Smile

Depois de há 2 anos nos termos mudado para o Canadá agora temos nova casa nos EUA.

It’s been a while since I had the idea of building a 3D frontend for a wordpress blog.

Tonight I decided to give it a try and after a couple of hours I had hacked together a working version using Gilles TimeMachine Interface and Reuben XML-RPC Library

It’s only showing the last 20 posts and the TextArea component is having a hard time displaying the HTML properly, but hey, it’s working and it only took a couple of hours

You can check it at http://granny.homelinux.org/smile/flash.html

We’ve been printing books at Apple via iPhoto since 2004. Back then the hardcover books had a linen hard cover with a small photo glued on top of it. They where printed using a Digital offset printer, and the quality was great.
With iPhoto 2008 Apple made some major changes to their books. The linen hard cover was replaced by a standard plastic cover with an image wrap but most importantly they changed from Digital Offset Printers to Digital Laser Printers and the picture quality got worse.
If you put an old book next to a new one you can easily tell the difference. The Digital offset printer was soooo much better and the laser one. Since then we stopped using Apple books.

And then there was Blurb…
We just got our first books from blurb, and they look awesome. Blurb uses a Digital offset printer (an HP Indigo) and not a laser one like Apple, and the quality speaks for it self.

So if you want to print a book go with Blurb.

After our first year together we decided, to put in a book, all the great moments we lived together. It has then become a tradition to make one every year.

We started by using iPhoto Books. We already had all our photos inside iPhoto, all we had to do was choose a couple hundred and put the into a book. It was so easy and painless. Life was great
Year by year, with every new version of iPhoto, there where new templates, enhancements and features. We started playing with the new layouts and we where always thrilled doing the book. life was great.
By the fourth year, with iPhoto ‘08 all of that changed. The linen hard cover had been replaced by a standard plastic cover with a dust jacket, wich seemed kinda nice, meaning we could now have the book title on the spine and a full size photo for the dust jacket cover and back. So we fired up iPhoto, made our book and sent it to Apple.
When it arrived and we first looked at the dust jacket cover we weren’t very happy, because the picture looked too dark, but when we started going through the pages we found out that it wasn’t just the cover. The printing seemed different from the other albums, the paper felt thiner and the colors where all wrong.

We never did any post processing of the photos that went into any of the book. It was straight from the camera into the book. So what had we done wrong this time…

We emailed customer support at Apple explaining that after three years of great service, this time we weren’t happy. They replied shortly with a long and not automated email apologizing for what had happened and immediately gave us a full refund. They really took the time and trouble to look at our album. They pointed 4 or 5 pictures that looked darker and gave us some links on how to try and improve the quality of our book. After that we gave it another shot, using some of the tip from the links, but the result was exactly the same.

Something had changed in apple’s printing process It wasn’t our fault. Whatever that was we didn’t like it… so we started looking for alternatives.

My first choice was a Portuguese photo store called fotosport.pt. This was recommended by a friend because it was very cheap, and when I say cheap I mean cheap. It was 4x less than what we paid at Apple. I installed their software, which sucked big time by the way, but It had a nice feature, you could design your own layouts. I ordered a test book and after a couple of days went to pick it up. The paper was nice, but the colors and picture quality where worse than apple. The overall quality of the book was poor. The cover had a see through hole that seemed it had been cut by hand with a xacto knife. It felt cheap.

Time was going by and we had already 3 books we wanted to make, so I started looking online for alternatives. I must have read hundreds of reviews, blogs and forums and everyone seemed to be unanimous about blurb.com. We started getting excited! Could we get the same quality we had on our early apple books?

So we started working on our books. Because it was our first time we blurb we started with the standard landscape books because they where cheaper and we where afraid of the quality. By the time we where almost finished with our books (many many hours later), a friend, who had just ordered a standard landscape book on blurb, showed it to us. It looked great, kinda small, but very good otherwise. We decided we needed to upgrade our book size, but that meant doing everything again.
Again we spent countless hours redoing all our books. A couple of days latter our books where done and ready to print. We ordered 3 large landscape books with premium paper some days ago and they arrived today.

…and they look magnificent. The quality is superb, and the printing is exactly the same as our early Apple books but the books look a lot better

Thank you Apple Blurb

Last time we got home from a long weekend, our roomba had fried it’s brains. After a lot of work it was back on it’s feed and better than ever.
This time when we got back from our holidays it was the power supply unit that had died.
I love our roomba, but it’s starting to cost a lot of money and time to keep the damn thing working

The 50.000 photos barrier in Flickr has been reached =)

Vamos daqui

Para aqui

Yesterday, while looking for a way to do Time Lapse with a Canon 400D I came across CHDK where a bunch of guys hacked away some cool stuff “that you can load onto your camera’s memory card to give your camera greatly enhanced capabilities”. Unfortunately CHDK software is targeted at PowerShot series, so there’s no official software available for the EOS 400D. However, thanks to the knowledge generated by the community, a hack was created for the 400D that gives you access to ISO 3200 and Spot metering amongst other things.

How cool is that!
I tried it and it works flawlessly.

It’s all explained on this forum or this one. There’s even a side by side comparison of the 3200 ISO between the 400D and the 40D.

Finalmente tenho o kite com que sempre sonhei, um flysurfer. Sim é um foil, igual aqueles papagaios de tracção que voo há quase 10 anos e posso levantar e baixar quando quero, sem precisar de ajuda. O facto de não poder controlar as boias da mesma maneira que se controla um foil foi factor que sempre me deixou pouco à vontade e limitou as vezes que fui para a água. É verdade que as novas gerações de boias (que curiosamente se aproximam cada vez mais dois foils) estão melhores, mas ainda não são foils e eu claramente sou um gajo de foils.
A partir de hoje acabaram-se as boias

Haja vento

Fui ontem buscar os meus óculos com as novas lentes. Acho que já não via tão bem à bastante tempo
O único problema é que o aumento da graduação de 0.5 para 1.25 faz muita diferença e ainda me estou a habituar.