Another Nokia N95 photo, this one taken from the Market St. side of the craft market at the ferry building (you can see the ferry building’s neon sign in the background).
These stalls have some interesting art and photos for sale, as well as clothing and other items.
One of a number of shots taken with my new Nokia N95. For a mobile phone this thing has an outstanding camera. Five megapixel resolution, Carl Zeiss auto-focus lens (not the regular fixed focus) and a whole host of features you expect on a camera but not on a phone camera.
Check out the other photos I’ve taken using the N95 in my Nokia N95 set on Flickr.
OK, I admit, it’s a lame title, but I couldn’t resist. These two three-sided white porcelain pyramids are now in my kitchen. They’re only a few inches tall too.
Was going to ask you to guess what they are, but I think it is a little too obvious.
Stuck indoors last week I thought I’d take some photos of the cut flowers we had bought for a party. These tiny little flowers were in the bouquet mostly as foliage I think (they were attached to what looked like a fir tree branch, complete with little green needles).
More photos from the cut flowers in my Flickr stream.
Early afternoon on the last day of the Web 2.0 Expo here in San Francisco. At 4pm today, in the Beta room on the second floor of the Moscone West building, I’m co-presenting a session describing how Devicescape is enabling Mobile 2.0.
I’ve had my Roomba for a couple of weeks now, and so far I am impressed. I’m impressed how well it finds its way around. I’m impressed with how well it actually cleans. But perhaps I was most impressed by iRobot as a company.
My first clue was that the schematic diagram of the Roomba in the manual included a description of where the serial port was. I had to double take. In all my dealings with consumer electronics in the Wi-Fi space, we’ve had to jump through hoops to get access to a serial port on a production device. In one case we had to add surface mount zero ohm resistors (anybody remember when these were just links?). And here’s a device that not only has the port accessible, but it is labelled in the user manual.
Then I found the sticker on the already opened bag. A EULA for a device? Surely not, but reading more I found: “For software programmers interested in giving Roomba new functionality, we encourage you to do so.” Now that is an enlightened company.
It is this kind of willingness to let others, including your end users, extend and improve your product that defines Web 2.0 and Mobile 2.0. Although most Roomba vacuuums are not connected to the internet, they are application specific devices, and they have an API and documentation for developers. If more consumer electronics devices came with this level of support for user experimentation the world might just be a little bit better off.
On the subject of Web/Mobile 2.0, I will be co-presenting a session about Mobile 2.0 on behalf of Devicescape at the Web 2.0 Expo this week. You can read more about that on the Devicescape Blog 2.0.
So, I bought one of these digital frames a while back and just got around to trying it out. The frame has a roughly16:9 aspect ratio screen, so I was expecting to have to crop some of my images to that ratio so that they’d display nicely (it does also support a 4:3 mode, but that leaves black bars left & right on the screen).
Problem was that when I converted the images to the 480 x 234 resolution that the manual states the screen is, I ended up with black bars above and below and the image squashed down. Took me a while to work out what it was really doing… even in 16:9 mode it is expecting to be given 4:3 photos (which is what most digital cameras take). All it does is stretch them out to fit the screen, which distorts them.
My solution, after a little trial and error, was this process:
So you can see what the effect of the processing is, here’s a before and after pair from one of the photos I took in Mexico:
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| Before | After |
When the frame stretches this out again to the 16:9 ratio it will look normal. The reason for the additional resolution, despite the recommendation in the user guide not to exceed 480 x 234, is so that it has more pixels than it needs. When I tried the smaller images, they came out looking blurry. The 624×468 resolution seems to look OK unless you study it close up (and who does that with a framed snapshot?).
I have the steps above stored in an action in Photoshop so I can apply it to a batch of photos, store them on a CF card and then have them run as a slideshow. The quality of the screen is not stunning, but then I didn’t expect it to be for the price. What was disappointing was that I couldn’t just load native resolution images into it and have it just render them directly, but my simple image processing trick works around that problem nicely and I am happy with the results.
Another photo of my favourite bridge – well, favourite in terms of photographic subject; I don’t think I’d consider it a favourite to drive over. Luckily for me, I don’t do that too often these days, instead racing under the bridge in relative comfort each morning and evening on either the Encinal or the Peralta.
Taken last weekend in Beresford Park, San Mateo. These socks were hanging in the tree next to where we were sitting in the park. Thought it made for a pretty unusual photo 😉