Jaysen Marais http://jaysenmarais.com/blog Making it happen, bit by bit Sat, 06 Feb 2010 04:07:42 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Synchronize bookmarks with Delicious & Firefox The web is awesome, but managing URLs is a pain. That pain is magnified if you use multiple machines and made worse if you use multiple operating systems (not to mention home vs. work, desktop vs. phone etc). There are roughly a million ways to handle this problem. Here's mine. Step ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20090502/delicious/ Spherical panoramas: photographs without edges Most lay-people see photography as the cut-and-dried act of capturing the world "as it is". Ironically, the simple and necessary action of framing a photograph instantly renders the result subjective ('un-photogenic' subjects are typically pushed out-of-frame). This creative choice built into the camera's design is part of the appeal of ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20090410/spherical-panoramas/ Ragged CSS: makes life easier The web community is generally coming (or has come) to accept that 'semantic' class naming conventions ('old school' elements with classes describing content not appearance) are preferable to the 'boldGreyLink' type conventions popular around the millennium. Millenium era HTML & CSS 'Semantic' era HTML & CSS <html> <head> <title>'Millenium' era</title> <style type="text/css"> div.redSubHead { color: red; } p.greyText ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20090126/ragged-css-makes-life-easier/ Scrolling beyond the black stump in Google Earth Recently an American friend of mine was asking about the basics of Australia's geography over lunch. When I couldn't make my points clearly using condiments and cutlery I turned to the Google Earth iPhone app (also worth a look is Earthscape). I find myself reaching for the iPhone mid-conversation ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20081115/scrolling-beyond-the-black-stump-in-google-earth/ Out with the old, in with the new (drive) After my fourth month of constant hard-drive space scavenging (in both OS X and boot-camped Vista) I finally bit the bullet and initiated the oft-delayed drive upgrade. It also seemed like the least irritating time to do the similarly deferred Tiger-to-Leopard upgrade too (hitherto postponed due to space and ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20080925/out-with-the-old-in-with-the-new-drive/ Immersive photographs on the iPhone with PangeaVR It was all I could do to stay true to my anti-iPhone stance so long as my 3G demands remained unmet, so when apple finally relented and released the iPhone 3G I too was forced to concede (it would have been unreasonable of me not too!). Most curious onlookers are ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20080825/immersive-photographs-on-the-iphone-with-pangeavr/ Photos — trip to Salzburg & Munich Just a quick post (to offset my last ridiculously long post on stitching panoramas with Hugin). I've finally posted the photos from my recent trip to Salzburg & Munich. It took a few weeks (spare-time) to cull (from ~400 to 85), caption, tag, geocode, post-process and upload the images. I'm still ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20080407/photos-trip-to-salzburg-munich/ Making nodal panoramas that don’t suck Update: 6th Feb 2010, changed 'linear' in title to 'nodal' due to comment feedback http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20080402/making-linear-panoramas-that-dont-suck/ dpreview.com lens review widget sallies forth Today's a big day at dpreview.com as it sees the launch of the first dpreview.com lens reviews. I'm excited as it also sees the launch of my latest and greatest project, the humbly-titled lens review widget (or see it embedded in a lens review). The lens review widget is a flash ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20080130/dpreview_lens_review_widget/ Photography ‘08 (ditching iphoto) Until recently my digital photography 'workflow' (such as it was) has been comically under-thought: Take photo, download images (using canon software) to mac and wipe CF card. Import images into iPhoto 6 then: Battle against iPhoto's terrible data-entry interface (helped slightly by Ken Ferry's great Keyword assistant for iPhoto). Complain bitterly when I realized ... http://jaysenmarais.com/blog/20080106/photography-08-ditching-iphoto/