Lombard Streeet at Night (San Francisco)
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Getting organized
WordPress has categories… why don’t I use them?
I’ve been randomly posting comments about day to day life, alongside photos, alongside tech talk. The end result isn’t everything I’d hoped for. I’ve added categories for humdrum day to day stuff, and tech talk, and will probably add more as I go along. That means that photos will be in posts by themselves, with the only text being actually related to the photos.
On the home front, I’ve actually managed to remove one source of constant irritation – making the printer in my office let Jenn print correctly. My office is bigger than hers, so it makes sense that the printer in is mine, unfortunately I’m the geek in this relationship. My computer tends to be… unstable. I re-install software and operating systems frequently, and that means that the printer can go away randomly for unknown reasons (from her perspective, I know exactly why it went away). I’ve been using a SMC Barricade router for years, it worked, but only barely, and didn’t have support for anything fun like Dynamic DNS or SNMP. I just hadn’t been able to convince myself to spend around $100 to replace something that was working fine. Then I had the brainstorm – I could get a router that had a USB port on it to act as a print server. Since Jenn currently wasn’t able to print, it was an easy sell.
Off to the store we went, and a D-Link router came home with us. Installation was simple (expect for remembering my DSL account info), and in no time at all I’d upgrade the network to be 100Mbps throughout (the SMC was 10 Mbps), and get printing working.
Due to the location of my office in the house, running cables to anywhere else and keeping them hidden is a pain. I’ve only been able to run a single ethernet cable which limits connections since it is hooked up to a computer. Since the new router actually frees a 5-port switch as well, that lets me play around with the setup. I’m going to have to play around with positioning of the wireless access point, and see if I can improve the overall signal strength in the house. I also need to think about a computer or device by the TV since everybody needs a multimedia system, right?
Trolley at night
Sleep, who needs it?
Well, that’s a bit better – now I just need to enter the bare minimum, a filename and a comment. I like that much better. Still room for improvement since I still have to choose the picture elsewhere to get the info, but at least it is a single copy now.
Fortune Cookies
Well, I’ve been messing around with various gallery plugins for the site, and I think I have at long last found a winner in Lazyest Gallery. It does (almost) everything I’ve wanted… easy upload dialog, pulling the images from a simple directory so setting up an export in my image organizer should be doable, automatic image resizing, easy adding of descriptions, and more. Still working the kinks out, figuring out what all the options do, and so forth.
The only missing piece is easily adding the images to the post with lightbox enabled as well. That will take some coding, but I think it should be pretty easy to do. I needed to work on the lightbox control anyway because it asks for way too much information – I want to tell it what image I want and have it worry about the details. In the meantime, it’s a little extra work to add an image, but really just a couple copy/paste sequences. I’m off tomorrow, so I’m hoping that I can fix that real soon.
As to the photo – we visited Chinatown in San Francisco, and one of the places mentioned in a guide I’d seen was the fortune cookie factory. It was not at all obvious, down a back alley and we almost walked right past it, but it was interesting to see the cookies being made. We got some ‘naughty’ fortune cookies while we were there, but on the whole they are a little disappointing.
My first photoroam
Went on my first photoroam on Thursday. Here’s one of the results – I seem to have deleted a bunch of them without transferring them first. Guess it’s time to figure out how to recover photos using Linux. Doh.
More of the same
Another shot from San Francisco… this was shot from a ferry on the way from Sausalito to San Francisco.
Went on my first photoroam today. Haven’t had a chance to see if I actually took anything worth sharing, but had a good time regardless. We did a roam down a stretch of railroad track until someone spotted an interesting spot in a nearby field. I’ll be adding links to some of the photo roamers in the sidebar…
Time to start posting some pictures….
Came back from a trip to San Francisco last week. Took a few pictures that might be worth posting. I added Gallery to the site, and am going to try using that. It certainly makes uploading pictures a lot easier, since I use Digikam (a linux picture organizer) to sort my images, and there is an option to export to Gallery.
Issues to resolve about using Gallery are how to integrate the lightbox preview I’ve already set up – I really like the way it works, so I’ll probably find some way of integrating the two, even if it is only to have the lightbox code use the images that Gallery sets up.
Anyway, Pic#1 from San Francisco bears some resemblance to one I took in Chicago that happens to be in the photos that rotate through the upper right.
Scan results
Had a friend wondering about the quality of scans when scanning slides with a flatbed scanner. I’ve dug these up out of the archives for a reference.
Slides:
These are the only slides I’ve scanned and I took them in high school, which means that they are about 20 years old. Hopefully my photography has improved since then.
Negatives:
Some black and whites from a roll I shot at a friend’s wedding and developed myself.
Edit:
I’ve been playing with a thumbnail creation script using ImageMagick. It’s pretty cool how much you can do. I had to do some scripting to make it fit the scaling, something that ImageMagick V6 handles with a single extra character, but until that’s running on this server, my solution will work…. long term I want to roll the thumbnail creation into the LightBoxJS stuff. Right now it asks for thumbnail, width and height. No reason it can’t get that stuff automatically.
Further edit:
I’ve update everything to use Lazyest Gallery, so the ImageMagick stuff isn’t needed
Cheap Eats
While we were in Toronto, we stopped by the Yung Sing Pastry Shop on Baldwin Street (off of Spadina in Chinatown). It’s been open since 1968 and is the only place my wife insists on going each and every time we visit Toronto.
We aren’t the only fans, you can find lots of other reviews on the web, including this one with a shot of the outside of the building.
