The centre of Glasgow has been transformed into a copy of Philadelphia for the purpose of shooting a Hollywood movie called “World War Z” (starring Brad Pitt).

Phyllis and I went down there last Sunday to take a few photos of it.

However, when we got home, I tried to compare it to photos of the same places in real Philly, and I must say I find it hard to see the similarity.

I guess the film’s producers must be counting on very few people actually knowing what Philadelphia looks like!

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Phyllis sent in a few photos to an Oxfam competition, and the result was a lengthy article in the Evening Times today.

Here is the relevant part:

A photo of a Glasgow chip shop menu is among images of the city which have been made into postcards.

Tourists will be able to send friends and family the quirky image, which was one of the winners of a competition run by Oxfam.

It is one of four new Glasgow postcards which will go on sale at the Oxfam Bookshop in Royal Exchange Square.

The chip-shop picture was taken by Phyllis Buchanan, 43, from Newton Mearns and bosses had more than 200 entries.

Phyllis, who compiles dictionaries, said: “I took it in West Nile Street. The reason I submitted it is my husband’s Danish, my ex-husband’s French, and the one thing that seems to unite foreigners when they come visit is the dreadful things we eat. I thought foreigners would like to send a postcard like that.

“I was thrilled to be chosen.”

I think she would have liked to have won the competition with a more artistic photo, though.

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As an example, here is a brief recording from my first birthday (which is quite appropriate, given that my youngest daughter will be one tomorrow):

However, going from the original film strip to YouTube has not been all that straightforward.

After his death, his 8 mm films were lying around in a drawer in my grandmother’s flat, mixed up with some films he must have bought at some point.

After quite a few years, my grandmother finally got round to viewing them all with a view to throwing away the ones he hadn’t made himself, and she took the remaining ones up to a shop where they converted them to VHS, added some easy-listening music and discarded the original films.

This week I then bought a kit to connect our VHS recorder to my Windows 7 computer, which creates an MPEG file.

I then loaded this file into iMovie on my Mac (which was a bit tricky, because iMovie won’t admit that it likes MPEG, so I had to create a MP_ROOT folder at the root level of my USB key and create a folder called “101PNV01″ inside this folder and put my MPEG files inside this [thanks!]).

From then on, it was easy – iMovie is great for editing films and putting them onto YouTube.

My only remaining problem is what to do about a church service starring my mum which was broadcast back in 1982: I have it on VHS, too, but the video capture software on my PC claims it’s copy-protected and stops after five seconds.

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I don’t think I should really comment on this photo – there’s really nothing I can add.

However, in general I must admit I simply don’t understand why so many photos get photoshopped. Surely the original would have been better?

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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!

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Wow, somebody has borrowed my duck and used it for a cool purpose!

Click on the picture and have a look at how it was made.

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I normally write blog postings by finding a nice Creative Commons-licensed photo on Flickr and using the Blog this button above it.

However, the consequence is that it appears on my blog immediately, without giving me the chance to proof-read it or anything.

It would be much better if the blog postings could end up in the Draft folder at first.

I was searching for a plugin to achieve this on the WordPress plugin site, but to no avail.

However, I finally found just what I needed here.

I just don’t understand why he hasn’t made it into a proper plugin package – it’s just so useful!

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I was playing around with qtpfsgui, which is a Linux program for creating HDR photos.

One of the settings produced this photo, which doesn’t look at all like an HDR photo, but must more like a classic black and white photo.

I like it, but tomorrow Phyllis and I will investigate how to create proper HDR photos, too…

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Our beloved Sony α100 started falling apart and we had to send it in to a repair shop.

At the same time, I noticed that a shop in Hong Kong called DigitalRev was selling cameras to the UK at a much lower price than shops based here, so I ordered a 350 to supplement the old camera.

It arrived Friday, and we’re now starting to get results.

Look at this photo that Phyllis took of Anna and me: Not only is it in 16:9, but it’s taken from a bug’s perspective, something which the tilting live preview screen makes it easy to do. Note also the resolution – it’s 4592 x 2576!

The only annoying thing about the 350 compared to the 100 is that the flash pops up automatically when the camera thinks it’s needed. I much preferred the 100′s flash that you had to pull up manually when you needed it.

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When we visited my parents in Denmark recently, we helped my mum set up the new printer the elders had bought for her.

It was an HP Photosmart D7160, and it impressed us: There were absolutely no lines on the printed photos, and the colours were great. It also had memory card readers and a small LCD screen for previewing.

So when we returned home, we ordered one for ourselves, and we got it a few days ago.

It really is a nice printer. A nice feature is that it can print photo on 10×15 paper without leaving any margin. And it worked out of the box with Linux.

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