivation to get everything to fall into place. So I’ll start this story just as I’m about to Hsien’s(our director) place, and we get our list of required elements:
Genre: Horror
Character: Tim or Tina Flagler, Unemployed Musician
Prop: a tire(any kind of tire)
Line: “I need to leave in a minute.”
Not distributing a link to the movie itself till the screening on Wednesday at 7:15PM in Baltimore. Probably a bit too far out of my way to make the trip.
Behind the cut is mainly my recollection of a timeline with comments of what I(and maybe some of what other folks) was doing, so that we can at least hope to manage our time better for the next time that we attempt this. Read the rest of this entry »
BogoPhoto
