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To Gnome3 and back

22 Apr

Gnome3 made of easy

An itchy feeling

I admit, I’m a sucker for new things, shinny or not, and admittedly since I started out using Ubuntu/Linux a year or something ago (ON THE DESKTOP NO LESS) and what’s newer and shinier than Gnome3 .

I’ve tried Unity before ( or The Ubuntu Netbook Remix system ), I’ve tried Jolicloud and had a look at MeeGo and ChromeOS and you can clearly the trend. I’m definitely not in a position to pass either judgment or give a complete utterly factual study about this, but seems to me the rise of small-screen computers – netbooks, MacBook Airs, Tablets and smartphones ( i-prefixed or not ) – has definitely had it’s mark on the current Desktop paradigm (can I use this word here, buzzword already? Come on, it’s my blog, let me use it :D ) .

Too many open windows!

Things have become bigger, screen use is more focused on one window (how many windows can you stick on a 11″ screen?) and more is pushed down to small icons, visual indicators, special hardware keys, whatever is there to be helpful while getting out of your way (and by no means I’m vouching for results here, people have tried and failed, I’m just empirically stating a trend I see). This trend is going on despite the fact that you can now get bigger, cheaper and higher resolution LCD / LED screens than we used to in the CRT days, and after errr some 3 years of experimenting and messing around it seems that things are entering a stabilization stage now and we better get used to it :) – I also think it’s useful to keep our synapses firing to new experiences and thank Zeus the world provides plenty of habit altering experiences .

Adventure time

Anyway, a couple of weeks after entering the Ubuntu Natty Narwhal world on my work laptop – I don’t think I’m crazy, but I’ve had good experiences with these early upgrades not breaking my computer or even allowing me to continue to work, so my confidence is relatively high – I started getting Gnome3 references all over, culminating with a OMGUbuntu post mentioning an Ubuntu PPA being made available.

Me being me I obviously focused on the positive messages like

The good news is that Ubuntu maintain a GNOME 3 PPA for Ubuntu 11.04.

and less, much less on the not so positive warnings:

The bad news is that, for Ubuntu 11.04 at least, you won’t be able to run Unity and GNOME-Shell side-by-side as the GNOME 3 PPA breaks Unity.

or even

This PPA is EXPERIMENTAL and MAY BREAK YOUR SYSTEM. There is no downgrade process.

pffff please, where’s your trust and nuts man :) , so after a couple of days of wanting to but finding reasons not to, I finally had a very very bad day (on all accounts) and decided that things could only get better if I went and potentially broke my of-office personal work computer, so a terminal was opened and words written on to it:

    
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

… and then we waited …

Gnome3: Made of different

Reboot (screen working: check, things responding: check, *sigh* of relief) and we’re ready to go. The first impression is, hey, I remember this, it’s vintage GTK look :) , logging it to the new “Gnome Shell Desktop” worked (brave man’s sigh of relief #2) and presto, my new desktop was actually working :) .

So the changes (from classic Gnome 2) are obvious and fall into what I mentioned a couple of sections back. A clean desktop, no drop down start/main menu, much less deskbar widgets, a surprising lack of right-mouse button and a top-left “hot corner” called Activities.

So after the initial – oh look it’s soooo cute – it was time to start using it. I’m a developer so I guess I can call myself keyboard biased (versus using the mouse / trackpad ) and I’ve used a bit of Unity before so I immediately pressed the Super-key (ok, the Windows Key, yeah :) ) typed in the app name and it’s up and running. The window decoration was clearly broken, and by broken I mean it had that mentioned vintage GTK look – apparently the Ubuntu theme(s) were broken with the current Gnome3 state – but generally and with that in mind everything was working as expected.

The thing I really liked was the new Notification system, everything that used to pop-up and grab the focus for you is now gently pushed down to the notification bar. A clear example is when a link is opened anywhere – inside the browser, on an email, help menu, whatever – where before a browser window would pop-up and have you look at it until the page would load up NOW a very gentle notification message tells you a page is gently being loaded somewhere and when it’s done he will say so and if you really want to you can press this “we’re done” message and it will take you to your newly opened window . This is by far my favorite thing so far :D

I also enjoyed – to some extent – the new Alt-Tab app switching . All applications on all workspaces (we’ll talk about that in a second) are made available and instances of the same application are grouped together smartly so that you can browse between those instances separately. I sort of missed tabbing between windows on _one_ workspace but I could use the Actives screen for that, since he will show you a grid with the windows on the current workspace – even if the keyboard was made useless there and the mouse/trackpad had to be used.

 

Workspaces are now automatically created for you, there’s always a spare empty workspace made available for you. What I don’t like, or at least I didn’t work for long enough to adapt, was the vertical-only workspace configuration. Having a linear-serial approach gives you less options to organize your workspaces, you also couldn’t switch workspace positions meaning you are either stuck to the workspace sequence or you have to reorganize application workspace-position one by one. Browsing workspaces is also less productive since you might have to travel the entire linear road to get from workspace #1 to #5 . The always there spare workspace is cool, and I’m not saying it’s easily workable to have a 2 dimensional workspace grid, but I missed it, even if, granted, I didn’t use Gnome3 for long enough to alter my application-organization strategy-synapses :)

Troubles in paradise

Gnome3 System Settings Screen

With things mostly working, it was time for some important details. The new system settings screen now looks very familiar (can’t put my finger on it) and right away I noticed my screen was running at full brightness which, when one has 2x 1h train trips is something of importance because I like my battery life . Unplugging the power cable seemed to produce zero automatic settings so I looked around and actually found it (sorry, I took so long to write this post that I lost some references, so between the Screen – Display or Power settings I don’t remember where the brightness is) , what I do remember however is that the brightness settings showed up once and as soon as I touched them they would disappear into Computer Limbo. The hardware keys for brightness settings were also broken and a couple of grub boot settings grabbed from the Interwebz didn’t produce any effect.

The CPU frequency settings that used to be available as a widget where also missing from action and the terminal command cpufreq-selector complained and failed to change things into powersave mode so two very important battery-life saving settings where now unavailable for me and this, by itself was a huge no-no .

Another problem – or lack of knowledge from my part, even if I trust in important things being made available instinctively – was THAT I SIMPLY COULDN’T FIND A BUTTON TO SHUTDOWN / RESTART MY COMPUTER . Now, it’s ok, I know how to sudo reboot and sudo shutdown -h but let’s consider for a second that some folk might not exactly enjoy the thril of command line operations :) – so I search around (apparently badly because I got nowhere) and reverted to the All-knowing-ever-present masses of the world – AKA twitter – for an answer and .. tara

Of course … silly me :) but now I know ;) .

Apart from the power settings I noticed the graphical performance was slightly choppy, Gnome3 System Info apparently rated my graphical power as “standard” – my experience with gnome2 and compiz is fluid and I could clearly see the difference – even if this is a tiny detail, it wasn’t that choppy.

Game over: Rollback

So, I sticked to Gnome for a few days longer hoping for some super update to solve some of the larger issues, I googled around and didn’t get much, and the initial “YOU CAN’T DOWNGRADE” warning started to become heavier now :) but fellow Gnome3 testers @relva and @danyR opened the toolbox and boom, ppapurge came to the resque, so after a couple of commands, EVERYTHING was back to the way it was before and sigh of relief #3 was heard … a couple of kilometers away too.

  
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3

Surprise destination: Unity

Now, excited from the new experience (excited because it was new :) ) I decided to give Unity a second change (I had before but I clearly wasn’t in it) and lo and behold, it has become my default desktop on my laptop :) – I’ll write something about this later, but I’m now used to it, I actually enjoy it (even the new integrated app menu – again it sounds very familiar) and despite missing the CPU widget (how the heck do I add widgets to the bar – I guess I don’t) and having to manually set the thing, I keeping it on the laptop. Where I’m not keeping it is on my office computer, the two screen large resolution experience begs for more GUI flexibility and I’m sticking to “Ubuntu Classic” on that one … which got me thinking how the hell is this going to work out if Unity / Gnome3 like desktops become the one and only option ……. thoughts?

Update: For a really really really extensive Gnome3 review, by absolutely all means head over to @danyR‘s post here – it’s in Portuguese but heck, that’s what Google Translate was made for

 
6 Comments

Posted in My Computer Stories

 

Project “Prove” – Take #2

09 Oct

Eat your Greens

Today we went to get our “Projecto Prove” basket for the second time, when we first sign up we weren’t sure what to expect so we asked for bi-weekly deliveries so we could get our bearings first, but right after we got home and drilled down the basket … we immediatly changed it to Weekly deliveries :) , and who knows, we might double the dosage :)

We’re falling deeper and deeper in-love with this, the flavor is unlike the groceries we get at the supermarket (we’re city folk, supermarkets is our “standard”) and I truly believe this to be an excellent opportunity both for consumers – who get fresher, local products – and for producers who can sell outside the big market, no doubt driven by the supermarkets who set the prices, quantities and only accept products that follow certain metrics (not necessarily related to quality), so in posting – even if in Bad English ™ – I hope or try to push the information for anyone wanting to try this out :)

So, here’s today’s contents:

Apples 0,520 kg
Pumpkin 0,760 kg
Courgette 0,560 kg
Tomato 0,510 kg
Onions 0,550 kg
Carrots 0,510 kg
Green Bell Pepper 0,260 kg
Parsley 0,060 kg
Grapes 1,010 kg
Potatoes 0,480 kg
Sweet Potato 0,180 kg
Turnip 0,230 kg
Leek 0,500 kg
Cabbage 0,630 kg
Spinach 0,450 kg
Lemon 0,170 kg
Tangerine 0,580 kg
7,960 KG

So, next week, will you join us? :) There’s good coffee there, leave a comment ;)

 
1 Comment

Posted in Real Life

 

Project “Prove” – Buying local

02 Oct

A while ago Josien Kapma and Pedro Custódio reminded me of this project and today we went to get our first Basket from the “Prove” (from the Portuguese “Promover e Vender” – to Promote and Sell) project . The project is a EQUAL funded project aimed at bridging the gap between small producers and consumers. The project is spread to 8 areas and seems to be expanding, which bodes well :)

Project Prove - Baskets

The way it works is this: you log on to the Prove Order Website, fill out your data and choose where you would like to receive your basket. You then choose the weight of the basket – some regions only have on option, other have more and you’re presented with a list of possible products that you’ll receive – mind you, this is not Farmville, the crops vary throughout the year – and choose up to 5 items you don’t want to receive. The contents, weight and price of the basket may vary because each region (or center) negotiates with the local producers. Finally you choose the day and place – each region may offer various options – where you’ll pick up and pay for the basket and the periodicity – weekly or bi-weekly, and you’re done :) . Baskets are made up from available products, excluding the products you choose not to receive – and are picked up on the day of delivery. You get to meet the producers, which are available to explain the products, give you tips, recipes or general chit chat :) .

"Prove" Baskets #2

We picked up our basket at the “Espaço Fortuna” – which I didn’t know at all, but we’re glad we do now :) and this is what 10€ bought us – translated to the best of my knowledge and available tools :)

Apples 1,060 kg
Wild cabbage 0,430 kg
Lettuce 0,380 kg
Pumpkin 0,590 kg
Courgette 0,630 kg
Tomato 0,540 kg
Onions 0,590 kg
Carrots 0,490 kg
Green Bell Pepper 0,150 kg
Parsley 0,030 kg
Coriander 0,080 kg
Grapes 1,050 kg
Potatoes 0,490 kg
Peaches 0,670 kg
Lemon 0,080 kg
6,360 KG

We’ll definitely repeat the experience, we had initially asked for a bi-weekly delivery but changed it now to weekly (you can change the order on the website) and decided to get Lettuce out of the picture, so next week we’ll be picking up our basket once more :) , care to join us and have some coffee there ? :)

 
5 Comments

Posted in Real Life

 

Shirikisha

03 Sep

Following my heart felt attempt to revive my interest in writing, and having felt over and over again that the tyranny of 140 characters makes perfect sense and that some tools complement instead of replacing each other, I’m going to talk about a project I’ve had for quite a while, that has sort of been neglected in it’s marketing and “commercial” aspect because, in all honesty, choices about time occupation and allocation needed to be made and I decided to get some code done instead of marketing it :) .

Mind you, this is not to be confused with a real, professional product page, I’ll get around to doing that, but this is my introduction of Shirikisha to the world, nothing more ;)

A bit of history

Shirikisha began as a project called CIARIS for the ILO/STEP programme, where the goal began as a rework for a simple static document based website, and as talks progressed the scope also grew to an online social platform with cooperative tools namely public profiles, blogs, Workspaces – an analogy for a set of tools made available to a group of people within a context – and a Library where publicly available documents where displayed.

The work began in 2006 with myself, Beverly Trayner and Pedro Custódio, we later had the pleasure to work with David Bluestein, Rory Carter brought business experience to the team, Luis Cavaco helped on the Design front, Carla Alcobia has been with us from the beginning testing the application and administering it for STEP  and Josien Kapma and Nancy White helped us test and brainstorm.

In 2007 we launched the beta version and later, after a test period, we opened up the CIARIS site. After the launch and initial development, we had further runs with STEP and with a few outside partners where we added and improved on the platform . At this point we negotiated and got the rights to the application itself and there, Shirkisha was born.

So, why Shirikisha?

The goal for Shirikisha was to provide a set of tools – for a wide and multilingual public – that would enable both individuals and groups. As with all naming that comes after a product is made, we took a while and searched the far reaches of the Internet to find a name, until we came across a Swahili dictionary on The Kamusi Project and as we went through it we found a single word that encompassed brilliantly both the meaning and the mood we wanted to set with the project, the word was Shirikisha and here are its meanings:

  • incorporate
  • allow to participate
  • cause to participate
  • make a member of a society
  • give someone a share in something
  • coordinate

Unquestionably we had found our name, we had our Shirikisha :)

Ok, what does it do then?

When we designed the tool that would later become Shirikisha, our main focus was to provide a platform for individuals do come together, under a certain context provided by the organization who “owned” the tool, and develop documents, projects, meetings, etc. These individuals would have their own identity and the platform should facilitate the meeting of equal minded people, finally since the workspaces – who are not necessarily public or visible -  could use the platform to produce written content, the creation of a curated display of such documents was also created in the form of a “Library”.

So, the platform allows an organization to have a publicly available website, with a simple content management system, people can sign up, fill their profile – which can be customized by the Organization in respects to certain fields that it should have – look up other profiles, create a personal Blog – this comes under the need to provide and empower certain individuals, but it’s quite simple and not mandatory – , search the Library for  community created and published documents and most of all, create Workspaces to develop their own work.

The Workspaces provide a set of tools for groups to communicate, organize themselves and create content/documents under the privacy of the workspace. A workspace blog is provided as a public tool, so the group can communicate with the world as a way to provide updates on the work in progress. The content produced by the workspace can later be published to the curated organization Library – following metadata input and approval by the organization administrators.

In summary, as beyond my possibly not so clear text ;) , the feature list for Shirikisha is following:

  • Site wide simple Content management System
  • Platform signup with custom profiles and optional approval system
    • Individual control over visibility of profile fields (Private, Friends only, Public)
    • A “people directory” to help people find .. well , people :)
    • An optional Personal blog
    • Messaging system between platform users
    • Notification system for almost every aspect of the web site, with a choice of Email updates or RSS feed (public and “private”)
  • Workspaces
    • Creation of visible or invisible Workspaces
    • Public Blog
    • Calendar with Event input
    • Threaded Discussion Forums
    • Multiple threaded Wikis (with PDF export capabilities)
    • File repository
  • Library for content produced on the Workspaces

A business?

Well, yes, we created what we think of as a very complete, awesome (pardon my bias :) ) tool that we would love to continue to grow and see what our tool can make for people. Consider this a Request for Comments, we would love to hear from you, how you feel and what your thoughts are in regards to Shirikisha, we want to harvest a few smaller projects, individuals, commercial or ONG’s. I don’t want this approach to be considered a beta test, or a trial run, we have quite a long road with CIARIS and a few others, but we do want to go slow and personal before evaluating and opening up to everyone, so big or small (in size or in budget), don’t be shy and talk to us :)

You can contact me here, via the comments or by my Shirikisha Email : dramalho[at]shirikisha[dot]com  , in the mean time, check out the CIARIS site whether to take a look at Shirikisha or if you have an interest in Social Inclusion and want to join the Community :)

 
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Posted in Development, Projects, Shirikisha

 

PHotoImporter Script

02 Sep

Like all people who own a Digital Camera and thus have gagilions of pictures from possibly several machines/ mobile phones / etc (webcams? Your absolute best Chatrollete face? :) ), I like to keep the whole thing organized on the filesystem . To facilitate this, I’ve written a very simple script that goes through a directory (say your memory card filled with pictures) reads the files and their EXIF information and then plants them on another directory (say your external hard drive?) with a date structure, followed by Camera brand and Camera Model (keeping the original name).

./2010-08-22/Canon/Canon EOS 10D

A directory example

I’ve had this for a long time but only now did I get around to put it up on GitHub, should it be useful to anyone (or for public shame) :) . It uses the Exifer Library to read the Exif information and all you need to run it is PHP (CLI) installed (You can probably get away with PHP4 – if you absolutely must) , it has the bare minimum of parameters and doesn’t allow for much customization without changing the code, but if I’m putting it out there, I’m also making myself available for changes that might suit your need :)

You can Download it from GitHub and use it like this:

php PHotoImporter.php
**********************************************************************
** Script that organizes photo files acording to their EXIF tags
**
** -h --help            Help screen
** -r --recursive        Searches sub-directories for image files
** -s --source        Source path
** -d --destination    Destination Path
**
** Author : David Ramalho <dramalho [at] gmail [dot] com>
**
**********************************************************************
 
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Posted in Development, Photography

 

A recipe for Timelapse Photography

31 Aug

Timelapse photography has always fascinated me, you have but to drop by Vimeo or Youtube and be blessed with impressive videos – I would mostly stick to Vimeo from the looks of the Youtube results ;) . Now, some cameras offer some type of timelapse settings, but from what I’ve seen (on a few cameras, I’m hardly a man with a deep knowledge of the market) they offer limited frame counts with not so short intervals (minutes, instead of seconds), so for a while I wasn’t very tempted or motivated to try and timelapse myself, but recently I actually found a good mix of software that not only revived my interest in timelapse, but empowered me and made an old camera come to life and be useful again :)

So , onwards to my simple recipe for Timelapse videos :)

Ingredients:

Digital camera + tripod

So, I’m a SLR fan and I admit, I tried to timelapse with my old Canon 300D but as the 99 Error Code of Unknown Death started to flash more and more often, I tried it once, and aborted at the though of the old and battered shutter simply dying for a simple test. Now, luck would have it that I was cleaning my closet and I found my old Canon Powershot S70, that for some reason (at the time) went bad and seemed to be non-working – it was taking terribly dark pictures, and no, it wasn’t me being silly .

I took it, charged the battery, found a USB cable, plugged it in and with the help of Mister Ingredient #2 .. BOOM :) it worked like a charm, and at least it’s one shutter I don’t have to worry much about :)

gPhoto

I had some computer troubles, a 3 year old Windows XP installation not filled with Spyware and Viruses, but certainly filled with a lot of other things developers tend to accumulate :) , and I felt the need to change and jumped onto the Ubuntu bandwagon – a post for later perhaps :) – with great success and personal joy.

A result of that jump was that I stumbled into gphoto -  yes, I admit it, apt-get ease of install actually makes me find new stuff more easily. Now, gPhoto is a “set of digital camera software applications for Unix-like systems” that supports more than 1300 cameras, and while this may sound vague, a quick look over the manual – or command line help – shone a light on me, a light in the form of “–capture-image” and “interval” :)

So what basically happens is, I could now hook up a Camera via the USB port, call up gPhoto2 and tell him to capture images forever (or with a limit of frames) within a timeinterval that it will try to keep as long as the camera helps :) .

We have control, we get our computer taking care of our camera and telling it to take pictures from time to time, with settings that we control, but we’ll just have a bunch of images, so we need something else

FFMPEG

Now, as luck would have it I was in the middle of a project that involved video encoding and a fair amount of FFMPEG, so I knew this would be my non-professional tool last piece of the puzzle, as we can take a bunch of images and tell FFMPEG to make a movie out of them.

The project I was doing needed to encode files using VP8, so if you want that, please, visit this tutorial on how to get FFMPEG correctly installed, It Just Works ™ and you’ll be WebM’ing in no time

Preparation

The settings change according to what your needs, camera capabilities and type of scene, I’ll give you a general run down of the commands and pipeline I have, I’ll show you some examples but after that, please, let us discuss :)

So, take your Digital Camera, put it on a tripod (you won’t be holding it perfectly still for hours, now will you?), connect it to your PC (or Mac if that’s your fancy) and get a terminal open for …

gphoto2 --capture-image --interval 15

This will tell gphoto2 to initialize the camera and get it cracking pictures every 15 seconds. 15 seconds incidentally is no random number, for my Powershot, it’s the fastest I can go while taking pictures with enough quality for a Full HD movie export (1920×1200) , if I want more I need to go onto lower resolutions.

I’ll leave the camera up for a while, usually for as long as the battery lasts ;) , but the math is sort of easy to do, if you want a 30 fps movie, you need to take 30 pictures for each second of video. If, for instance you want a full minute that would mean 1800 pictures, at a 15 seconds interval that would mean ……………….. 7 hours and 30 minutes of picture taking :) , how cool is that? :)

So, next up, I download the pictures to my computer, put them in a directory and prepare them for FFMPEG. Now, this would be the time to mess around with the pictures, maybe resize them or crop them (FFMPEG can do that for you), but more importantly adjust Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, perhaps mess around with Levels, but keep in mind that you’ll probably want something that can be run against a batch of pictures so, don’t overdo it :)

Ok, preparing the files for FFMPEG means getting them with a sequential naming scheme so FFMPEG can cycle and encode them into a movie file. For this I use a bit of bash scripting that I found online (sorry, no reference :( ) and that looks like this

x=1; for i in *JPG; do counter=$(printf %04d $x); ln "$i" ./tmp/img"$counter".jpg; x=$(($x+1)); done

What this does is go through all files that have “JPG” inside a directory (my camera saves files with a capital JPG extension, but feel free to adjust this to your settings) and create a link inside a folder (tmp) with four digits (change this accordingly – %04d) . By the end of this, we have a nice little directory with 0001.jpg all the way to xxxx.jpg in sequential order for mister FFMPEG.

So, having this, all I need to do is tell FFMPEG to grab the files and pack them into a video file, a hd1080 WebM encoded file :) with the following command:

ffmpeg -f image2 -i img%04d.jpg -s hd1080 -r 24 output.webm

This takes a while, but by the end of it – assuming you had no errors breaking the process – you’ll have your very own Full HD – VP8 video ready to Youtube uploading :) .. or whatever you do with video files :)

Some Examples

I’ll leave you with three initial attempts, none particularly brilliant, I was furious about trying this out and I hardly remember the settings but it will give you an idea, and if you look at the kitchen one, you’ll see that different types of scenes require different settings, in that case the interval was too long (but I remember using 15s for it, so it needs to be much faster) for anything useful to come out.For city or outside scenes, I think doing it by night adds an interesting and much appreciated effect, slow exposure, you’ll get light streaks that make the scenes more fluid, in the day scenes it’s easy to spot objects jumping around.

Final thoughts

All of this is a first attempt at things, I think the pipeline is ok, but I think that either by using professional software or by adding something to the mix, we can generate some in-between frames to both enrich the movie but also make it longer and have a better control of the timelapse rate.

I hope this can be useful in anyway to you, I know all these factors combined motivated and empowered me to experiment with timelapse, and I wanted to share it, but it’s only one way, and I’m sure there are countless, so if you know other techniques or have more ingredients to add to the mix, please please please, let’s talk about it :D

 
5 Comments

Posted in Photography

 

Foreword to a new cycle

30 Aug

I’ve been going through a lot of personal life phases lately, for a long long time, in fact, I’m writing this post on the first vacation time I had for some 5 years – I’ve been to the Algarve, but I did my 10h work day either way, so that’s hardly … anything. My kid is almost 5 and we’re having a second one in late November (a second boy, boy oh boy :) ), I’ve had an incredibly – if such a word is adequate -  busy and roller-coaster type of life and yet I have little to show for, if you don’t take into to account the problems and challenges I had to (and still) face and this has also reflected itself on my online presence .

I’ve grown anxious, I hid myself for a while (outside of the problem scope, in that regard I believe in a in-your-face approach), depended and looked for low depth interactions on quick mediums – Twitter is my absolutely favorite and more “prolific” online presence, I neglected my blog, trying to feed it by purely online presence and activity (and having the occasional debacle with certain Lifestream + Twitter plugins) instead of taking care of it myself and it shows, both on the blog and on my attitude.

I want to tell my tale, and I will eventually talk about it, but I’m still in the middle of it and it’s the sort of thing that “entrepreneurs” sometimes go through – completely outside the glamor, fame and fortune that you might take for granted . Despite my shyness and silent mood, a few close – and not so close – friends recognized the general situation and helped me and my family in whatever ways they could, I am a richer person for having them and to them I’m grateful.

The fact that I’m back here now and that I start to acknowledge these … character and life problems is part of a roadmap I’m trying to build and follow, my life from 2007 to 2009 have been almost 100% based on problems, large scale non-health-but-scary-as-such ones, and while they are not entirely resolved, they have been addressed and put into a more manageable state, so now is the time for me to take care of myself and pick up the pieces again .. and at 31 :) – no longer will I be able to be a young millionaire like the Ad said :) but I’ll keep at it, if anything because I absolutely love what I do and because I absolutely love life :) – even if only know I’m acknowledging it.

 
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Posted in Real Life

 

Beyond Print

01 Jan

Very nice advertisement by McDonald’s, we don’t see this sort of thing on a day to day basis but it’s not super-rare either. The reasons are easy, there’s cost, maintenance (replacing a sheet of paper is easy, mechanical/electronic stuff not so much) , risk of vandalism (and the interest level must rise with these ones) but, when there’s budget and a will to risk it, it beats the crap out of conventional posters :)

Video below :

via n.design Studio

 
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Posted in Creativity

 

Codebits 2009

12 Oct

I’m in, I’m there, I’m happy :)

also, I WANT COMPANY , SIGN UP …. NOW

Codebits 2009 Banner

Codebits 2009 Banner

 
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Posted in Uncategorized

 

The Amazing Soviet Moon

19 Jul

As the Summer Silly Shows creep up on us via national television (as in Portuguese National :) ) , RTP2 – as usual – detaches itself and is showing a range of documentaries about the Moon. Today I caught one called “Tank on the Moon” – from what I gather, done by/for the Science Channel – and I was amazed, both from my own ignorance on the subject but also from the sheer magnitude that certain scientific feats have.

During the 1960s, the United States and the Soviet Union were engaged in a feverish competition to be the first to set foot on the moon. We know who won this race, but less about a secret chapter. The Soviets many not have sent a man to the moon, but they successfully guided two small robots by remote control from the earth. For 16 months between 1970 and 1973, these “Lunokhods” traveled more than thirty miles over the moon’s surface. With the declassification of the former USSR space archives, along with recollections by several of the key participants in the Lunokhod program, the true story of the Russian lunar robots can finally be told.

Lunokhod 1 robot vehicle

Lunokhod 1 robot vehicle (Wikipedia)

The documentary tells the tale of how Russian scientists / engineers put two rovers on the moon in 1970 . Two robotic, remotely operated Rovers on a Celestial Body that they weren’t sure the surface was solid, dusty, sandy, rocky, whatever . This is the essence of projects and watching the Documentary had a profound effect on me, because we know all about the Apollo 11 and Neil Amstrong and everything surrounding that – mind you, an equally yet different amazing feat – but this suffered from what I think were two key aspects, the American Shouting Power and the Sovied Whispering Politics , and this is my own personal-average-joe-on-a-country-possibly-equally-apart-from-both-superpowers view , not a certified one :) .

Sojourner Rover

Sojourner Rover (Wikipedia)

The important thing for me was, 27 years before the Mars Pathfinder – a project that grasped my own imagination and awe, a group of people built, in a world where – probably :) – the total ammount of computer power equals my phone or possibly micro-wave oven, lauched, landed and controlled a robot on the surface of the Moon . Now, this also takes me to my second imeadiate thought … damn , this was all because of the Cold War , the un-nobliest of reasons . I know I’m from the computer boom generation, and I – too easily – expect every single aspect of technology to follow a sort of Moore’s Law rule, and yes, we still fill huge tanks of super powerfull combustant and blast (literarly) heaps of metal into space, but the Moon is again on our scopes in what will probably be some 50 years after man and machine had been there .

Damn the Cold War but how can we reproduce it’s effect in this day and age? I’m guessing we need to find a way to make a profit from the Moon, I’m sure that would spur the right amount of interest in the world :)  . How sad is it, that we (as in the Human Race) need to be motivated by hatred and power struggles to find the motivation to do the things we’ve shown we can do ? Humans always need a highier purpose :) , I almost wish Religion would step in and say that God wants us to build a space ship (no Tom Cruise, not you :) ) .

“Everyone is capable of doing extraordinary things, each in his own way. Some are perfectly happy doing simple things in good spirits; others, however, concentrate on details. We are all different, and it really doesn’t matter if you focus on space travel or work in the fields. What is important is to do what you really want.” – Alexander Kemurdzhian

 
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