irrelevancy

PSN released over a hundred games last week. Picked up a slick version of Tetris. Play ‘Til Your Eyes Bleed mode and a few crazy ones. Purchased a tower defense game. Only ever played a few online. Nice to have a quality one. I didn’t want to buy God of War as a short action game isn’t really worth $40. They put it on PSN for $16 and it’s a stunningly beautiful game. Plays very smooth and the combat is very satisfying. I was excited for Motorstorm to come out and it’s a blast to play. The tracks are massive. Every game should have a screenshot feature. I could’ve taken a million of these.

Pulling ahead

Huge jumps

Levels are varied and beautiful

Laser show

I wanted to put up some gallery software to make it easier to share pictures. After a cursory search, I found this Plogger, which was very nice. It was simple to use, but came with a couple tiny annoyances. First, an image goes into an album and an album goes into a collection. I just don’t need that level of organization and only seems to cause more clicks to get to the content. Also, I would have preferred to be able to password-protect certain albums or whatever and Plogger didn’t seem to offer any sort of that functionality.

Dear friend Minna mentioned that she had been using ZenPhoto for a project. It’s a small download and easy to set up, which only took me a couple minutes. It doesn’t use compulsory collections for organization, instead offering optional sub-albums, which I prefer. Also, it features protected albums.

You can find the (currently desolate) gallery here: Irrelevancy Web Gallery. I’ve resolved (I don’t think that’s the right word if I haven’t actually started doing it by now) to carry my camera around more often, so I hope to populate the gallery before too long.

Oh, and WordPress’ gallery looks to be coming along nicely.

Slapped together a wallpaper for the PSP using the fan-site kit.

Patapon PSP Wallpaper

Patapon PSP Wallpaper with overlay

I was getting burnt playing around with the GIMP, finally just selecting random plug-ins and filters and I liked this one.

Posturized Poolballs

I took a few sequence shots with the purpose of trying out Hugin (available in the Ubuntu repositories) to make panoramas. I had a cursory knowledge of how the program worked, picking control spots and stitching an image together, but I had no idea how easy it was when you just let it do it automatically.

I threw 8 pictures at it, it worked for about 10-15 minutes, and out came a fairly nice panorama. The first wasn’t perfect as it seems like it used the first photo as a starting point, where it seems like it would have better to use one of the middle photos to start with. The only real problem I had was with the seams. It applies some blending, which helped, but the white bands are noticeable.

Sedona Panorama – 8 pictures

I tried again with only 5 pictures and it did a much better job, both with the seams and the perspective. Thanks to SJ for tips on color correction.

Sedona Panorama – 5 pictures, heavily cropped