justinmaccarthy

Microsoft has launched a iPhoto/Picasa type application called Max. Max allows you to organise your digital photos, create slide shows etc.

Interesting Nerd note.. its built on WinFx

Location. Location. Location – its a retailers mantra.

Getting prime shelf space in high street shops is a big deal for a manufacturer. And if we use this a measure of the success, Apple are really on a roll.

Its seems every phone shop and digital Photo shop in Dublin are stocking the Mac-Mini, the iPod (and many accessories and even the full iMac.
Those lovely white machines are pride of place in these stores, not sitting on a back shelve somewhere.

To put this in context; they are not stocking PCs, just the Macs.

So Vodafone are selling linux and non wintel machines to Joe Bloggs.

Now that is a mini-revolution.

IrishBlogs

A public Phone in San Franciso - August 2004
IrishBlogs

Screencasting??? The heavy metal umlaut???

What the hell??

Read it here

Some tools to help manage your iPhoto collections..

Slim down the size of your iPhoto folder

iphotodiet

Extract your originals, duplicates etc. with
iPhotoExtractor

Split up you libraries
iPhotoLibraryManager

Channel4 (www.channel4.com) shows some great documentaries but alway late at night. Tonight they showed a documentary called “All the girls I’ve loved Before”, by Henrique Goldman , a Brazilian film director. In his film Goldman interviews his former loves, 6 very different women (and one who refused to be interviewed) from several countries, who talk freely straight to the camera without interruption from Goldman, about their relationships with him. It was really interesting to see the director through and ONLY through the eyes of the women in his life (..well plus a few auxiliary charactors). Nicely shot, and edited.

Really interesting and utterly charming.

A year ago, I turned on Channel4 late one night expecting some mind-numbing “best 100 …” shows, but ended up watching one of the most uplifting documentaries I have seen. I then promptly forgot what it was called. But thats ok, cus google didn’t.

The Other Final ( http://www.theotherfinal.com/ ) is the story of a football (soccer) match between the 2 worst teams in the world:

Bhutan (pop: unknown. between 1 and 2 million; fifa ranking: 202nd ): A secluded kingdom 7500ft above sea-level in the Eastern Himalayas, between China and India. The Prime Minister claims the citizens value GNH (Gross National Happiness) over GNP.

Montserrat (pop: 9,245 ; fifa ranking: 203rd ): Much of this island was devastated and two-thirds of the population fled abroad because of the eruption of the Soufriere Hills Volcano that began on 18 July 1995

Now I am not of fan of football, but it doesn’t matter, this story is about the diverse people and culture of the world, and getting together to enjoy sport. The resulting documentary is beautiful.

If you get a chance to watch this documentary, grab it.

Also…

If you are a nerd you might also like the bbc Radio 4 documentary series – SILICON VALLEY USA
Listen online here http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/siliconvalley.shtml

I’ve just splashed out on a Nikon digital camera , the D70. I love it. I bought it on a whim, after using a friends and so far I have no regrets. Not bad since it cost about $1400.

I had my PowerBook with me on holidays so I used the Apple iPhoto software to import my photos for my camera. Now iPhoto is very easy to use, like most of the applications on the Apple, it just works. There are lots of nice features, but there are also a few missing features. One I find really annoying is the fact that iPhoto doesn’t autorotate images. It annoys me because it should be so simple to do, using the EXIF info that the camera provides.

So the best why to deal with annoying features to to fix them. Since these applications are not opensource, the hack will have to be more subversive than just fixing it.

So first step, lets see what we can use.

Applescript : there are sample applescript to rotate a image provided by apple.
Perl : there is a perl module that read EXIF info .
Folder actions : you can attach scripts to folder that will run when an item is placed into them.

Seem that we should be able to stitch something together with the above .