This weekend I spent an hour or so making my own flash ring light. All in all it cost me under $10.

Materials:
- Round Rubbermaid container
- Tin foil
- Chrome/reflective duct tape
- SlimJim/Pringles container.

One tip I have is to use a hole saw to drill the holes in the bottom of the container. It cracks fairly easily, so drilling it will help with that. For the rest, I think the pictures should give you a pretty good idea on what to do.

Continue reading ‘DIY Sub $10 Flash Ringlight’

After reading a great review of the online photo lab Mpix.com I was eager to try them out. Well about a week ago a friend of mine asked if he could buy a print of one of my photos, so I figured it would be a great time to test them out. In the past I have used Apple’s print service and was always very happy with them, but they do have their limitations.

So I ordered the print he wanted in 16″x24″ and also tacked on a few prints of photos in my portfolio at various sizes and paper options to compare.

Here’s a rundown of my experience:

PROS:

• Prints are very high quality. Their lustre coating looks great and their metallic paper is outstanding. I really recommend the metallic paper if you really want a print to pop off the wall.
• Fast shipping to Canada. My order took less than a week to arrive.
• Prints are shipped flat (not rolled). This is a huge thing for me. Large prints I’ve ordered in the past have been rolled and it seems impossible to get them totally flat.
• Prints are well packaged and separated.
• Website works great and has tons of features for uploading you photos for prints
• They offer a lot of different print sizes. I ordered several 6×9 images which are just great. A much better option than 8×10 prints for me since I hate cropping my photos to a 4:5 aspect ratio.

CONS:

• Not sure if this is really a con, or a side effect of having so many “pros”, but prints are a little pricey.
• A flat shipping rate of $15 to Canada makes it hard to justify smaller orders.

So the bottom line is Mpix.com is now my number one goto print shop. You pay a bit more, but you are getting great products and service in return. The prints looks great (especially the metallic paper) , the packaging is outstanding and the size options are great.

When I first built a my lifestream, it was a messy chunk of code and never really worked the way that I had wanted it to. First off, updating it was a huge pain and even looking at the code totally turned me off.

So after doing lots of reading about the Django web framework for Python, I decided that as a learning project, I would port my Lifestream over from PHP. I’ve never like PHP as a language, so the thought of getting to write Python code again really sparked my interest.

I must say, building a website using Django has been the most enjoyable web programming experience of my life. I now find it very hard to go back to more traditional ways of building web pages. I’m definitely looking forward to doing more projects with it.

You can check out my new lifestream here: http://lifestream.seanmcg.com/

Not only did I port my existing lifestream (http://blog.seanmcg.com/lifestream/), but I also added a bunch of new features and improvements. Here’s the rundown:

• Updated the look a bit
• Better updating functionality. The stream is updated in a background AJAX call, and new items will appear on the page after load.
• The code is much cleaner and efficient, definitely easier to update
• Full administrative backend (Thanks to Django it only took a few lines of code)
• Better aggregation of feeds and handling of timestamps.
• Added a page for each stream item
• Added an archive list so you can browse older items
• You can filter the stream based on original source (i.e. only show Flickr updates, etc)
• I made it a lot easier to add a new stream source
• You can comment on any stream item now
• Comments have email notifications built in
• I added gravatar and identicon support for the comments
• Updates to the RSS feed

The code is also totally generic, so anyone could use it on their site with minimal fuss. Maybe someday I’ll release the source if I get around to it.

I recently revisited Quick Tag and did a few changes that I thought were worthy of a new release. I’ve got some big new features planned for the next release (hint: last.fm) so in the meantime here is version 0.7. Changes include:

- New look
- Improved ‘Check for updates’ functionality
- Window size and position are now saved whenc losing the app
- Improved “Show Song Information” functionality

Quick Tag 0.7 beta

After upgrading to VMWare Fusion 2.0 things have been running a bit slower, especially booting or restoring a suspended operating system. I went searching and found this great post with several suggestions that really helped my performance.

To quote brianwilson71:

- I have 4GB of Ram. Previously I allocated 3GB to Fusion to try and get a better response from Windows. I have now set this back to 2GB macbook, 2GB Windows

- I was using 2 virtual processors. I now use 1.

- DISABLE: the following setting: Settings->Sharing->Allow your macs to open apps in the virtual machine.

- ENABLE: VMware->Optimize for Mac Performance. (Ensure debugging checks are disabled)

- Ensure you have the latest version of VMware tools installed.

Since I’ve been doing a lot of work for clients lately using Drupal, I’ve been meaning to get a solid backup solution for all my MySQL databases. With a CMS like Drupal, if you lose the DB, you lose everything. So here’s the backup plan I’ve put in place.

It’s worth noting that with my web host, my databases are stored on separate server from my files.

1. Cron Job on Web Host
I was going to write my own backup script until I found AutoMySQLBackup, which is a hundred times better than a script I would have written. The script is run nightly for all my different database users, provides daily, weekly and monthly archives. Also emails me incase of errors connecting to or exporting the database.

2. Cron Job on Home Server
Run weekly to sync the files on my web host with a local directory using rsync.

3. Home Server gets backed up
For a little extra security, the hard drive on my home server is cloned every night.

In the end, it gives me backup of all my databases in 4 different places. Plus I have incremental backups. I think it is a good setup and should do me well. Hopefully I’ll never have to use it, but it’s always good to have something like this in place.

I think it is safe to say that if you are reading this post, then you have a good idea of what a tag cloud is. Tag clouds are everywhere these days (including this blog) and for good reason seeing that many people view them as a useful tool for browsing popular content and displaying trends.

In the spirit of tag clouds, I’d like to propose a new concept, which to my knowledge hasn’t been brought up before. I call it a Nav Cloud. The idea is simple…apply the concept of a tag cloud to navigation items.

As a basic example, imagine that instead of a traditional navigation menu you were to present the visitors of your website with a tag cloud-like structure that contained the items that would have appeared in the menu. You apply whatever cloud drawing technique you prefer (font size, color, etc) using the frequency the items have been clicked or visited by your users as the weights. So items that have been clicked the most would show up larger and items that aren’t clicked very often would show up the smallest (or whatever your drawing algorithm dictates).

Not only would this show your visitors what options they have, but will show them what items are the most active and popular. As a bonus it would even show you, at a basic level, how visitors are navigating your pages. This could be taken a step further and you could offer users a personalized Nav Cloud. So you only take into account a particular user’s activity so that their favorite links become more dominant and links they are hardly use appear to fade away.

Now all of this isn’t to say that the traditional menu is to be banished and a Nav Cloud to take its place. I think the best solution would be to offer some combination of the two where you would store the activity on both sets of navigation items to help generate the Nav Cloud. I think it is hard to beat and replace a traditional menu, but it is something that could always be complemented with something like a Nav Cloud.

When it comes to the implementation, I see there being two main ways to go about collecting the data. We could capture the actual clicks on the items, or we could collect the actual hits on the respective pages. Both methods serve the purpose needed by the Nav Cloud, but would produce slightly different results. Also the first method would probably be the way to go if you navigation linked to external sources that you don’t have control over.

The next step is to prototype this idea to see how well it works. The beauty is that it’s a simple technique that is easy to implement and relatively inexpensive, so where’s the risk in trying…

Have you implemented a Nav Cloud before? If so let me know in the comments.

Want to get started into learning jQuery and not sure where to start? I’ve been bugging a friend of mine to get into jQuery for a while now, so I did up the following 6 slides (with examples) for a quick and basic introduction to JQuery that he could use to get familiar with things. If you are in the same boat, you’ve come to the right place.

jQuery in 15 Minutes

Mac Appetite (Ryan Groom and myself) have started in on the iPhone / iPod Touch development movement and have just released our first app.

It’s called Red Delicious and we built it to offer the best iPhone interface for your delicious bookmarks. Version 1.0 offers the following features:

• Quickly see your recently added bookmarks upon launching the app.
• Browse your bundles and tags.
• See the most popular bookmarks from the Delicious community.
• Can’t find a book mark by browsing your tags? We support searching by keyword!
• Delicious communication is done securely over SSL so your password and username is safe.
• View your bookmarks while not connected to the internet. A local copy is kept on the device and only the changes are fetched from Delicious.
• Internet activity is optimized to help save battery life and keep you data rates down.
• Support for device rotation. Makes reading those long bookmark titles a breeze!

Check it out on the App Store.

View a larger size on Flickr

Lately I’ve been experimenting with different post processing techniques, on camera filters, and textures in my photography.

One of my goals when taking pictures of couples is to provide more than your standard posed portrait, in fact I never ask any of my clients to pose (I believe more in capturing a special moment between to people, instead of forcing them into one). I want to provide them with a piece of art they can hang on their wall that contains themselves as the subject matter. Yeah, I still provide them with regular photos too, but the bread and butter to me, is the artistic side.

This is a photo that, to this date, gets me as close to that goal as I have been.

Credit: seanmcgrath

View on Flickr

This goes to show, you can get some great images out of the iPhone camera. This was also shot through the window of a plane.

All you need is the right lighting.

Credit: seanmcgrath

Here’s an old Bird’s Eye View tune that I just got around to mixing over the weekend.

Faith You Seek

It’s a song that some people say was the best song we ever wrote. I personally feel that it is too poppy and catchy, but that’s just me I guess. It’s another song that I recorded when we were demoing songs for our album. I am just releasing this now because the vocals were previously incomplete, but thanks to copy and paste…I have fixed them. Lyrically, I think it is some of Matt’s best work.

It’s not entirely obvious how to link to a specific folder in your .Mac / MobileMe public iDisk folder but it is fairly easy:

To link to your root public folder you use:

http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername-Public/
or
http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername-Public/?view=web

To link to a specific folder under the root folder use:

http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername-Public/Folder1/Folder2/
or
http://idisk.mac.com/yourusername-Public/Folder1/Folder2/?view=web

The same goes for files, except you don’t want to use the ?view=web part.

This could potentially be my favorite new app for my iPhone. It’s called Shazam (Free) and it totally blows my mind. Check out my video demo:

Continue reading ‘My favorite iPhone 2.0 app?’

Just wanted to try out the new wordpress app for my iPhone. I upgraded to the 2.0 firmware last night and have been busy using all the great apps at the app store. With 2.0 I would say I am 10 times happier with my iPhone!

I can’t see me blogging much this way, but it is a nice app to have just incase. I’ll likely be updating remotely via Twitter and Facebook.

There’s is a small trick to getting Rogers’ new 6GB/month for $30 data plan on your old non 3G iPhone. The trick is to not let them know you are using it for an iPhone.

If you go into a store with a non 3G iPhone they will ask you to leave, so it is best if you call. When you call tell them you want it for your Motorola Q9h. Basically any phone that is 3G and not an iPhone.

So that should get you the plan, and once that is done you need a few settings on your phone. Under Settings > General > Network > Edge add the following

APN: internet.com
Username: wapuser1
Password: wap

And then you should be all set!

Lately I’ve been experimenting with the Flickr API and in the process I’ve built a few tools that I use very often and figure others would get some use out of so here they are.

How to use these bookmarklets: Drag the bookmarklet link into your browser’s bookmark toolbar

Is Explored?

This bookmarklet checks the current Flickr photo you are viewing and sees if it is in the top 500 (explored) photos for the day it was uploaded. Basically does the same thing as Scout but is up-to-date (Scout runs its program every so often and isn’t up-to-date at all times).

Is Explored?

Flickr to BBCode

If you spend a lot of time on forums or message boards (phpBB, vBulletin, etc) and like to post pictures from Flickr there, then this bookmarklet is for you. Just go to the Flickr page for the photo you want to post, click the bookmarklet, copy the BBCode for the photo on the next page, then paste it into your message!

Flickr to BBCode

Flickr to HTML

This is the same as the BBCode script, but it gives you the HTML for the 3 sizes of the photo instead of the BBCode. Flickr will provide you with the HTML, but I find this bookmarklet makes it a bit easier to get to.

Flickr to HTML

Large on Black

A popular thing on Flickr is for photographers to include a link to a “View on Black” page. Well, if you are armed with this bookmarklet you can view any photo on Flickr “On Black” whether the photographer has included the link or not. If you happen to be one of those photographers….this will also help you get that “View on Black” link even faster!

View Large and On Black

Something I’ve been meaning to do for a while now is to create a page that lists a large collection of the songs I’ve been a part of over the last few years. Well, I went a head a did that over the weekend and added a bunch of Bird’s Eye View songs (pretty much all of them) as well as a few that I’ve done solo.

All songs are free for download and can be played right on the page.

Check it out

Ever wonder if you should be tipping someone? There are a few cases when I’m never sure when I should be tipping:

1. When picking up takeout food in store. In this case I do not tip.
2. At the hair dresser. In this case I do tip.
3. At the massage therapist. In this case I do tip.
4. At the local ice cream shop / convenience store. In this case I do not tip.

Am I out of line / crazy in any of these situations? What does everyone else do in these situations? Any other tipping situations you are unsure about? Share them in the comments.

It’s about that time to go ahead and change the look of things around here, so here is a new theme. This theme is based on the unsleepable_16 theme but I’ve made a lot of custom changes. Definitely the most personal stylings I’ve put into this blog to date. Usually I just pick a theme and go with it, but this time I thought it’d be a nice change to do something personal.

Along with the new look, I’ve also added a few new features which include:

• Better integration with my lifestream
• Better Flickr integration via the FlickrRSS plugin
• Twitter integration
• Mootools sidebar
• Updated to Wordpress 2.5.1
• Added a tag cloud
• OS X stlye search bar
• Custom favicon
• Installed Google XML Sitemap plugin
• Installed WP-Syntax plugin
• iPhone / iPod Touch theme for viewing the blog on one of those 2 devices. (Thanks to the WP-Touch plugin)

There is still a lot of lose ends, but they’ll come together with time.