Native fish eye lenses can be very expensive, a cheap and nice alternative is a multiplier lens that you can attach to your native lenses.
Last week I bought for Anna a Opteka .35x Super Wide Angle Panoramic Macro Fisheye Lens (Amazon Uk, Amazon US) that I found to be affordable and very good.
Now, instead of attaching this lens to your camera like you normally do, this one is attached to your lens filter attachment ring and because lenses have different diameters for filter rings, the lens which connects to a 52mm ring, comes with adaptors to connect it to 58mm and 67mm filter rings and this is when I started having an idea.
You know, this lens is to be put in front of another lens, so what about attaching it to your webcam and have some wide fun with it? Nothing simpler!
Yes, there is a lot of geek-ish and hack-ish goodness in baking bread and if you wish to incorporate this goodness onto your life, you may find these slides useful.
By optimization I don’t only mean reducing file size, but also colour precision, http requests and
optimized coding and deployment.
The slides also show and extensive benchmark of image production alternatives and compares file
sizes and quality.
Also, it was a happy surprise today that Slideshare sent me an email to tell me the presentation has been
editorially selected to be showcased on the design section today.
When you export graphics to be used in web pages, file size is important and for as obsolete as Gifs may seem to the eyes of some, don’t be mistaken,
the indexed color system isn’t going anywhere. Even if Gifs are a bit in decline, Png files can use the indexed color system and this is actually very useful.
Despite the predominance of Jpegs and support to millions of colours, many images are simple enough that they could benefit of using more modest color systems
like indexed color which allows for up to 256 colours but allows you to control with precision which colours these would be and exactly how many, allowing for
extremely compact image sizes.
So you decided your domain doesn’t fit you as well as you’d like. And you are also afraid you’ll be losing all the old links and search
engine ranking if you move to a new one. Maybe you also want to use the current domain for a different project that suits it best.
Or maybe you just want to change the structure of your URLs or you want a different URI structure in the new domain.
Let’s see how to write some htaccess rules so Apache can do the magic for you.
You may have noticed that, thanks to the magic of Gravatar, commenters on this blog now have faces besides the comments.
Gravatars on Zo'C
Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar and what it does is to allow people to create an account, register as many emails as you may have and attach avatars to each. This image can be retrieved by any site through your email, so anyone who knows your email, may know how you look like, or what kind of image you’ve chosen to represent yourself.
And as I said, it doesn’t have to be a single image for all emails. If you have different emails for different purposes, your avatar would display the image you’ve set up for it, leaving you to different images for different email addresses.
Getting Started
First things first, if you don’t know what a gravatar then the best thing to do is start by getting one for yourself, although you don’t need one in order to use avatars on your website.
Go to Gravatar’s site, sign up for free, add at least one email address and an image for it. You can leave a comment on this post and you’ll see your face besides it.
Putting Gravatars on your site — the hard way
Once you’ve put your hands on someone’s avatar, all you have to do is to get encode it using an hexadecimal MD5 hash for the email and add it to the end of this url
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/
This is to protect the privacy of your user’s email. For instance, the MD5 hash of my email 4c7e77a76f68420298c3e2cf692a47a9. This is one directional cryptography, meaning that you can’t, in practice, know what the email is, but if you know the email, you can easily produce this string.
You can easily get my Gravatar by asking for the image at
Hash encoding email addresses may not be your cup of tea, but you can probably guess that there are many implementations around for Gravatars.
If you use Wordpress ≥ 2.5, all you have to do is call the get_avatar() function. The first argument is the comment author email or Hass, the second one is the size (optional) and a third optional argument is allowed to specify the URL of a default image for those who haven’t got a Gravatar yet.
I may be a bit outdated, I know, but I just discovered the Wordpress iPhone App, and nothing better than using it to write about itself.
I don’t think there’s much to say. If you use wordpress you know you should expect a quality tool and you can do most things you would do on the web interface but with added mobility and you can use your iPhone camera (which is lame, I know, but is handy and it’s always with you).
I have just started exploring it, but I don’t see much missing for a quick post editor to carry on the pocket. The one thing I do think it could be present (and is one of the reasons why I’ve got an iPhone in the first place) is the ability to use geodata on your posts from within the app. I hope this feature is present in future versions.
In any case, the app is quite nice, it’s free and you can find it on iPhone.wordpress.org
(And yes, the lame picture on this post was taken with my iPhone)
Moving further towards the life in the cloud, I’ve been beta testing Spotify, a new music service, and I’m loving it.
Cloud computing is a term referring to the web as an abstract cloud providing you the services you need without having to rely on a local system for more than connecting to the internet and the services you require.
Spotify is just like that!
They have signed up with several major record labels to create a huge music repository you can browse and play instantly, categorize and share with friends. The simplest explanation I can give you goes like this: “Is just like your iTunes, but with a much bigger library.
First, let me rant a bit about the music industry.
For many, many years, people bought LPs, then CDs and, while tapes have been available for a long time, they were never preferred. Most of us (all?) did record a tape for a friend when asked and moral consequences of that were minimal, if at all. The means to copy and the final quality were rudimentary enough not to cause a deep impact on the music industry.
Since the advent of the CD recorder and music and video compresssion formats like mp3, copying has not only been made easier, but often more convenient than the traditional method. I remember once I’ve seen a comment in the internet of some huge collector of downloaded audio and video saying:
I don’t mind paying for a film or music I want, what I mind is the need to antecipate my film or music choices in a day or more, when technology exists to make it available immediately
Anonymous user on a forum
Now, before anything else, I’m not in favor of piracy, not at all. But having said that, that speech has a point: pirate downloads offer, in many aspects, a better service than the traditional process, labels are still trying to enforce. Of course the price is unbeatable, well at least until you get caught, but I’m inclined to believe a good part of the piracy only happens because of lack of music distribution services that are compatible with the times we live.
What about iTunes store? I hear you asking. Fair point! I haven’t said there aren’t, just that they are in short supply. And what about last.fm? You might add. Yes, they too!
Let’s compare them!
The iTunes Store
The iTunes store is pretty much similar to the traditional method, but with great advantages. You can buy songs individually, you can have them downloaded imediately and start listening. Additionally you keep some, once you downloaded it, the song is yours, you can backup it, synchronize your iPod… it’s yours. Just like a CD.
On the shortcomings side, you have to manage your own backups, disk space, synchronization, etc. But probably the biggest problem is, just like CD’s that you have to buy the songs to even try them. If you don’t like them, you have to pay anyway.
Last.fm
One of my favourite features on last.fm is the variety of artists, it is on the cloud, you don’t have to worry about a thing, it is a great service, but not surprisingly, given its name, is more analogous to a radio than to your own music collection.
How Spotify works
You can have either a free or paid Spotify account. The free version will present 30 seconds ads every now and then (not very often, IMO), the premium version will allow you to go completely ad-free for a very monthly fee. And a very cool feature is the 24 hours ad-free pass.
Now, the bad news. Because Spotify is still in Beta, signing up for the free service is invite only. So you need to either receive one from a friend or subscribe to the invite list. To do so, go to Spotify click on “Get Started” and add your email to the list.
And before you ask, I wish I could give some invites, but unfortunately, I have none :(
Once you have your account, you don’t need to keep a music library, the songs are streamed from the server, and because of that you can try and use all the songs you want and you don’t pay extra for songs you didn’t liked or you don’t want to keep. Even with iTunes, if you want to share a song with a friend, your friend must buy if before she knows if it’s worthy.
With Spotify, anyone having an account can freely accept your suggestions at no extra cost. To me, this sounds just like life in the cloud should be.
The problems
Of course, there are shortcomings as well. First and foremost, is not as portable as music you actually have, physically. If you don’t have internet access, you are out of music which is pretty much a problem of cloud computing as a whole. Also, you need a client to listen to songs, and for the time being, that is only available to Mac and PC (and to Linux via Wine), but no mobiles so far.
Having free accounts, you know you will still be able to access “your songs” even if you quit the premium account, which is a good thing.
Conclusion
At this point I should say I’m not affiliated with Spotify in any way, I just like their service but I do encourage you to register either on the waiting list or for a trial on the premium service because I think this is the way music is going and I’m very happy it is.
Today is blog action day and the theme is poverty, and I’ve been struggling for weeks to find a subject to write on and following discussions today, I realized many other people are in the same boat.
I did wrote yesterday a post saying that poverty isn’t off-topic in any blog niche, and I certainly believe that’s true. Why is, then, so hard to write about it?
According to blog action day stats, Today 12,044 sites have blogged about poverty and hopefully, risen awareness about poverty, but, I’ll join Sue Clark on saying: Just blogging about poverty is not enough.
Awareness about poverty is high enough, what is lacking is attitude and not information. If 12,044 posts have today lead to 12,044 actual actions to fight poverty, then I’ll call it success, but if a good part of these posts are just transferring the responsibility to the reader, then is time wasted.
What can you do?
Actions fall in two categories: long time strategies, and short time solutions. Ideally, actions that fall in the first category will help wipe poverty from the face of the earth, but the short time solutions are essential to supply the immediate needs of people, literally, starving to death or being unable to supply very basic needs.
Short time solutions
Donate money to an organization
Engage in activities to raise funds or help manage one
Donate what you don’t want, instead of selling on eBay
Donate your professional skills to help find and optimize solutions
You don’t have to cross the world to find people in the need of help. Living in one of the wealthiest cities in the world, London, I tell you there is plenty to do here. I’m sure there’s plenty to do near you as well. If there isn’t, you can always engage online.
Long time strategies
Educate both rich and poor
Help create sustainable solutions in terms of cost of solutions/revenue
Help change the greed mentality
The greed mentality and the credit crunch explained
Nothing is more harmful to the delicate balance of the human beings than trying to have plenty of limited resources. There is only a certain amount of wealth in the world, and is more than enough to all of us.
More often than not people seem to want to be really rich. And what’s that for? The only reasonable answer I see for willing to be rich is to have more stability over life, which is a fair point. Still, it’s a fragile thought.
People believe to think they are as wealthy as they money they have. But money is just an abstraction and, as Christian Heillmann pointed it quite accurately, these days is an abstraction to no real world goods, merely speculation, then, bam, credit crunch! Where has the wealth gone? Nowhere, it has never been there.
But I’m slightly digressing now, the point is, greed is making some people rich and, as consequence, others poor. Make Greed history and you’ll make poverty history. And if you don’t have poverty, why would you bother in being rich to live with stability?
Easier said than done, I hear some saying. I’m not sure, it seems that becoming poor and broken is even easier than fulfilling the objective, while trying to become rich.
Finally, is not about you or me being rich or trying to, but where you shop and what. Is about who you endorse with your money. As my cousin Saverio told me once: You don’t make politics voting, you make politics buying. Chose carefully where and what to buy!
If you believe in blogging at all, then you have to believe that bloggers united for a cause can be a strong driving force to change. The motivation behind Blog action day is that bloggers around the world gather one day a year to discuss subjects that concern all of us as individuals.
On October 15 last year, thousands of bloggers wrote about the environment and targeted an audience of millions. The environment has become a frequent and recurrent subject but the need for a change of conscience and attitude on that field is still huge and what has been done is not yet enough.
This year, Blog Action Day’s subject is poverty, and so far 8,634 Sites already engaged on the cause and will reach an audience of 9,201,889 subscribers.
Why is your post important?
Now, with all the media coverage on the subject, why is your blog post important?
As a blogger, you probably know that relationship between writers and readers in blogs are much more personal than in traditional media and when you write a post on your blog you might be targeting only a few hundred people (or even less) but these few people are listening to you and if there are bloggers among your readers, they’ll be talking to some people who are actually listening to them.
Why is not off-topic on your blog
Poverty, just like environment, is a subject that concerns every single human being and your blog and your business, as tools for your business, networking or your online persona are part of your footprint on the planet. Being a personal or professional blog, either you or your business have an impact on poverty. Either you are helping, creating poverty or doing nothing, which means, at the very least, endorsing the current situation.
To make a long story short, whatever you write about, has an impact on poverty, either positive or negative, and there is at least some point in which you can discuss the subject inside your niche.
What if I’m wrong?
Say I’m wrong. Say that your niche doesn’t have anything to do with poverty at all, it doesn’t help, it doesn’t get in the way and it doesn’t endorse the current poverty. Well, then the non-relationship of your niche with the subject is so unique that it is on itself a subject to write about and I’d be the first one to read your post.
What’s in for me?
Well before being bloggers, entrepreneurs and professionals, we are all human beings and I’d be happy if that were enough reason, but if that’s not, then let’s roll up the sleeves for some simple math.
There are 8,634 blogs registered and a fixed audience of 9,201,889 Readers and the numbers are growing. It is quite likely that this event will have a lot of more traditional media coverage and the networking happening on this event will be massive and you risk end up knowing interesting people you wouldn’t normally meet.
GuilhermeZühlke O'Connor is a passionated Web Designer and Developer focused on Web Standards and the web ahead of us currently working as a Webdev for
Yahoo! Eruope
inLondon,UK.
On his free time he enjoys cinema, travelling, cooking and eating.
This is to protect the privacy of your user’s email. For instance, the MD5 hash of my email 4c7e77a76f68420298c3e2cf692a47a9. This is one directional cryptography, meaning that you can’t, in practice, know what the email is, but if you know the email, you can easily produce this string.
