My phone’s camera has a mode where it takes a 3×3 or 2×2 grid of images by snapping pictures in series. Press the shutter button and it starts going. There’s the typical camera phone lag to get started and then it takes pictures on its own schedule. I tried it on Finney and here’s what I got:
Autopilot for picture taking ain’t too bad. It just reinforces the same old “take lots of pictures, you’ll get something you like.”
Today is one of those rare days that I have no meetings. And also happens to be a day that Paula needs to spend time getting ready for a house guest. Finney is a good dog but he can be kind of needy. To free up Paula I brought Finney into the office
For one complication was sneaking Finney into the office, however, is that when he is in new situations he gets nervous and whines a lot. Now, sneaking a dog into the office doesn’t work very well if the dog is making a lot of noise. The way to keep a nervous Finney quiet is to continuously pet him. While petting him keeps him quiet, my hands are unable to do any typing. Sounds like a good reason to try out speech recognition.
It may be my microphone, or it may just be that I need to do more training of the speech recognition, but my initial use has been slow going. I’ve been using speech recognition to type this blog post, and I find that it is taking me three times as long as it would take if I were typing. I can touch type and and fairly accustomed to putting my thoughts down directly from brain to fingers. Part of the delay, I am finding, is expressing my thoughts in this new manner. If I stare at the screen waiting for my words to appear, I’m brain just freezes. There is a significant delay between voicing a word and having it appear on the screen. For the touch typist who is used to seeing the output immediately on the screen it is distracting to have to pause ones stream of consciousness while waiting for the computer to interpret your words.
I also find if I speak too quickly the computer will run my words together to form similar sounding words. This is usually frustrating as it requires frequent editing of the sentence is high and have just dictated. Most commonly the errors are in the form of incorrect words but it gets even more frustrating when the dictation is incorrectly interpreted as commands to the program (it has tried several times to close this blog post prematurely). It does, however, provide some amount of amusement when it makes errors like taking ” down directly” and turning it into ” downed rectally.”
As I struggle through, however, I find that through a combination of training the speech recognition engine and training Reeves, I am getting better at am using text to speech. I wonder if I’ll ever get to the point where I can speak naturally to the computer and have it be acceptably accurate.
What are the odds this Mini driver is a PM who attends a lot of loosely scheduled meetings?
Because I’ve become “one of those people” I’ve been taking a ton of pictures of Finney. When you take lots of pictures you often end up with something you didn’t quite anticipate.
![484517153_jb8b2-S[1]](http://www.little.org/blog/content/binary/WindowsLiveWriter/Mycurrentfavoritepicture_B8F1/484517153_jb8b2-S%5B1%5D_3.jpg "484517153_jb8b2-S[1]")
I took this while he was in the middle of playing with a rope toy. I’ve decided he doesn’t look angry, just mildly insane… and that pleases me.
What’s entertainment for a greyhound? Paula took a little video to give you a fairly clear picture:
It’s been a while since I pulled down some good free music. I stopped obsessing over every Mercedes Benz Mixed tape and haven’t gone on a mash-up bender for years. Yesterday, however, a couple free albums caught my attention.
Harvey Danger – Little by LittleHarvey Danger has put their third album up for a free download in the hopes that you’ll try it, like it and buy it. While the album is free, the band is relying on your honesty to buy it if you like it. I personally like this model, partially because I have a huge tendency to feel guilty about intellectual copyright so I’m sure I’ll pay if I like it. I do hope that enough of the public also steps up and pays because I’d be really cool to see this type of trust continue.
My take? It’s catchy pop/rock with pervasive piano and harmonies giving it a decidedly Beatle-esque feel (which isn’t bad in my book). And, heck, they’re a Seattle band. Note: if you really like it you may want to get the CD since it has 9 more tracks.
NIN|JA – Tour Sampler EPPerhaps they’re touring together because they have similar music, perhaps it’s mutual respect between the bands… I think it’s just because they realized that combining their names creates "NIN|JA". Whatever the reason, Nine Inch Nails and Jane’s Addiction (and Street Sweeper) are offering a free sampler album with two tracks from each band to help promote the tour. Unlike other "check us out, please" free albums, this one is promotional and doesn’t come with the guilt of needing to donate money (other than you should go buy tickets and see them live… unless you’re old like me and would probably break a hip in the mosh pit).
My take? Classic NIN and Jane’s Addiction sound. Turn it up and let your ears bleed freely. I was also pleasantly surprised by Street Sweeper, a nice Industrial/Nu Metal blend with a bit of gansta’ rap special sauce poured on top.
Bonus album: At the NIN site you can get The Slip for free too.
Have you ever wondered what kind of people work at MS and what makes them tick? Hop on over to Microspotting to get the dirt. While you’re there you can also really get to know Dan, a great dev who started as an intern on the Entourage team when I was a test lead there, Omar, a PM from the Entourage team (and also, coincidentally an intern there too), MC, who was on Mac office (Entourage was part of Mac Office)…. hey, this is just becoming a trip down memory lane. Clearly my friends haven’t been pimping their fame (or I simply couldn’t be bothered to read their blogs… of course, I blame them).
At any rate, it seems Ariel has a great knack for finding the personalities at Microsoft, and isn’t shy about stalking them to get the story. Geeks and stalking? How can you pass that up?
While my Windows Mobile phone is fantastic at synchronizing data with my PC and operating seamlessly with Exchange, it does lack in some of the non-business areas. Most frustrating for me lately: no EXIF information on the pictures it takes.
What is EXIF data and why does it matter? EXIF (Exchangeable image file format) is a standard that specifies, among other things, the metadata tags included in image files. The key bit of metadata that my camera pictures lack is the date and time I took the pictures. The pictures do have a date & time they were modified, but not having a separate entry for when the picture was taken leads to the date information being lost when the pictures is edited or copied to another PC. As a result, I have a lot of pictures from my camera phone like the example below, created in 2009, modified in 2007 and I have no clue if I took the picture on either of the dates… or some completely different date and time.
(Oh, by the way, iPhone owners, this is one more thing you can use to taunt your non-iPhone owning friends about: the iPhone adds EXIF data to the pictures.)
While I may have lost the historical data I haven’t given up on my future pictures. I’m now using an excellent app from Phil Harvey, ExifTool. This powerful command line app allows me to preserve the date taken by copying the modified date to the date taken. In the process of adding the date taken I am also adding extra info to indicate what phone I used and correcting the time taken since my pictures are all date stamped in GMT (no, I don’t know why, I’ve stopped being surprised by stuff like this).
ExifTool is Perl based and will work on Unix, Windows or Mac OS X, your install steps will depend on your platform. From the ExifTool home page you can pick the version you want, Windows and Mac users will want to get the platform-specific version for simplicity. The Windows executable is a single file "install." Unzip the download and you have an EXE file, there is no installation or required dll’s. Clean & simple (monolithic is good, right Jud?).
Once you have ExifTool, creating date taken info based off the file’s modified date is a simple command line operation.
Straight forward enough, no?
Now that you have the basic info you can go crazy. Unlike the EXIF editing capbilities of most photo software (like PhotoShop or Windows Live Gallery) ExifTool allows you to create/edit fields like the camera’s manufacturer.
To help make the process auto-magic for myself I’ve created a batch file which creates the datetimeoriginal data, adds the camera model and maker, corrects the time taken and, finally, copies the pictures from the staging folder to their final location. I have this batch file set to run periodically using a scheduled task. Now I just need to learn to have the scheduled task be triggered by new photos showing in the staging folder. 🙂
If you’re shooting in RAW format you have the luxury of tweaking white balance as you open your images. This can allow you to adjust for camera inaccuracies or even for artistic effect. If, however, your image is a JPEG you’re not out of luck.
My old D100 still takes decent pictures but it certainly ain’t fast. If I shoot RAW it literally takes eight to ten seconds to write an image to memory. When trying to take rapid fire pictures of a running greyhound this doesn’t cut the mustard (though one could argue the merits of mustard cutting). Yesterday I was taking pictures of Finney romping in the snow and found the morning light plus snow combo had confused the heck out of my poor, senior citizen of a digi-cam. Everything came out with a blue wash. Fortunately my buddy Rob showed me this common and easy technique.
Pick an area that has both black and white areas (or areas that should be white) and zoom in. You’ll be using an eyedropper tool, so zooming in will allow you to pick the right spot more easily.
From Photoshop’s Image menu choose Adjustments > Levels. This will bring up the levels window with a histogram. First thing you’ll do is grab the little white tab on the right side of the histogram and start dragging it to the left.
As you drag you’ll see the image becomes more and more washed out. The goal is to emphasize the blackest of the areas on the picture. Once you’ve identified the blackest of the areas on your image you’ll use the Set The Black Point dropper (the black dropper from the levels window) to sample your new “black”. Once you take the sample the image will go back to looking more normal.
Next repeat the steps by grabbing the black slider to the right. This will darken the image to allow you to identify the whitest of the white areas in the image.
As with picking the black areas, you’ll need to play with the slider to get the right contrast, then use the dropper to pick the location you’d like to define as white. Once you use the dropper the image will once again snap back to “normal”. After picking the white level, however, the color issues should be largely fixed in your image. Here’s a before/after comparison of the picture with the as-shot on the left and the corrected on the right.
But hey, right next to the Levels menu item is an Auto Levels item. Why not just use that? Actually, there’s no reason not to try it out. It will often correct the color just about as well as this manual technique and take a fraction of the time. The auto levels correction, however, is not quite as accurate and I find the results from the manual method give me an image that looks much more the way I remember the scene in my mind’s eye. I do, however, often just blast through a bunch of pictures using auto level when I’m trying to speed through a big batch.
I owe two thanks to Rob for the above. 1. Thanks for showing me how to do this. 2. Thanks for taking such awesome pet pictures and inspiring me to point my camera at Finney and try to capture some of his personality.
If you live in the bay area and would like to get pictures taken of your pet, your first (and only) stop should be Murphy Dog Studios. Rob is a wonderfully talented photographer and he loves pets (his business is named after his late lab, Murphy). Don’t worry, if you don’t have a dog, or even a pet, Rob can shoot just about anything. Check out his amazing sports photography too.
… and a faster shutter speed.
I made my first attempt to take pictures of Finney playing in the yard today, but most of the results were blurry. In retrospect I should have set the camera to shutter priority before getting him worked up (I just used full auto for my first try to see what came of it). When trying to chase a dog who can go over 40 Mph it’s just not going to cut it if your shutter speed is 1/90. Um duh. Oh, also, if you’re chasing a fast dog with a camera, you better not be worried about looking like an idiot.
When he’s not romping, Finney’s preferred place is Velcroed to my thigh.
Another photographic note for myself: If I want a keeper picture, don’t wear an old sweatshirt with frayed sleeves. 🙂
If you record cable TV using Windows Media Center you may have wondered about recording high definition signals off the cable (or, like me, struggled unsuccessfully to make it happen). If you’re willing to take the beta plunge, Windows 7 has made getting some high-def content off your cable a lot easier.
First, the hurdles: you’ll want to do this only if you’re willing to run beta software and are not afraid of using RegEdit. To get it done without running a beta operating system you can track down the TV Pack for Vista Media Center (code named fiji), some other software and do some registry changes. If you believe the forums, upgrading Vista is more work (clean install plus two additional software installs), however, than running Windows 7. Windows 7 is just the singular install… but keep in mind you’ll need to be ready to buy it when the full version comes out.
The whole process was completely painless for me. I needed more hard drive space so I just took the old drive out to be an easy backup. I put in a new, bigger hard drive, installed Windows 7 Beta then headed over to Mike Wren’s blog for the registry setting for my card (Hauppauge HVR 1600). A quick reboot later and Media Center could see the clear QAM channels! Sweet! No more weather interference when watching local high definition broadcasts.
Keep in mind, this doesn’t mean you can get all the high definition channels. Even if you subscribe to HBO (for example) the signal will be encrypted. Clear QAM is the unencrypted digital content broadcast over cable. For Comcast in my area this is our local stations in high definition as well as standard definition duplicate versions of some other channels (like Speed). It’s worth noting, just because it’s digital, it doesn’t mean it’s high definition. If you want to get all the content off your cable you’ll need to pay the big bucks for a CableCARD approved Vista PC. If, however, you’re like us and you really only care about HD from the major networks this does it.