(Last) summer’s last hurrah

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Sometimes, if you’ve been reading a blog regularly, you’ll see an entry that you’ve read before, reposted for new readers to spot. This is kind of like that, in that I wrote it about a year ago. It’s kind of not like that, in that, I didn’t think it was interesting, funny, or informative enough to post the first time, let alone twice.

I’m putting it up now, because: (a) I found it interesting that the weather leading up to September 23, 2010 was evidently summerier* than most of this year’s actual summer, (b) my cares and occupations were very different this time last year, which is, I admit, only likely to be obvious or interesting to me; (c) there may be a ghost of a smidge of useful photographic information in there for someone; (d) I got tired of seeing this old draft languishing but not having the heart to toss it; (e) I wanted an excuse to post my unremarkable moon picture, because the moon is awesome, and (f) I’m too tired and busy to come up with anything new that’s any better than this.

Without further ado, here’s last years leftover reheated:

Yesterday was the first time in a long while that I’ve ridden home after dark. In the periodic illumination of the bike path, bare legs sniffing cool, then warm currents of air, I felt surrounded by campus-y-ness. There’s a golden, warm version of this, when all you hear on a warm lunch hour is the hum of nearby building plant and maybe a lawn mower, and there’s a chillier, more excited version attached to memories of September arrivals back when I wasn’t here (or wherever) the whole time. I think Cambridge has just changed its summer clothes for the term-time ones, ready for the undergrads to return.

The moon was glowing behind some hazy ripples, and I thought it looked cool and wished for a camera.

When I reached home, I bounced straight back outside with my tripod and camera, and aimed for the moon. The magic was gone but I practiced focusing on the moon, which was a bit more visible. My tripod (Slik Sprint Pro, old now but here‘s a contemporary review) is not quite up to the task of keeping a DSLR and 70-300mm (Sigma) lens from drooping but I can’t blame it as when it applied for the job my only camera was a Canon A700.

I’m putting up a shot just because I’ve never had a camera that could show this much detail on the moon even on a clear night. This is cropped, but also scaled down. There are much better D90/Sigma 70-300 moon pictures to be found on Flickr, but this one is mine, so it’s special. (To me.)

Next I swapped back to my kit lens (18-105mm Nikkor) to catch the roses, because they deserve some recognition. They took a beating when we had some real summer weather followed by a blast of windy rain. There were petals everywhere and we didn’t see a lot of blossoms again for a while.

As I played with the focus and the settings on my camera, the motion-sensor light kept going out on me.

Um. “The End.”

*Firefox doesn’t think there’s any problem with “summerier” as a word. Lemme try something else: campusiness. Nope. I don’t get away with that one.

Making a sketch into vector art using Inkscape

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I noticed a flurry of excitement on Twitter over a new product from Wacom called the Inkling, a combination of a pressure-sensitive ballpoint pen and a doodad that clips onto the top of your sketchbook and records the position of the pen by detecting inaudible sound pulses emitted by the pen. The position and pressure data are recorded and the sketch reconstructed in software.

I archive doodles using my camera; there’s a higher chance I’ll see them again if they’re on the computer, especially if I tag them as sketches in Digikam. The Inkling might streamline this process and enhance it with easy conversion into vector graphics and the ability to switch layers (so a rough sketch can be separated from refinements drawn over it). Having to find the doohickey and clip it onto a sketchpad before starting any sketch might be enough hassle that I’d reach for a more gratifying-to-use pencil, pen, or brush, though, and then I’d have to take my photo anyway.

Using a standard ballpoint refill may make sense, all things considered, but it’s not the most pressure-sensitive of drawing instruments. The physical pen sketch on the page can’t reflect anything interesting the software might do with the pressure data, like varying linewidth or opacity, as suggested by images here and here respectively. I imagine that with practice one could visualize the intended effect, but to my mind it’s quite a compromise. It will be interesting to see when hands-on reviews start cropping up.

So, that all said, I’m not the intended audience for the Inkling, but I had been following the countdown to the unveiling of a new product from Wacom, hoping for a pressure-sensitive stylus for capacitive touchscreen devices (like my Asus Transformer or an iPad). When I saw that the new product is for digitizing drawings made on paper, I was inspired to test how easy it is to vectorize a photo of a drawing by getting the free vector graphics program Inkscape to trace it. Now, I’m a complete Illustrator ignorant, and I haven’t spent a lot of time with Inkscape either, so the nuances of working with vector graphics escape me completely. The result of this process may be non-ideal for most people’s applications. I ran through it just to see what would happen.

Here’s a doodle I’d made during a landmark first (and probably only, ever, with autumn just about upon us and G approaching three years of age) coincidence of warm, sunny weather and both children sleeping. I should really have made a pen or brush sketch for this, I suppose.

Import into Inkscape and go to Path->Trace Bitmap… I chose a single scan with brightness threshold 0.880.

A different trace, this time using several levels of grey (I chose 4), followed by a Path->Simplify operation:

These examples were carried out without optimizing the settings, but I was impressed. My low-contrast doodle was made into an SVG file, with vectory shapes with nodes you can tweak, and no limit on their resolution. They look like something you could make something out of. Incidentally, the inkscape tutorials weblog is a good general Inkscape resource, with links to some really neat tutorials.

I like taking pictures

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This photo is pretty unremarkable, except in that it’s the first one I’ve taken in about a month that doesn’t look like this:

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On another topic, this post is taking an awfully long time to write, for technological reasons. The photos were processed on my desktop computer (Mandriva Linux), but from there I wanted to see if it was practical to write a post on an Asus Transformer tablet running Android Honeycomb. For the nonce, let’s just say I ran into some issues. I hope to follow up with some details, perhaps typed out on a physical keyboard. I’m determined to finish this post on the tablet.