After taking a photo every day for a year, I thought it would be worth a few extra hours putting it all together in to a nice looking mosaic.

I think the easiest way to do this is using Google’s Picasa program.

The problem with this is that you need to have all your photos in on folder, which I didn’t have. Rather than spend ages going through each folder and finding the photo I had chosen for that day, I just downloaded mine from Flickr. Since I had them all uploaded in one set and all named with their correct numbers, this seemed like it would be the easiest method.

I downloaded the Saleen Flickr Downloader (which didnt seem the most elegant solution, but worked well enough) and told it to download my Project 365 set. I set it to download just the Large size, rather than Original, which would take hours. It still took quite a while and one photo didn’t download properly (lucky I noticed that!) but after that I had the folder of every image.

The next problem was that the downloaded images had the Flickr ID in the file names, so they weren’t being sorted properly. They also had no EXIF data, so I couldnt arrange by date taken. To fix this, I used the trusty old Bulk Rename Utility.

The files were named like this:

5794243281_ee16c5544c 121_365_L.jpg

So I just told Bulk Rename Utility to remove the first 22 characters from all the file names. And just to neaten them up, remove the last 2 characters too.

Which left much nicer looking file names which also could be sorted by name:

121_365.jpg

Note: This is only useful for the Picasa mosaic which is in chronological order. For the final mosaic, I didn’t need to do all this as the photos are arranged by colour.

Now the photos are in a folder and sorted by date, we can find the folder in Picasa and click on “Create Photo Collage” (make sure you only have the folder selected, rather than any of the individual photos within the folder, or it will just make a collage with the selected photo).

There are a lot of options here, so play around and see what you like. Since all my photos are square and I wanted an orderly, linear mosaic, I chose “Grid”

This was my result (after adding some space around the edges and text in Photoshop):

This was good, but it looked a bit messy. I wanted to see if I could arrange the photos by colour.

The closest thing I could think of was using a Photomosaic program. AndreaMosaic seems to be one of the best and is also free.

So after installing that, I found the image I wanted the images arranged on – I went for a rainbow type image. Basically a colour picker box.

Note the settings in the above image: “no duplicates”, no colour change, only use the original tiles. This ensures that only the 365 photos we have will be used, won’t be used multiple times and the colours won’t be modified to match the rainbow image.

Another thing to watch out for is having half-images on the edges of the frame. The first mosaic I made, 5 photos were right on the border and only showing about 5 pixels of the photos, so I almost missed them. I just needed to change the mosaic size so they weren’t being cut off.

Now we need to tell the program to use the images in the 365 folder. Click on the number 2 (at the top right, the dolphin photo)

Click on “Add Folder” and select the 365 folder. Then at the top click “Save List”. AndreaMosaic will go through and analyse the photos, ready to put it all together. Once that is done, click OK.

Finally, click number 3 (the Van Gogh) and see how it turns out.

There will be a warning saying there will be gaps (because we turned off duplicates and colour changing).

Mine had quite a few gaps, but I realised the photos would all fit.

After some cutting, pasting and rearranging in Photoshop, the mosaic was done!

A lot of the pictures are family photos or travel shots, but this was just an ordinary street. A candid snap-shot of a different era. I always like this kind of historical photo.

The photos on the DVD weren’t in any particular order, so I had no idea where this place was. I knew my great-grandfather had taken a lot of the photos while travelling from England to Australia by ship and had stopped off in Europe, Africa and India along the way. I had a feeling the photo was taken in South Africa but I wasn’t positive.

Zooming in and reading the signs revealed some clues to the location. The mixture of English and Dutch-looking text confirmed that it was South Africa.

One of the clearest signs says “Waldorf Cafe”, so I tried searching for a Waldorf Cafe in South Africa. There were a few hits, but looking at Street View, they didn’t match. This did lead me to discover that Street View was actually available to a lot of South Africa, which boosted my hope of finding this location, based on a single 50 year old photo.

Next I tried searching other words that I could see, thinking they might be the town name. “Gebou” was next, but that turned out to just be the Afrikaans word for “Building” (thanks Google Translate).

Finally, there was the small, blurry sign for the hotel. I thought it said “Barys Hotel” so I searched for that in South Africa with no luck. Then I noticed the word “Pary” half cut off on the right side of the frame and realised that is probably what the sign said.

This was a big help. Parys turned out to be a city in South Africa. I started searching for hotels in Parys, which returned 3 results – all of them tiny buildings and in fairly remote looking places. Parys isn’t large, but looking through Street View one street at a time wasn’t practical. I needed to find a main street.

Looking at the layout, I noticed a small section of fairly dense streets (in the centre of the image above), and decided to go in for a look. Immediately this looked familiar and after looking through a couple of intersections, I had found something that looked very close.

Zooming in and studying the details confirmed that this was it! While the buildings on the street seem to have been remodeled significantly, the hotel in the background is largely unchanged. Comparing the distinctive roof shape is what clinched it for me.

Parys Hotel mouse-over

Mouse-over to compare the original to the street view image.

My great-grandfather, Percy Evans.

I’m surprised partly by the fact that I was able to find this location, based on a single photo and minimal clues. But mostly I am impressed with the technology freely available to us, that allows me – on a whim – to research a photo, find its location, then lets me look through current photos of an entire city to pin-point the exact location. That is amazing.

Being able to look through my great-grandfather’s photos, tracing the route he took, seeing the places he stayed, being able to virtually walk down the same streets, really brings the history alive.

After saving the hard drive from my laptop which died a few weeks ago, I’ve finally been able to recover the 2011 calendar I had made!

If you’ve decided to participate in Project 365 this year, you might start to find it difficult to keep track of which number day it is in the year once you get out of January – I know I did when I did my Project 365 in 2009.

That year I made a special Project 365 Calendar with all the days of the year on it and now I’ve updated it for 2011.

Details

After some feedback on the previous year’s calendars, I’ve adjusted the layout to 4×3 columns and moved the notes section to be under each month.

The PDF contains two A4 pages (all vector graphics, so it’s no problem to print at different sizes).

Page one is the full colour calendar (I actually wanted to change the colours, but don’t have access to InDesign or Illustrator for now, so feel free to edit it if you can).

Page two is a simplified version – just black text on a white background.

Download

Project 365 Calendar 2011

“file.jpg” has failed to upload due to an error
Missing a temporary folder.

After some searching and a lot of reading, the only solution seemed to be that it related to the php.ini file which I didn’t have access to. All the folders had the correct permissions, so I was sure it was related to the php configuration and that I wouldn’t be able to help.

Just out of curiosity, I did the equivalent of “turning it off and on again” – I reloaded WordPress. It was already the latest version, so I just copied over all the WordPress files (except the wp-content folder and the wp-config.php file, as you would do if you were updating WordPress).

Somehow, this actually worked. The error was gone and files uploaded with no problems. I haven’t seen this posted as a solution anywhere, so I thought I’d just put this out there as an option.

Like classic motorcycles? I’ve started a tumblr blog over at KickStart.tumblr.com with vintage, classic, worn-out and generally interesting motorcycle photos that I find.

My web browsers in order of usage. I was just noticing how good they all look now, so I thought I get them all together.

1. Opera for general, long sessions of browsing. Opera 10.50 pictured above.
2. Chrome + AdThwart for looking up something quickly, or if something doesn’t work quite correctly in Opera.
3. Firefox mostly for web development. Firefox theme pictured above is TwentyTen with Fission + Locationbar2 + Adblock Plus + Firebug.

Wallpaper is from here.

Edit: Oops – there’s actually a much simpler way. Right click on the tab area > Customize > Enable thumbnails in tabs

The Opera 10 beta has introduced a new tab feature that lets you resize tabs and expand them to show a full thumbnail. You can either click and drag it down, or middle click on it to expand the thumbnails.

While it’s an attractive feature and some people might find it useful, I’m not one of them. Since I use the middle mouse button click to open and close tabs, it actually gets in the way. I’ve been accidentally middle clicking a bit to low and opening the tab view quite often.

Follow these settings

Luckily, there’s an easy way to disable it. Just type “opera:config” into the address bar. Then type Tab into the search box. You should see “Use Thumbnails Inside Tabs” – untick this, click save, then restart Opera. Fixed.

January

February

March

April

I decided to participate in Project 365 this year. Only 5 days in and I can already see it’s going to be difficult to keep track of which number day it is in the year. You can see my Project 365 photos here.

I meant to get myself a calendar today but forgot, so I decided to make one myself, which shows on each day what day of the year it is.
 

Details

1. There are two versions: one with a “notes” section on the right and one with the “scavenger hunt” items for Project 365.
2. Each version has 3 pages in the PDF: Full colour, Black and Economy. This is to let you choose which you want to print depending on the capabilities of your printer.
3. Made in InDesign in a surprisingly short amount of time.
4. Formatted for A4 paper.

Download

Project 365 Calendar 2009 – Notes version (PDF ~38kb)

Project 365 Calendar 2009 – Scavenger hunt version (PDF ~53kb)

 

Preview

This guide will be a (hopefully) simple guide to creating skins correctly for Launchy 2.0 based mostly on my own trial-and-error in making this Elegant Brit skin.

The 5 main skin files

Launchy skins are made up of 5 files.

1. alpha.png – is the main part of your skin and should contain all the colours, patterns, etc and have a transparent background. It should also have the areas for the input, output and icon removed (transparent).

2. background.png – will be the background for the input, output and icon areas and should contain nothing else. The rest of this image should be filled in red (255, 0, 0).

3. mask.png – should be based on your background.png, but with the red areas filled in white (making them transparent) and the input, output and icon areas being in black.

4. misc.txt – defines the areas for the input and output text, location of the icon, alternative suggestions area and the size of the above images (all the same size).

For example:

• input = 14,49,276,19 (input text where you will type the program you want. This box will start at 14 pixels from the left edge of the image and 49 pixels from the top. It will be 276 pixels wide and 19 tall)
• output = 14,14,276,20 (will be the title of the program selected. The box will start at 14 from the left and top and will be 276px wide and 20px tall)
• boundary = 0,0,311,83 (the overall image size of alpha.png and the others which are the same size. 311 being the width and 83 the height)
• icon = 264,9,32,32 (position of the icon for the selected program. 264px from the left, 9 from the top, in a 32x32px box)
• alternatives = 7,74,296,100 (location of the alternative suggestions box. 7 from the left, 74 from the top, 296px wide and 100px tall)

Some skins also define a few font related variables in this file because it is not possible in the qss file. These related to the path details in the drop down list:

dropPathColor = colour in RGB
dropPathFamily = font name
dropPathSize = font size
dropPathWeight = bold
dropPathItalics = italics

5. style.qss – is basically a CSS file and controls the fonts and borders for the skin.

<QLineEdit#input or output or alternatives>
font = font size and name
background-color = text background colour, including alpha value %
alternate-background-color = background colour for the alternative suggestions box
color: font colour
border-style = whether border is a solid line, dotted, dashes, etc. Borders are usually off
border-width = border size in pixels – usually 0, meaning off

Other files

author.txt – information about the skin such as title, author, date, version, etc.

Sometimes other skin features such as option button, close button and skinned scroll bar are included.

–

Thanks to sierra13 and this thread in particular on the Launchy SourceForge page.