Lewies Blog

So a while back, Aurora posted an entry about some creative desktop wallpaper. A group of individuals have taken a picture of there computers environment without the computer screen. Editing the photo, they were able to crop the area where there monitor should be and reshape the image to fit on the screen. The screen was then displayed with the image while another picture was taken to achieve the effect of a transparent screen.

I have been wanting to try my hand at this for a while. I finally decided that I was in the mood for a quickie and went to work. My pet cat Gizmo was setting next to me. This cat never wants to leave once he has found a nice spot to set near me. What a perfect centerpiece.

The first image was easy. I just set up a tripod and took a picture. I placed my laptop in front of him and then took another picture. Now I knew what area to pull out of the picture. Now at this point, I could just cut out one picture and let the second picture show through - but that would be cheating. I needed to take a picture of the laptop with Gizmo as the background wall paper.

I pulled out a portion of the image that I needed and reshaped it to be a rectangular image to fit the entire screen. I used scaling and perspective transformations. I then loaded the image onto the laptop as the background. I then set it up to a screen saver too so that I could get a picture without all the icons and the start bar in the way.

The tripod was still in the same position from the first photograph, but the laptop was not. I had used the computer and moved the laptop to get to it. I didn’t even think before I took the picture. I forgot to line everything up! Of all the things to do wrong.

Gizmo at this point had spotted a more comfortable spot where the laptop wasn’t setting against him and moved himself away. It will have to do. I now have experience of the process of doing this. If there is a next time, I will put more effort into perfecting my technique.

Tags: Photography, Transparency, Wallpaper, Pets, Gizmo, Experiments, Tricks

So last Thursday a problem presented itself at work within the last two hours that I couldn’t solve. It was a very important problem that needed to be fixed and Friday was already booked to be my day off. I couldn’t solve the problem, but I was able to stay late and duplicate it by the end of the day.

My mind had been racing at different parts of the weekend trying to hash out the answer. The task seemed impossible and I was terrified that I wouldn’t be able to solve it at all. It was very hard just to grasp what the problem actually was, let alone solve it. I was fearing the worst.

I arrived at the office today and began my daily tasks. For a time, I eagerly tried many approaches to solving this puzzle. Like stars revealing themselves slowly in the early night, I started getting little bits and pieces to start showing me the answer. Not sure if I would be able to fully solve the predicament at hand, I continued on. I felt like I might be wasting my time and should be directing my energy onto an entirely different strategy.

After all the hard work, I figured it out. It wasn’t perfect, but it was the answer I was looking for. The basis of my work ensued and finally I worked out all of the other peculiar workings that needed to be fixed along the way. The answer was complete, simple, and yet complex.

Why do these things worry me so? I always seem to be able to come up with the answer when all seems to be lost. The complexity overwhelms me, but yet I still prevail. Why am I always so quick to misjudge myself?

Tags: Work, Databases, Troubleshooting, Bugs

I’ll admit it. I love playing with programs that allow you to create faces. Most that I have used in the past were cartoon faces. Today I found one called Morphasis that was made from photographs of people. It reminds me of something you might see on a show of CSI. Police Sketch Artists may end up being replaced by computers.

I didn’t get the face to look like me at all. There are not enough choices to get it rite. The way that my results turned out, this guy could pass as a family member. I could always submit a photo of myself for everyone else to use, but it could take months for it to get into the face database.

Along with the morphasis generator, you can see many user favorites or have the generator create one randomly for you. One big problem that I had with the site was browser compatability. When using Firefox, the eyes, mouth, eye brows and such were hidden behind the face itself.

Tags: Generators, Faces, Sketch Artists

So lately I have discovered something called QR Codes. The industry has been limited in the amount of data that a regular barcode can hold (something like 16 numbers) , and the amount of space required that a barcode needs to occupy. A few 2 dimensional barcodes have popped up and answered the call of commerce. You may have seen some of these on your UPS packages that you received over the past few years. You could go so far as to say that they look like modern hieroglyphics.

Everyone has there own standard. However, QR code appears to be something that could affect us as people directly. QR code is so widely accepted in Japan that it has integrated itself within Japans social structure. Many Japanese camera phones come with the ability to recognize QR code. You simply take your phone, point, click, and wallah! You can enter bookmarks, addresses, or start an email application with the senders email address, a brief subject and a message already typed up for you. All you have to do is send the email out after you look over the information.

I tried my hand at generating a QR code for my own website with a QR code generator. The QR code generators are limited with the size of the QR codes created since phones only go up to version 10 (out of 40). Take a look:

These codes are blown up and are usually much smaller. Both codes contain the same information. The first is for DoCoMo and reads:

MEBKM:TITLE:Lewies Blogs;URL:http://www.lewismoten.com/;;

The second is for Vodafone and reads:

Lewies Blogs http://www.lewismoten.com/

It appears that phone makers haven’t agreed on a standard on how to store the data, but they did agree on using QR Codes. There are even applications out there that will generate a hybrid QR code to support both phones, but it is much larger.

Many applications are comming out in the Japanese market. Imagine this, you are shopping in a grocery store and you spot a QR Code on a head of lettuce. You take out your phone, take a picture and see that it has not yet expired. Well hey, we can all do that now with a regular printed date - but with the code, you can store much more information or link to that information contained on a website. You could see such things as the origin, soil composition, organic fertilizer percentage, use of pestisides, herbisides and the name of the farm it was growing on. Guess what? It is already happening - in Japan.

Unfortunately, this craze that has been going on for a significant amount of time in Japan just hasn’t made it overseas to America yet. The US industry is a little worried. I have read that there are applications that allow a user to scan a code on a product in a store, and then compare prices on Amazon.com. The other problem is that RFID is just over the horizon. The US Industry may find this more beneficial to them. RFID can’t be read by cell phones and will not be visually identifiable to our society.

Along with scanning things into your mobile phones applications, there are also QR games. Events are held in a store and also some cities where special QR codes have been strategically placed. Contestants go around and take pictures of the codes to read the information contained within them.

I think there is potential for someone to create a service that will bypass the need for camera phones to be equiped with QR scanning. You see, I can already take a picture and email it to someone. What prevents a company from creating a service that will decode the QR code for me and then send an email back to my phone with the decoded content? Sure, it is much slower, but hey - I could decode these little buggers with my current phone!

For anyone who can’t wait, there is a free java program that will read the codes for you. I took a picture of these with a camera at odd angles and loaded them up. It was able to successfully decode the images.

• Visit http://www.intelcom.ru/2d/english/demo.php
  
• Download the java application for decoding QR Codes: “QR Code-demo (jar)”
• Make sure you have JAVA installed on your machine and run!

Now that you can decode QR Codes, you can head on over to a QR Code Blog where all entries are posted as QR Codes. After you decode the QR Codes, you’ll need to translate the Japanese to English. I like the post about his valentines day project where he made a QR code on White Chocolate. There are plenty of images to show you how he did it.

Tags: Barcodes, Scanning, Mobile Phones, Commerce, Codes, Encoding, QR, QR Codes

So I was browsing technorati the other day with blogs that link to mine. A new one showed up called Kapil’s Korner. Kapil leaves comments on my blog from time to time and he wrote something about the website statistics counter that I use in his post, “The Sunday Punch“.

Along side the mention of the counter, he also talked about a few other things that he uses with his blog such as 43Things, Blogrolling, and Tag Cloud. I knew about 43Things and Blogrolling, but Tag Cloud was new to me. I went on over to the website, created an account, and submitted my blogs feed.

Almost a full day later, the service started assigning a few tags to my blog. Two days and I had over 250 of them. The service is pretty cool. Not only do they give you a page to land on, but they also have javascript that you can display on your own blog. Also, they create the tags for you.

Technorati on the other hand, requires you to explicitly identify text as a tag. You may have noticed all of my tags at the bottom of each post. Technorati also doesn’t generate tag clouds on a per-blog bassis. I’ve been working on my own little programs to automate the process of creating tag navigation on my blog, but it is tedious.

Well, so far I like the service. It is creating tags that I hadn’t thought of. I wonder what it will look like as time progresses. An interesting note is that the bottom of each page states “Content Analysis powered by Yahoo! Search“. I wonder how that is done exactly.

Tags: Tagging, Tag Cloud, Services, Free, Blogging

I started to clean my gerbils many different compartments today. In each compartment, they have different bedding material. I do this so I can give them a choice. They can choose from wood shavings, sand, cotton-like bedding, Dusting Powder, Alfalfa, and … Toilet Paper.

That’s rite - toilet paper. Of all the different types of bedding, they prefer the toilet paper. They play in all of the other materials, but home is where the softness is.

My wife and I discovered the use of toilet paper after one of our cats decided to play with a new roll of toilet paper. Angel just picked it all up and handed it to me in a big bundle of fluff. It was clean so I just handed it to the gerbils.

These guys can build some pretty mean nests with the stuff. I didn’t even bother derolling the stuff today. I just put an entire roll in the cage and let them have at it. I may have to rethink my decision because it is taking them some time to chew through it.

Besides the toilet paper, they go crazy over the toilet paper rolls. They love to chew things and the stiff paper keeps them happy. I kind of look forward to change the roll just so that I can give the cardboard roll. If I don’t get to it first, everyone else throws them out from habbit.

Tags: Gerbils, Pets, Toilet Paper, Bedding, Nests

I must be in the dark here. Here I am with a nice shiny iPod and I didn’t even realize that another version of iTunes came out until this morning by one of my commentors. I wonder how long it has been out.

A while back, I complained about the lack of playlist folders in iTunes. It appears that Apple got smart and gave us this feature. I can now create folders, and put folders inside of folders. This is nice because it allows me to categorize things and manage my playlists.

Unfortunately, the folks at apple forgot about the iPod itself. My playlists still synchronize, but the folders do not. So now all of my playlists still appear under the “playlists” folder, but I don’t see any folders. Unfortunately, I renamed a few playlists and now it looks horrible.

I created a “Decades” folder and renamed a playlist from “Decades: 1960″ to just “1960″ and put it in the “Decades” folder. I did this for all of my decades. I expected my iPod to have a “Decades” folder … but NO! I just have my 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, and 2000 playlists showing up directly in my playlist’s root folder. I am so mad!

So any how, let’s take a brief look at what else they added. You’ll have to take these with a grain of salt because I am just really upset.

New Look - Streamlined design makes iTunes even easier to use.

The colors changed and I now have the ability to make fonts bigger. I guess that is considered making it easier to use? If they made it skinnable so that I could customize the look, then that would be something to boast about.

Search Bar - Find stuff fast and refine your search with the handy new Search Bar.

When I search for something, I can now click some filters (all, music, audiobooks, podcasts, videos and booklets??) and I can also search by artist, title, or all of the metadata

Smart Shuffle - Adjust random playback to hear what you want.

Blah, blah, blah. I hadn’t used shuffle yet as the play lists do pretty much anything I want them to.

Sync from Outlook - iTunes now supports iPod syncing for Outlook and Outlook Express on Windows PCs.

Outlook keeps badgering me that an application is trying to access it each time. Why couldn’t they synchronize with a program that I use like Thunderbird?

Playlist Folders - Organize all your playlists into folders.

They forgot to mention “in iTunes only”. We all know how I feel about this one.

Parental Controls - Limit kids’ access to the iTunes Music Store and sharing features.

Interesting, but I don’t need it. I think a lot of kids might be using this on there parents.

Album Reviews - Browse over 1,000 album reviews.

I couldn’t figure out how to access these until I realized they were stairing me in the face. Apparently the reviews are just a description by the iTunes folks themselves. Hey Apple, why don’t you let the community get in on this action? I’d trust a fellow consumers review before I’d take the vendors point of view.

The Complete Harry Potter - Download all six audiobooks or the Digital Box Set and add the collector’s iPod with Hogwarts crest.

I didn’t get this with the installation of iTunes. It costs hundreds of dollars in the music store. Where is my complete Harry Potter set that was supposed to come with iTunes 5?

iTunes for Your Mobile Phone - Sync music to the Motorola ROKR E1.

The Motorola ROKR E1 can only hold about 100 songs. It looks like Apple is just testing the waters with the Mobile Phone market. However, I do like the dancing girls on the phones website.

Tags: iPod, iTunes, Software, Music, Gadgets, Style

So over the years I have started picking up trinkets here and there. Most of my trinket collection consists of Buddhas of various sizes and colors. The chubby joyful little fellow is a nice site to look at and envy.

I don’t know much about his story, garments and various objects he holds, or the religion itself. I simply collect them because they are nice to have near by. Some were gifts.

The three purple Buddhas are set evenly spaced out over the top of my bedroom door on the trimming. The big brown one setting down migrates around my room and sometimes sets in front of me next to my monitor. The brown one standing sets on a shelf over my bed. The rest set on the other shelf in my room with many other trinkets.

One of the kids likes to play with the big brown one setting down and the mini red Buddhas. We like to pretend that he is going to eat them. Then he turns out to be there best friend and protects them. It is all fun and games.

So I’m starting to wonder what the Buddhas are really for. Are they simply trinkets? Are they religious items? Is there any superstitions that go with them? Any stories?

Also, it seems that there are two different kind of Buddhas. One Buddha is the jolly heavyset guy who is all smiles. The other I see from temples of a thinner, younger man who appears to be meditating. Why are there two different Buddhas?

Tags: Buddha, Trinkets, Collections, Religions

So today I felt a little cooped up. I had been in the house all day and I needed to go out and do something. I grabbed the camera and left the house. It was a very bright day outside. The sky was a beautiful shade of blue and there was a gentle breeze. I could hear the sound of lawn mowers in the distance.

I headed on down past the church towards a well known path into the woods. I wasn’t too far down the path when I looked down and noticed a watch. I picked it up and it had the correct time. It was a timex watch. The face had some dirt on it, but it was still working and didn’t have any other damage. I realized that I had just found some time. I pocketed the watch and continued on my journey.

I would keep running into a lot of spider webs. Eventually I picked up a stick and started waving it in front of me as I walked. It worked half the time, but at other times I was still covered in webs. It gave me a jittery feeling every time it happened. I would keep stepping back and brushing everything off frantically in case there were any spiders on me as well.

I started smelling smoke and found a hole full of ashes. It looked like a stump was burnt out of the ground. Parts of the ground were still smouldering underneath and I could feel heat comming from it. I tried to stomp on part of it, but it seemed to only make things worse. I saw more smoke comming up and got the feeling that I was only feuling what was underneith. I heard some people comming and got out of there.

Many trees caught my eye on my little adventure. Most of the trees are small, but the really big ones are beautiful. They are usually littered with many bumps and broken branches. Just looking up at them makes me feel very small compared to everything else. Its beautiful to see the leaves rustling and feeling a sense of nature everywhere around you.

I arrived at an area that my wife and I went swimming at a couple summers ago. It was great at the time because the water was much deeper and cleaner. It was well secluded. Today the water is low and polluted. It has a blue hue to it. A few kids on ATVs and Motorbikes ran through the area tearing up the little beach that was there.

I like the natural look of hollow trees. They are beautiful to look at. Someone had the nerve to spray some bad grafiti on one of these trees near the swimming hole. This is just done in really bad taste. It is a sad sight to see today. It angers me to see such horrible deeds. Memories are the only good left of this place.

Most of the flowers in the woods were bright yellow. I saw many butterflies, dragonflies and even some wasps playing in the myriad of flowers. I got a picture of a wasp pollenating one of them. I slowly got closer and closer until I could see it pretty well. I was also on guard in case it started to fly. I didn’t want to be stung in the middle of the woods.

I was fortunate enough to get up close enough and take a picture of some painted ladies. I got a yellow one down by a make-shift dam. A blue one was also found over near a construction site on the edge of the forest. I seem to have better luck with the blue ones as they don’t fly away when I get too close and they slowly open and close there wings for me.

I came to an area being developed for a new community. One saying around my county is “As long as there are trees, there will always be development”. It is sad. When I came up on the cleared land, I saw someone running around on his ATV around a water trap. He was really enjoying himself and spinning out on the turns.

After I crossed the barren land, I reached the woods again and started finding junk. There were many old tires in the woods. I found three of them together near a dried up river bed. Sometimes I get the feeling that these tires just grow in the wild. No one seems to appreciate the forest around here. I continued walking through the woods until I found a path.

Vines are beautiful I like to see them in all different sizes twisting around trees and climbing. It reminds me of dancing for some odd reason. Unfortunately a few vines will cut into trees and strangle them like a python does to its victim. If the vine dies away after this, you will sometimes be left with a really interesting tree formation.

I got home and emptied my pockets. Besides picking up the watch, I also found some pine cones of different shapes and sizes as well as some acorns. I took a few pictures and then started working on all the the pictures I had just taken. I started to adjust the brightness and contrast on my pictures to pull out the rich colors of the forest. I even cropped a few pictures as well.

Tags: Walking, Forst, Woods, Photography, Boredom, Adventures

I’ve been slaving away a little bit over the past few days. A little here, a little there. All of it done to make a simple image out of many. I posted a glimpse into what I was trying to achieve a few days ago. Since some of my readers expressed some interest in the program, I started changing it to be used by anyone. Here is a preview of the program itself:

Behind the sceens, I have been having difficulty determining the average color of an image. I made a breakthrough yesterday and got it working with color. Today I spent a good amount of time getting the average color for very large images at a very fast pace.

In the end, I learned about some methods that are available to me to bypass the GDI+ library. I found a really good tutorial for working with those bits and got some samples working. This helped speed up the processing of the thumbnail images that I had, but very large images were still taking too long. Instead I went ahead got 1024 pixels evenly spread accross the image. The end result was still very good color matching at a fast pace.

I hope to have a little program available tomarrow for you to try out. If you want to prepare for the beta test, make sure you have all of your images available in one folder. Also, you may want to go out and find some colorful things to photograph. I found that I lacked some color in my portfolio.

Tags: Montage, Software, Photography, Programming, Graphics, Beta