I built a light box this weekend out of PVC. Similar to this one. I spent some of today experimenting with the set up. The right combination of shutter speed, aperture, lighting, and white balance are deceptively tricky. I still don’t quite have it right. But it was a good way to spend a rainy Sunday.
Wiretap - Gentleman’s Guide to Grooming (11 MB MP3) From 2006-04-21 with host Jonathan Goldstein.
The fine folks at the controls of This American Life have finally ditched Real Audio in favor of MP3’s. Unfortunately, they aren’t yet providing a Podcast feed. So I’ve thrown together a simple feed. You can subscribe here.
This is simply an RSS feed which points to their publicly accessible MP3’s. I’m not hosting anything. (I am linking to the MP3 using coral cache to reduce their bandwidth consumption.)
The feed only contains the 20 most recent episodes. For a full archive with links to the MP3’s you can use my (currently bare bones) archive page.
Tuesday, April 25th - 12 - 8 pm - Free Cone Day at Ben & Jerry’s. And to think, I finally live near a Ben & Jerry’s.
The Boston Marathon was today. It goes right through downtown Natick so I went to check it out and take photos. I didn’t expect much since I didn’t know anyone running the race and running doesn’t particularly interest me. I ended up being completely surprised. The Boston Marathon renewed my faith in humanity. Really. Everyone from the town was out cheering on the runners. But not in that polite cheering people do at parades way. They were sending heartfelt encouragement to all the runners and getting smiles, high fives, praise, thanks, and hugs in return. Everyone was pitching in, especially children. I saw kids:
It was perfect weather for running and for having a BBQ in the front yard. And thanks to it also being Patriots day in Massachusetts, the crowds were huge. I rode my bike to Wellesley and there wasn’t a single break in the crowd. Certain spots where the crowds were lighter, you could hear the patter of running shoes on the pavement which sounded like a soothing rainstorm.
Unfortunately, it was tough to get around (even the bicycle wasn’t allowed on the road). So I didn’t get to see runners struggle on the infamous heartbreak hill in Newton or people cross the finish line. Next year hopefully I’ll be more organized and find alternative routes.
See Boston Marathon 2006 photos in the gallery.
Update: Two quick movies from the marathon have finally passed inspection from the Google Video gnomes.
Wiretap - Samson and Delilah (11 MB MP3) From 2006-04-14 with host Jonathan Goldstein.
Yesterday, BoingBoing had a post about Selfridges & Co.’s claim to the world’s most expensive sandwich. I decided to surpass trounce their claim.
I am now selling the worlds most expensive sandwich. It is two prime pieces of stone ground 100% whole wheat Freinhofer’s bread. Inside… a healthly serving of Teddie smooth natural old fashioned peanut butter and fresh (from the jar) Smuckers Strawberry Jam.
All this and a glass of fresh organic cow’s milk is yours for $8,402,876,241,412.25 (US). All profit will be used to pay the United States national debt.
For real patriots this represents a remarkable value.
After way too many hours, I’ve finally moved the redjar gallery over to my home grown set up. It is a jumble of PHP scripts (which use phpflickr), mod_rewrite rules, and a mysql database which create a custom front end to my flickr photos. I spent extra time to make all the old gallery album and photo url’s map to the new system. The image source itself is also a redjar.org url which gets rewritten to the appropriate flickr url and sent back to the browser. So except for the required link to each photo’s flickr page, there is no mention of flickr that will tie me to them. So down the road, if I decide to ditch flickr it should be possible to preserve all URL’s.
The actual page design at this point is really basic and needs to be cleaned up, but all the major features I wanted are there.
Current features:
To-Do list:
Wiretap - The Call-in Show (11 MB MP3) From 2006-04-07 with host Jonathan Goldstein.
I went to check out the Boston LinuxWorld Expo today at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center. I didn’t expect much, but it was free, so I figured I’d stroll around. (See here for photos)
My prediction of it being a bore fest were pretty accurate. The only news I’ve seen so far on the web is about Unisys’ little fire mishap. You know when the biggest story of a Linux expo has nothing to do with Linux that it isn’t very exciting.
I walked around for a while, hoping to spot some cool little gadget running linux, or someone giving out free shwag that didn’t stink, but no such luck.
Instead I found many “win a free iPod” contests. You’d think that maybe people would want to win the product you are selling, not an MP3 player that doesn’t even officially (via iTunes) support Linux. Further irony, Apple had a small booth showing off their Xserve and Xserve RAID hardware, but did not have a “win a free iPod” contest.
The .org pavillion was a little more in the Linux spirit. A couple rows of booths with people who are interested in Linux for philosophical reasons not necessarily to make money. Ubuntu, Fedora, Gentoo, Gnome, KDE, and several others had booths. In the middle of it was the “Slashdot Lounge” which was pretty sad. Poor CmdrTaco and his cohorts sat awkwardly playing games. No one was talking to them presumably because they were preoccupied, or perhaps because all the 13 year olds have moved onto to digg.
The buzzword that I kept hearing was “virtualization”, something I’ve been waiting to mature for a few years now. I heard it mentioned several booths including AMD, RedHat, and obviously VMWare (who did actually announce that they are opening their virtual machine disk format.
After a few laps around the floor, I wandered the convention center a bit. It a new building. So new Google Earth’s aerial imagery doesn’t have it yet (oddly Google Maps does). The place is mammoth.
I can now confidently say that the with the exception of a Steve Jobs keynote, the usefulness of an Expo has passed. If you want to learn about a product or communicate with a company, the Internet is just much more efficient.
I just realized it is in fact possible to reorder your Flickr Photostream… if you want it bad enough. By changing the the upload date, the photo will in fact change its location in your photostream. Unfortunately, you can’t set the upload date prior to when you created your Flickr account. So if you just created your account and are uploading thousands of old photos, you can’t just set the upload date to the “taken date”. But if you specify upload date down to the second, you should be able to precisely order your photostream.
As far as I know, there are only two ways to change the upload date for a photo. The first is using the annoying Flash Organizr. Go to a single photo, click “Edit dates” and modify the “Date posted” fields.
The other option is to the use the Flickr API. Using flickr.photos.setDates you can set the upload date of photos. Better more reasonable for updating the order of hundreds or thousands of photos.
Just noticed that PBS has a new show coming out May 1 called “Texas Ranch House“. Same premise as there previous series like Frontier House and Colonial house except this takes place in 1867 on a Texas Ranch. If I could have watched these types of shows in History class, I might actually have been able to stay awake.