My love of photography, along with my addiction to Dailybooth, led me to download a few photo-enhancing apps from the App Store. I’ll post more comprehensive reviews of these later, but one that impressed me lately is Photoforge. It’s essentially the closest I’ve come to seeing an iPhone app do some semi-convincing, Photoshop-esque editing. I may look around for some more photo-editing apps that do more or less the same thing, but I may stick with this one for a while!

Look for a more complete review soon…

I have to give a tip ‘o the hat to Chris Pirillo, egomaniacal geek that he is, for pointing this app out.

Click on the thumbnail to embiggen the image of my new desktop (wallpaper, for you Windows sufferers users!). I created that while using this awesome fractal-generating app called Oxidizer. It’s an open source project on Sourceforge.com and, so far, it’s only available for OS X. Be warned, though; you will definitely need some muscular processing speed to render any thumbnail samples generated by Oxidizer to full size images within a decent timeframe.

Case in point: Chris Pirillo demonstrated this app on his quad-dual-core Mac Pro machine. That’s 8 processor cores, compared to my lone PPC 1.8 Ghz G5 processor. It took him all of 37 seconds to generate an over-2000px wide image. It took me seven freakin’ hours to generate this image you see in the post to 1680×1050px resolution!! Oh, by the way, this thing does fractal morphing animations as well. So, yup, definitely think twice before doing any serious stuff with this app if you have a underpowered (read: over 2 years old) computer.

If you want to use this image for your own (legal) purposes, click here to download it in 1680×1050 widescreen goodness. (567 Kb download)

Cheers!

Hello all! I could have written about this thing earlier but I wanted to get things tweaked to where I wanted it to be.

I’m talking about my new addition to the blog… a Tumblelog! The concept goes something like this: Since I don’t like to do multiple small posts in one day about little things I encounter, I save the important posts for this (main) blog. The Tumblelog, for bloggers like me, is good for those “little bleeps and blurbs” that I may find amusing or interesting enough to post, but not in my main page. I feel that some of my readership wouldn’t want to have to revisit the site several times a day just to see little posts about things that don’t impact my world enough for them to read about. Aaaaand, for those who would like to keep up with it, not only do I have a new button on the top menubar (isn’t it snazzy?), but I also have a link to the RSS feed on my Tumblelog page! (The original tumblelog is served by Tumblr.com)

So go ahead and check it out! C’mon… I know you wanna! I may even install a condensed version of it in place of the Del.icio.us links in my Sidebar. Well, cheers to you all… and happy surfing!

Sorry to all of you for not writing lately. I’ve been both lazy and busy… figure that one out! I guess I should tell you all about some of the happenings in my life lately, as well as plans I have in general and with this blog.

First, I’ve been having fun with the new Megaminx puzzle. When I first started solving it, it took a couple of hours at a time. Just trying to get used to all the faces while looking for all the pieces can be a real challenge! Now, I think I can solve it in around thirty minutes. I also took some time on friday to go to a hardware store for some silicone lubricant. This is recommended for twisty puzzles like Rubik’s and Meffert’s brand, among others. Now, the minx and all three of my 3×3x3 cubes turn very well; no stiffness!

On that note, I also had a good run on Stickam.com yesterday. It seems that Thommen and I had become very popular that day, as I had a highest count of 40 or so people looking at my cam pages! I got to meet a few cool new people, while in my live cam room, and reconnect with one friend in particular. I even looked in the chat rooms and found a room called “Cubing”. This I had to see! It turns out, while talking to the guys in there, I got to meet one of the world record holders for the Megaminx, at under a minute and 13 seconds! I can’t even begin to spell Erik’s surname, but he’s listed in the Wikipedia entry on the puzzle. Watching the guy on cam with a cube was just amazing.

I’ve also been having fun, with Christine, watching the Doctor Who box set. We still have a few episodes to watch, so I’ll list my favorites here when we’re done. I’m ripping “The Impossible Planet” for iPod use as I type this! I haven’t forgotten to do a review on Lunatica’s “Fables & Dreams”, so I’ll do that as soon as I can. I also acquired DragonForce’s “Inhuman Rampage” album… I’m still recovering from one of the songs on there, so watch for a review on that one after I’ve scraped my brains off of the ceiling…

One more thing. I’ve found a good way to post some of the things in my internet (and real) life… stuff that may be too short for the blog and too long for a Twitter update. It’s called a Tumblelog! It’s kind of an internet scrapbook where you can throw a bunch of miscellaneous stuff for quick reference and communication. You can check out mine at http://chrisw357.tumblr.com/. I have it integrated into a blog page… kind of… it’s got a date bug, but it’s functional, and you can check that out over here (http://esoterik72.net/esoblog/tumblelog/). When I get the date bug fixed, I’ll make a button for it on the horizontal navbar at the top of this blog.

Well, thanks for reading up on everything that’s going on. Email me… or message me… or whatever… if any of you want to talk more. And comment here, too, if you want to; your comments are very welcome! Cheers!

I wanted to do something different with some of the pictures that I had laying around in my Fun Pics folder. These are pics of myself in various situations throughout the months and I used a couple of them so far in the header graphic for the blog. Sooooo… I found a cool plug-in that lets me randomize assorted pictures anywhere I want on the site. Of course, I had to choose my usual spot in the right hand side of the header graphic! Whenever you refresh the page, a different picture of me (or some other goofy pic!) will be shown every time.

After that, I found a way to do the same thing to the header graphic itself, without using a plugin, and the effect is less random. However, it gets the job done nicely, since I don’t want to change header graphics much and I won’t have a whole lot to choose from. It’s a good effect, though! I have a set of three of the vinyl graphic headers, one original and the other two are red and green, randomly popping up on the top of the blog. Maybe in the near future, I’ll create some holiday-themed sets to switch off on!

I’ll have to give proper credit for the authors of the script and plug-in that I had to use for this. Two great ways to achieve a neat rotating image effect!