Spring is starting

A couple of the new plants are already seriously blooming. I got out to the back yard this morning and took some pictures and spent some quality time with Aperture. This is my favorite photo from the set: I also quite liked this one: And just to prove that it's not just the vines that are flowering here's one of the camellias: I also like how in the first two images you can see the depth of field of the 50mm lens coming into play. The flowers in the center are in sharp focus and even other blooms in the background are blurred.
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Wrapping it up for Eye of Judgment(sic)

So I originally posted about how I liked Eye of Judgment(sic). Soon after that it sort of fell of my radar. Nothing particularly wrong with the game, but the AI is sort of "meh", nobody I knew was interested in playing, the card supply frankly sucked, and I could just feel the "Stay away" vibes rolling off the so-called "internet community" at large. The cards are about twice as expensive, per card, as a Magic card. I probably feel fairly strongly that Magic cards should be the "gold standard" for your Collectible Card Game (CCG) pricing, but I cut them some slack and figured the problem was both Sony and WOTC needing their cut. But lately they've been rumbling about the new "set 2" coming out in March. I was starting to think "Hey maybe I should haul out the EoJ cards and play a few rounds." Then today I saw this blog post. So to play with the Set 2 cards you have to buy a software update from the Playstation store, and then buy the cards at the standard 2x MTG price. They are (rather obviously) not saying what the price for the totally useless PSN update will be. I think this will kill it. I don't think EoJ was actually doing well in a market where very few games survive. Paying the price premium was annoying. Adding some other Sony charge is just silly. Look, any obstacle you place in the way of *selling cards* is stupid. Charging for the digital content of Set 2 is exactly that - it's a convenient excuse for me to quit following the entire game. Whoops! So, anybody have good CCG recommendations for 2008? :-)
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Playing with Aperture

I haven't been posting very many pictures lately. There are several reasons for that. The main one is the majority of my photography time lately has been on Karin's clock project which doesn't generate interesting photos for the world at large. Additionally I've been spending a fair amount of time learning how Aperture (the software, not the camera term) works and what it can do. Then I upgraded from 1.5 to 2.0 and that process has been extended. In the meantime photos have been piling up. Also, in my day to day life there really are two picture sources: the landscaping and the cats. The landscaping hasn't produced a lot of great photo opportunities lately because A ) it's still winter and most of the plants are pretty dormant and B ) it's been raining like crazy lately so the lighting hasn't been very vibrant. Cat photos are such an internet cliche and I'm really conscious of not posting very many cat photos. But today I did post a couple of takes of a Schrödinger picture. My justification for this is that I'm doing a before and after of my Aperture changes. A couple of weeks ago I came into the kitchen and found that Schrödinger was up on the dining room table. She's not supposed to be up there of course, but it was also notable because she doesn't usually get up on high surfaces. I ran back to my office, grabbed the camera, and took a quick snap to email Karin. I particularly like her expression, as she clearly is giving me the "What?" defense. "I didn't know the table rule applied today!" So here's the original shot: Schrödinger on the table - original Then I did several color correction things in Aperture - White Balance, just used the auto-levels for levels. I ran the auto-exposure adjustment, but then further tweaked the "Recovery" and "Black Point" sliders to remove the clipping - her paws and chest are clipped to white and there are a few pixels on her back that were clipped black. I also cropped and I had originally cropped it very close. Today I learned about using the "Vignette" tool in Aperture, and I used it to darken the corners of the shot which meant I had to loosen the crop to avoid vignetting her shoulders and the right edge of her face. Here's my current version: Schrödinger on the table - cropped, vignetted and color corrected I really like Aperture as a tool. One very key bit is the nondestructive nature of the edits. Notice that I cropped this photo back on Feb 7, but when I learned about vignetting today (Feb 21), I was able to turn off the crop, play with the vignette, and make a new crop. Also I had auto-leveled and auto-exposured back in Aperture 1.5, but in 2.0 I was able to identify the flared-out white pixels and recovery them from the RAW image, restoring some fur detail that was lost otherwise. In a tool like iPhoto I could have gone back to the original image, but not just selectively gone back and turned adjustments on or off, or do something like recrop the image while preserving all the color channel changes.
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PS3 and Universal Remotes

So now that Toshiba threw in the HD-DVD towel maybe you're thinking, "OK I should get myself a sweet, sweet PS3 and some Blu-Ray discs." But there's a problem and that problem is universal remotes. If you aren't using a universal remote than you're A ) foolish and B ) very likely a bachelor. I talked about my Harmony 880 remote before and there are newer Harmony remotes out there so I might not recommend buying an 880 today, but I really highly recommend the Harmony line. The fly in the ointment is that the PS3 doesn't have an IR receiver. It uses Bluetooth for the Sony remote. The Sony remote works well enough, but once you achieve one remote nirvana having that second around is really irking. I recently found out that Nyko sells a IR dongle and small little remote for the PS3, called the Nyko BluWave ($14 at Amazon). You plug the dongle into an USB port on the PS3 and then teach the remote codes to the Harmony. (I did that last night, but I've since learned today that apparently you can PICK Nyko->BluWave as a device on the Harmony and it will download the codes.) This isn't perfect. There are two minor problems and one fairly big one. The first is that a USB device can't turn on the PS3, so there's no power button on the Nyko remote. (The Sony Bluetooth remote does have a power button.) This isn't huge, it's only an issue if you already had a Blu-Ray disc in the drive and wanted to power it on from the couch, and don't have a controller within arm's reach. The second minor problem is that the Nyko remote doesn't have all the buttons of the Sony remote - it lacks both the 10 key keypad and the colored buttons. I'm not sure this is a problem at all, I've never used those on my PS3. I'm a little worried about the Blue/Red/Yellow/Green buttons because I assume those are for Blu-Ray features and I might want them at some point in the future. The much bigger problem is really annoying. If you have the USB dongle connected to the PS3 and you turn on the PS3 via a wireless controller the dongle apparently becomes controller 1. (The Sony Bluetooth remote somehow manages to always be controller 7.) The controller you just used to turn on the console ends up being controller 2. Most games won't play ball with this. Oddly enough if you turn the controller off and then back on it ends up being controller, but that's an awfully clunky workaround. After some thought my current plan is to leave the dongle sitting by the PS3 and only plug it in when playing a Blu-Ray. Figure I'm up there turning the console on anyway, so it's not a big deal to connect the dongle at that time. Given all that, personally I think it's worth $14 to let my Harmony control disc playback. I can't quite unconditionally recommend the BluWave, but I guess you can weigh the issues listed above versus the issue of having to use two remotes (the horror) to watch movies. Update 2/22/08: I realized today that if you're in a game on the PS3 that you can reassign a controller ID. There's a menu that comes up when you press the PS button. This is where you can turn off the controller or the system, or quit the game and return to the Cross Media Bar (XMB). There's also an option called "Controller Options" and from there you can reassign the controller ID. So now I leave the USB dongle plugged in, but I can grab a controller, start a game and then correct the whole controller 2 thing. Still a pain, but better than having to turn the controller off and on again.
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Mauvais Role

Boing Boing TV is a bit hit or miss for me, but they recently had a French CGI short film (of all things) on and I really enjoyed it. As Boing Boing describes it:
Today on Boing Boing tv, Mauvais Rôle ("Bad Role"), a short animated film about a computer game character who gets fed up with playing the same lame villain roles all the time -- and takes matters into his own (clawed) hands. His quest leads him to new and increasingly more ridiculous casting calls, each one weirder than the last. And they lead him somewhere he never thought he'd end up...
Take a look. I thought it was worth five or six minutes.
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