In LA

I threw together this little¹ damask pattern, which I’m using as my desktop, iPhone, and iPad background. Figure I’d share in case anyone else would enjoy it.

Click the thumbnail at right to get hold of a png image at the exact resolution required for the iPhone 4G’s “retina” display. 960×540. Perhaps you can spot the game of Pong in it?

If you feel like using it on your phone, click through to the full-size image, then click and hold on the image to save it to your library, then navigate to and choose it in the wallpaper settings. Neato.

To make your own damask pattern, sit yourself down in front of a computer running Adobe Illustrator and check out this great tutorial over at tutsplus.com.

1. Don’t you just love it when people are proud of an achievement, and they express their pride couched in diminutive adjectives and verbs that indicate the achievement took a minimal amount of effort. e.g.: “Oh, those little baubles I tossed off the other day? The full-scale model of the pyramids at Giza? It was nothing.” In this case, I think I’ve come up with a pattern I like (partly due to subject matter) but the pattern will probably please very few, (partly due to subject matter). I’m using the diminutive out of respect for those who hate retrogaming or hate damask patterns or just hate life in general. [↩]

I know a lot of editors who like to leave Final Cut Pro’s “Browser” in large icon mode so that they can see a visual representation of each clip. I happen to think that the Browser’s list view is more compact and displays more useful information for each clip. But that layout is a hard sell for visual thinkers.

Enter the Browser’s Thumbnail column:

To enable this column, just right-click any column header, and select “Show Thumbnail” from the contextual popup menu:

Just as in icon view, you can click on each thumbnail and drag left and right to scan through the clip’s contents. If you press the “control” key any time while scanning through the clip and keep it held down as you release the mouse button, you’ll change the “poster frame” displayed in the thumbnail for that clip to the last frame displayed.

It’s worth noting that the thumbnails, at least in the case of the 16:9 clips I used for these screen captures, are not displayed at the proper aspect ratio. It is also worth noting that the thumbnail doesn’t change size if the user widens the Browser’s Thumbnail column. I’m sure these small issues will be fixed in some future version of FCP (wink wink nudge nudge Apple ;) .

I saw this wine bottle on the clearance rack at Meijers and, though this alcoholic beverage likely has nothing to do with any two-wheeled self-balancing electric scooter, I couldn’t help but remember all the Segway hype from 2001.

The quote in this post’s Title is from Segway creator Dean Kamen, who has invented many extremely-cool devices, but his predictions for a future built around that scooter have yet to be realized. This Slate article does a good job recapping the more outlandish bits of Segway hype and expectations.

I remember rumors circulating before the Segway launch that Kamen was going to release some kind of antigravity flying machine based on the Stirling engine. I have no idea what that means, but the diagram of a Stirling engine over at Wikipedia is the most unintentionally suggestive engineering-related image I’ve ever seen. I’ve put a tiny thumbnail of it at right, but for greater impact view it at full resolution over at Wikipedia.

Hints of chocolate, blackcurrant, and outsized expectations.

When one searches for anything on Microsoft Bing that has the potential to be related to anything that can be bought, sold, or processed, the search engine presents several links to commercial related items at the top of the search results, often emblazoned with the ‘Bing cashback’ icon to indicate that the item can be purchased at a discount by finding it through Bing. I thought the following commercialized Bing link was rather interesting:

Any guesses as to the subject of my initial search? Here’s a hint: the search was completely unrelated to gender reassignment surgical procedures, but it does warm my heart that on such operations a person might receive a Bing cashback percentage return. Thanks Microsoft!

At right is an image with a little more context, in which you can see my query and the placement of Bing’s interesting little ad. Click it to see it full size.

edit: I’m wrong about the resolution issue — see correction and link to a full-resolution 2729×733 180º panorama at the end of this post.

I just shot and stitched a panorama while waiting for a ride. Though the Autostitch iPhone app does a great job, I can’t help but wish it would save the resulting panoramas to the photo library at full resolution.
 
The screenshot of the app displaying a section of the finished panorama is at least twice the resolution inside the app as is the version it saves. If the iPhone APIs limit the resolution at which apps can export to the photo library, perhaps autostitch could save to its own db and offer some other method of export (email, built-in webserver a la ‘Brushes’, flickr export?).
 
Regardless this one limitation, ‘AutoStitch’ is a lot of fun, and is well worth its $1.99 price.

Posted via email from Zachary’s posterous

– Edit 2009-06-19 12:32am –
It appears that AutoStitch does save its panoramas at full resolution to the iPhone’s photo library, but the photo library doesn’t display the images at full resolution. Nor does the iPhone’s mail client send the photos at the original resolution, instead it scales them to be much smaller.

I used the ‘Multi-Photo’ email application, which can send multiple photos via email without resizing, to send this panorama to myself.¹ Click the thumbnail below if you’d like to view the panorama at its full 2729×733 resolution.

Click this thumbnail to see the full-res pano.

1. Were I home and not out traveling, I’m sure the full-res photo would have easily synced to my home computer’s iPhoto library over USB, but that’s not an option in the field. [↩]