Using Panoman to get panoramic pictures wherever you are.

Byrichard

If you’re looking for a software that makes creating panoramic shots easy with a phone such as the N95 then Panoman is an interesting option. It’s a software that you install on the phone and helps you take a series of pictures before stitching them together.

It does this by showing you a band with up to twelve possible images. As you take the first image keep the camera steady and pan to the right until the red border is filled with the next image. It automaticaly takes the picture. Repeat those steps and then press stop. Once that’s done the software stitches the images together.

View from Cuvaloup de Crans

Here is one example of what you can get with nothing more than the phone.

My new Toy, the HDR-SR12E

Byrichard

After talking to a friend about possible collaborations in the near future I decided not to invest too much money on a new camera so I bought the Sony HDR-SR12. It’s a small easy to carry video camera that records in AVCHD at a resolution of 1920 by 1080i.

The hard drive is 120 gigs for a total recording time of over 30hrs depending on what you want to shoot. I chose the highest quality setting and I still get 1780 minutes of recording time, more than enough for a day’s shooting. It’s a small camera, much easier to travel with and there are no moving parts and no need for tapes. I love that, it means I can start editing as soon as I get home. I’m tapeless at last, I’ve been waiting years for this moment.

It’s charging so I can’t play with it quite yet but I’ll keep you informed as to developments on this topic.

As a side note video capture is easy, just use log and transfer rather than log and capture in Finalcut Pro. It’s shift option 8.

To Maggie and Chris I dedicate my 600th Blog Post

Byrichard

To Maggie and Chris I dedicate this, my 600th blog post as you are now in Florida, engaged and planning the rest of your life together.

We have exchanged hundreds of messages over the past year and it’s been fun. Now the dynamics have progressed and in so doing why not mark the occasion 🙂

Have fun.

As a sub note I also dedicate it to my Cousin and his fiancée.

And to Seesmic Whit and Claire.

Falling for Friendfeed

Byrichard

Friendfeed is an interesting service I never wanted to use because I prefered Jaiku but recently that feeling has changed. As I saw Scoble speak more and more about how good friendfeed was I began to think that maybe it’s time to try the service, to see what it’s about and to see how well it works. As a result of the past day using the service I begin to enjoy i.

What I like about this service is that it’s an aggregation of all the content that friends are creating. it’s not content produced by IRL friends but rather by interesting people from various corners of the web. We see their images, their posts and the articles they find interesting, as well as comments detailing why they are of value.

A change I’ve noticed, at least today, is that as I watch the live feed I find myself reading more posts, following the conversation and being quite a bit more receptive than I would be to links on twitter. That’s possibly because the site is still new to me but it may also be because it’s a nice mixture, more visual than other solutions.

As a result of this first day of using it properly there’s a good chance I will continue experimenting with the site, seeing what I can gain from it in the long run.

Twitter and it’s fourty minute delay

Byrichard

Today twitter has reminded me of why I dislike how it’s managed. With the big Mac World event and CES twitter is down, for the count. The problem is that these crafty people have decided that rather than take the site down completely they would let it lag.

As a consequence of this lag the site has been rendered redundant but don’t worry. Other sites like plurk, friendfeed and facebook are still standing.

Picasa for Mac

Byrichard

Picasa is now available for mac and it works well. It works so well it took just 30 seconds for me to crash the application.

On a more serious note Picasa is an interesting application that auto indexes all of your pictures in the Pictures folder and indexes your images within the application. As a result you have easy access to those images. At the same time as it can do those things it also makes uploading images to picasa on the web, to blogger e-mail and more.

What I like most about this application is it’s ability to read geotags to place images on the map both locally and on the website. The weakness though is that it’s per album for the moment, rather than for every image at once. It would be fun to see all my images from around here scattered on the map.

|

TwitterFriends

Byrichard

Twitterfriends is another of those interesting tools to see who you converse with most on twitter. You can see who replies to you most, who you reply to most, the sphere of influence and more. As a result it’s a good tool with which to establish who are the interesting people to continue following as well as those that may be worth dropping.

In particular the second to last tab deals with inactive account. It’s a quick and easy way to see which accounts are no longer worth following. The network tab is also interesting. It’s a quick way of seeing who is in your networki graphicaly. Click the FOAF (friend of a friend) tab and you can see how your network and that of others interact.

As more people use the website so the value of those figures go up. You’ll notice that according to this I have received no replies. If that was a reality I would have given up on twitter a few months ago.