Once again, it has been Karneval in Aalborg. 
It has always impressed me how a town this size can agree that once a year every body parties and everything else is suspended. Although I’m currently living in Paris, I was home visiting my beautiful girlfriend and enjoying the fun.
If you like using flicker, but would like a different look e.g. a black background check out Flickriver.com – its a pretty simple url rewrite job, to view your flicker pictures here. No registration no nothing!
So, spending a lot of my spare time taking photos around Paris, actually some 3000 in 3 months, I am becoming increasingly annoyed each time a photo is ruined. Either by my fumbling around with the camera controls, or by my otherwise excellent camera just not being able to handle the situation; By not focusing fast enough or focusing slightly off subject, or by being forced into to an ISO level which is just too noisy.
It came as a slight surprise to me, although it probably shouldn’t have, that noise and soft focus, can be exploited to give a nice effect. I just tried out a demo of Silver Efex Pro, which can add even more noise, in the form of film gain, to the photo which makes the otherwise bodged photo look intentional, case in point:
This little cute thing was in too much of a hurry, trying to catch up with is mum, to stop and pose for me and my camera. From the point where I realized it was there, until it had passed me I only had time for one shot, and the auto focus did not get time to do its job properly. But I think the result is pretty Ok.
So yesterday afternoon I was out taking some pictures in Paris, having been inspired by a number of interesting groups on flicker (among other this and this). I prefer Googles PicasaWeb for my own pictures, but fickers groups are cool if you are looking for a specific style of pictures (let me know when someone digs this feature out of picasa).
So here is one I quite like:
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| From Night view |
Anyway, I decided to try to spiff some of the pictures up, by converting them to blank and white. It tuns out that the default B&W magic in iPhoto was a bit disappointing, so I decided to try and give photoshop a spin.
Not being an expert in photoshop, googleing for tricks, made things all the more frustrating, since creating black & white versions of ones photos in photoshop seems to be a jungle.
Long story short, I found this place where the author, provides handy cheatsheet for trying out the best way of converting the photo at hand.
So here are the versions I prefer:
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Now if you read the comments on the page I linked to there are several alternatives listed, so this is by no means the end of the story. Hmm..
I just got this nice tip from a friend of mine, about adding effects to photos. So I decided to try it out.
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| From Fun with new Camera |
The effect which showed me is called the lomo look. And luckely for me he knew of a nice guide at the Digital Photography School. So here is the end result, personally i think its pretty ok for a first try.
I recently started attending a PhD course in category theory, given by Uli Fahrenberg and Rene R. Hansen at our department at AAU. 
Although the two lecturers does an execellent job, I can’t help to relate my initial feeling to the picture above.
To all of you, who did and didn’t remember, I hope you had a nice “talk like a pirate day“ 
This summer I attended ICALP 2009 and the QUANTLOG workshop, which was located on the Greek island Rhodes. The conference and workshop was as expected extremely interesting, but that’s not the topic of this post. During my stay there I was fortunatly enough to find time to go diving. I was lucky to run into a local travel agency which recomended Trident Diving School. Although the dives I joined them on was not very technical, it was very enjoyable. This was to no small extend due to the fact that a danish divemaster was temporarily working there. Here is a few pictures:
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| From Diving Rhodos |
A physician, a civil engineer, and a computer scientist were arguing about what was the oldest profession in the world. The physician remarked, “Well, in the Bible, it says that God created Eve from a rib taken out of Adam. This clearly required surgery, and so I can rightly claim that mine is the oldest profession in the world.” The civil engineer interrupted, and said, “But even earlier in the book of Genesis, it states that God created the order of the heavens and the earth from out of the chaos. This was the first and certainly the most spectacular application of civil engineering. Therefore, fair doctor, you are wrong : mine is the oldest profession in the world.” The computer scientist leaned back in her chair, smiled, and then said confidently, “Ah, but who do you think created the chaos ?”
– Unfortunately, I don’t know the name of the author, but I cannot take credit for this joke either.
Recently I decided to put my old, otherwise unused, workstation to good use, by reinventing it as a mediacenter. The idea would be to install some sort of Linux on the old hardware, before going out buying something new (just to see if it would be worth it). This is however, where trouble began. Not only am I getting old an lazy – especially since my move to OS X, where everything just seems to magically work – but it turns out that mixing Xorg and HDTVs isn’t really something you would want to do in anything else but theory.
Moreover, it turns out that (almost) no references to my Samsung LE-32N71B HDTV (720p) exist on Google, and therefor it must not exist – but I quite like watching it anyway.
Even less information is available on how to make it work properly in Linux. Having spent quite some time in the jungle of Nvidias proprietary drivers and compilation of kernel modules, I entered the real hell of Modelines and over/under scan which comes with the “non-standard” resolutions which is HDTV.
After a lot of reading, configuring, reconfiguring and some more reading, I finally ended up with a working modeline for my Samsung LE32N71B tv – that is, it works for me. It seems that Modelines are just as personal as ones underwear, but this one fits my configuration:
Modeline "1360x768" 84.750 1360 1448 1565 1776 768 771 776 798 -hsync +vsync
Feel free to use it. It works fine with my old GeForce FX 5700LE and Kubuntu.
also i added the following, to the same “Monitor” section of my xorg.conf
HorizSync 29.0 - 75.0
VertRefresh 0.0 - 61.0
