Make movies without leaving your computer!
I found a new website today called Xtra Normal.
It lets you make movies like this, and it’s quick and easy:
I want to park my car like that!
Is this iPhoto?
I’ve been playing around with iPhoto on and off ever since Complexli bought the Mac mini for me.
In particular, I’m interested in face recognition. It would be so nice if all your photos could be tagged correctly to show who’s in them.
However, I’m less than impressed with iPhoto’s performance in this area.
One thing is that the face recognition on its own is quite bad. I appreciate it’s a hard thing to do well. It appears to me, though, that it’s doing a worse job recognising the blond members of the family, such as Léon, than spotting the darker ones, such as Anna. I read somewhere that it’s been developed by a Japanese company, which might explain this.
However, I have two major complaints.
Firstly, if you upload a lot of photos in one go (I tried about 15,000), it will keep processing faces in the background forever. It’s now been running almost constantly for over a week, so I think it might have entered an infinite loop somewhere. This means that it will almost never make a suggestion, and it keeps one processor 100% busy constantly, which is not great for system performance.
Secondly, it seems not to use any other information when making guesses.
For instance, if ten photos have been taken within half an hour, and the nine of them contain only Léon, wouldn’t it be reasonable to suggest that the tenth also contains him? iPhoto doesn’t think so: It will happily suggest it’s Léon on one photo, Anna on the next one, then Gordon, then Charlotte, and so on.
Also, it doesn’t seem to take dates into consideration. If there’s a baby in a photo, it’s a good guess that it might be Marcel if the photo is from 1997 or 1998, Charlotte if it’s 2000, Léon if it’s 2005 or 2006, and Anna if it’s 2007 or 2008. But iPhoto will happily make suggestions that are not reasonable given that all photos have a date stamp.
It’s so frustrating to know that it could easily be improved, but it’s closed source, so I can’t do anything.
I prefer open source!
Our new local shop
They’re building a lot of houses, business premises, a school and some roundabouts on some fields between us and the motorway. (That is, they started building them a couple of years ago, but most of them seem to have put on hold when the recession started to bite.)
The posters also seemed to indicate that there would be some kind of shop.
I always thought it was a great location because it’s so close to a motorway onramp, but I didn’t know what kind of chain that would go for this.
Today we got the answer:
In 2011 Scotland’s biggest Waitrose will open there, just five minutes’ walk from our house.
I’m not sure we can afford to make that our main shop for groceries, but I’m sure it’ll be a good place to get certain products, so I’m looking forward to it!
Schwäbisch schwätza uff Youtube
I was raised bilingually. However, it wasn’t Danish and standard German I grew up speaking, as some people might think, it was Danish and Swabian (Schwäbisch).
These days even my dad hardly ever speaks Swabian any more, and Swabian speakers aren’t exactly ubiquitous in Scotland, so it often feels like I’m the only remaining speaker.
So imagine my joy when I realised that Youtube is positively full of Swabian videos, such as the following parodies!
Obama:
Star Wars:
John Wayne:
If the pound collapses…
Of course the financial problems are not restricted to the UK, but as the recent news that this country is contracting shows, it’s definitely worse off than many similar places.
That means that it’s not impossible that the pound will fall even further.
So it’s worth asking what the effects will be if the pound collapses, e.g., to €1 = $1.50 = £2 (it’s £0.92 at the moment).
Obviously, holidays and many importing goods will become unaffordable to most Britons, and the UK might become a very popular tourist destination.
However, the effects will surely be very different depending on who you are.
For instance, if you’re exporting goods or services, you’re likely to be much better off, and that will most likely have an effect on all people working in such industries.
Also, some jobs are very international, because people can very easily take their skills and find an equivalent job in other countries. The typical example is doctors, but I presume the same is true for investment bankers, engineers and others.
On the other hand, some jobs just don’t travel very well, so lawyers, civil servants, teachers and many low-paid workers will probably find it much harder to argue that they need a huge salary increase to counterbalance the effects of the low pound.
The same is true for those not in work, such as the unemployed and the pensioners.
A low pound would also make it rather unattractive to come here to work. Imagine a job paying £10 an hour here, but €8 in Slovakia. It would have seemed really attractive to a Slovakian a couple a years ago, marginally better at the moment, but very unattractive it the pound collapsed.
On the other hand, it would possibly lead to mass emigration from Britain because so many jobs would be better paid abroad.
Stor baby
Som jeg sikkert har nævnt tidligere, skal Phyllis efter planen føde den 9. januar.
Det betyder, at afstanden fra skambenet til toppen af livmoderen gerne skulle være 28-29 cm.
Men da de målte hende i dag til et rutinetjek, var afstanden 34 cm.
De sagde først, det sikkert bare var for meget væske, men de sendte hente til scanning for at tjekke.
Men nej, det er rent faktisk pigen derinde, der er kæmpestor: De vurderer hende til at veje mellem 2500 og 3000 gram på nuværende tidspunkt.
Anna vejede 3500 gram ved fødslen, så det lyder jo umiddelbart ret stort.
De regner med at tjekke Phyllis for sukkersyge i næste uge, men der er ingen tegn på noget i urinen, så hvis ikke det er årsagen, er det sikkert bare en meget stor baby.
Det kan selvfølgelig godt være, at hun vokser meget langsomt fra nu af og altså kommer til at veje ca. det samme som Anna ved fødslen, men det kan man ikke sige noget fornuftigt om på nuværende tidspunkt.
Jeg er i øvrigt meget imponeret over billederne fra scanningen. Phyllis er aldrig blevet scannet så sent i graviditeten, og det gør altså en stor forskel.
Se blot, hvor tydeligt man kan se hendes profil på billedet øverst til venstre.
Folding T-shirts
This is an impressive way to fold your T-shirt:
Unless you’re an engineer, in which case this is the way to go:
If you like that idea, but don’t want to build it yourself, it seems to be available here.
However, it seems that if you’re in the US Army, you don’t fold, you roll:
Modern curries
I’ve already written about the wonderful Curry Secret cookbook, which shows you how to cook Indian restaurant food.
Not only will it give you the recipes for dishes you’ve encountered in restaurants, but it will also teach you how to pre-cook the sauce and the meat, so that you can cook two curries in half an hour after work.
So when the New Curry Secret was published, I bought it immediately.
I assumed it would just contain more recipes and better illustrations (the old one was a black-and-white paperback, but this is a proper cookbook with colour photos), but I was pleasantly surprised!
It turns out he’s moved with the times, and whereas the old Secret would advocate ground spices and food colouring, this one cheerily tells you to put in whole cinnamon and cardamom pods and leave them in, just like in the best modern restaurants.
If you only want to own one Indian cookbook, buy this one!
A different perspective
John Redwood today is trying a new approach to explaining the scope of the financial crisis:
Let us look at the financial plight of an imaginary Mr and Mrs Public Sector. They are on a good income of around £50,000 a year. They don’t feel it is nearly enough, as they are spending this year £67,500, financing the extra £17,500 from borrowing. They are lucky, because they do not have to pay any tax on the income, so what they earn they can spend.
They already have an £80,000 mortgage. They owe £110,000 to the pension fund, as they have not paid any pension contributions in for years. They have borrowed another £50,000 on credit cards and hire purchase to buy furniture they fancied and to undertake some training courses. They have guaranteed a couple of businesses that have gross debts of £300,000, but the businesses also have plenty of assets so they are hopeful they wont lose too much on them.
All these figures are about 1/10,000,000 of the real public sector ones.
It does put things in perspective, doesn’t it?
