Add A Little Ginger To Your Day…

Neo Geo? August 22, 2008

Rich

A while back I stumbled across a Pixelpost application that I figured would go quite nicely with my photoblog, veryfishy.net. It’s called easymap and its premise is very simple: allow everyone appreciating your photographs to see exactly where you were standing when you hit the shutter (and display it in a lovely ajax stylee which I’m very fond of).

easymap is written by Pixelpost user Andreas and is continuously being tweaked and prodded in order to give the user the configurability needed to integrate it into personalised photoblog sites. easymap reads geodata embedded in your EXIF and then dumps said coordinates into Google Maps. Easy. Like it says on the tin. That’s one of the best bits about Pixelpost; the amount of community driven content.

The only drawback with this is many DSLRs don’t ordinarily come with GPS tracking that automagically pops your current whereabouts into your EXIF data. This is where another nifty little app comes in. Geotagger is built to run in the background alongside Google Earth with no interface other than its Dock icon. You simply find the spot you were in, center on it and then drag your about-to-be-published image onto Geotagger’s icon. Presto - your EXIF now contains spot on coordinates providing a new user experience of viewing images online. A few tweaklings of the code later and my map now displays in Satellite mode and hovers about 500 feet off the floor.

If you fancy testing this out, open one of my images on VF, Click For More and then poke ‘Where Was This Taken?’ Vertigo sufferers - insert Google Earth disclaimer here.

Kevin Smith says.. August 18, 2008

Rich

I saw Watchmen. It’s fucking astounding. The Non-Disclosure Agreement I signed prevents me from saying much, but I can spout the following with complete joygasmic enthusiasm: Snyder and Co. have pulled it off. Remember that feeling of watching Sin City on the big screen and being blown away by what a faithful translation of the source material it was, in terms of both content and visuals? Triple that, and you’ll come close to watching Watchmen. Even Alan Moore might be surprised at how close the movie is to the book. March can’t come soon enough.

Squeek.

Thanks to /Film

Gadzooks! August 8, 2008

Rich

The experience of watching one of Shakespeare’s plays at the very theater he used more than 400 years ago is indescribable. But I shall do it my best.

Lear, already in my mind a tale eager to change the very notion of a 17th century performance transcribed to the 21st century stage, is incredible. The character himself, broadly played by David Calder (he of the recent BBC climate change drama Burn Up) is like a taut wire from the moment he steps on stage, preceded by his own crown. Be it hollow, emotional, loving, senile or outright rage, Calder possesses the stage like a beast, trampling across other characters unable to match him for sheer presence, save the indomitable Fool (admirably played here by Danny Lee Wyminter) and Joseph Mydell, the very vividly unfortunate Gloucester.

There’s actually little else I can say on the matter save for the fact that anything performed at the Globe will make you feel like you have been transported to the Elizabethan era for your own entertainment. I reiterate - if you hate Shakespeare (or Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons for that matter) then perhaps now is the chance to give hm another whirl.