Crooked Shack » Photography

Slicing Gauge

Joe — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 04:32:33 +0000

My first attempt at making my own tool was inspired by the Q&A section of Fine Woodworking #189. It was relatively easy but took some time to get the right fit between the head and the sliding bar. Since I am left handed I made it for me so it will probably appear backwards to most of you “rightys”. Here are the pictures.

Photostack or Zenphoto?

Joe — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 13:06:37 +0000

I have been using photostack for my photos section and it has served me well up to a certain point. There have been a couple of things that have annoyed me about it but they were small enough that I let it go since the rest of it worked really well.
The version that I have been using is 2.17b which was released just about a year ago. Noel has finally released the next beta of photostack and I have been playing with it on another site. There are many great improvments but one that really stands out for me is on the user end. If a gallery has a large number of photos and therefore many pages of photos, when a user is pageing through the thumbnails and wants to see the larger view, they click on the thumbnail. Once they have viewed the photo if they would like to go back to the previous page of thumbnails they can now. In version 2.18b or less, if you click the “up a level” link to go back to the thumbnail view you will be taken back to the first page of thumbnails. That is most annoying.
I am really enjoying the new look and layout of the admin section. It uses AJAX for a lot of the editing and is really pretty slick. I do have one issue with the gallery creation section. The gallery folders are created using the script of course but as a result the owner of the gallery folders is apache. That is probably not an issue for anyone using apache without SAFE_MODE turned on, but my host uses SAFE_MODE. Because the gallery folders are owned by apache you cannot write to them i.e. upload photos. I don’t know if there is any way to fix this but I have my fingers crossed.
I have been looking into a couple of other products and one that I have found that is really enticing is Zenphoto. There is a bonus on this one in that it is also set up as a blog. While I like this feature I don’t know if this would draw more comment spam.
A couple of others that are interesting are Simple PHP Gallery and Plogger.
Whatever software I end up using it will take a little work because I will have to set up some kind of redirect in my main .htaccess file to redirect all of the links to photo-posts that are currently out there.

More Photos

Joe — Tue, 23 Aug 2005 03:13:36 +0000

Here are the photos that I promised. I have updated The House, The Baby, and The Building. Enjoy.

She found her thumb

Joe — Sun, 05 Jun 2005 15:00:41 +0000

Photostack 2.1

Joe — Thu, 10 Feb 2005 00:23:00 +0000

I set up the new and greatly improved photostack 2.1 for the photos section of this website. If you are looking for a photo organizing application for your website I highly recommend it. It is super easy to set up (if you have server access) and it is super easy to use.

The Cat

Joe — Sun, 24 Oct 2004 10:33:58 +0000

« Listening to: F For Fake (Groove Salad: a nicely chilled plate of ambient beats and grooves. [SomaFM]) – Beach Flea – (0:-1) »

The Snake

Joe — Wed, 08 Sep 2004 02:54:25 +0000

At work today we were admiring the clients blueberry bushes when I noticed this little guy staring back at us. We figured that since he was up in a blueberry bush he may have been waiting for a rodent of some sort, but it was also a cooler today so he may have been trying to sun himself as well. Either way when I first noticed him he was so still that I thought it was a rubber snake placed there to scare the birds away.

Where to begin…

Joe — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 08:37:21 +0000

Well it has been quite a while since my last post and it seems like a lot has happened, so I will start by mentioning that I am posting this using the w.bloggar 4.00 Beta1 tool that was released on 7/7 and it is awesome. I am able to post to multiple categories and it also has custom tags entry for those personal class or id tags such as the one that creates the drop-cap on this website. I only see one problem right now and that is when you publish a post, close the application, and then open it again it opens the last post from the saved local copy, even though it was already posted. The old w.bloggar would save you post locally until you published it then when you opened the application after the publish it would open with a new post. I haven’t used it too much yet but I think that I might be able to set that up in the options section.

Now for updates with me (not that anyone is really concerned or interested). My wife has been throwing up ever since we got back from our week and 2 day trip out west. This past Monday she was hooked up to an I-V for two hours because she had become so dehydrated. She has been better about drinking water but she is on moderate bedrest for a couple of weeks. Since she is in her 10th week and everyone says that it is usually only bad during the first tri-mestser, we are hoping this will pass in two or three weeks.

Also on Monday I received the telephoto (2.0x) and macro/wide angle (.45x) lenses that I ordered from ebay for my Canon Powershot A70. I have not had a lot of time to try them out yet but I did get a chance to use them that night at a show we played with The Race at Second Story that night. I will post some pictures from that later (they are on a different computer). The show went really well and it was so fun to see the boys from The Race again. Their new album “If You Can” is super good and I recommend all to run out and pick it up. You will be most happy I’m sure.

On Tuesday I attended the funeral of a co-worker who died from cancer. His wife appeared strong and together, and that may be because the two of them were able to talk about his passing several days before it occurred. He had been sick for about a year but everyone thought he was on the road to recovery and suddenly within a week he degraded.

The next day I ended up working extra hard on an application that I have been involved in for about 3 months now. I needed to get so much done that on Thursday I came into work at 12noon, went home for dinner around 7, and then came back at 10pm and stayed until 8:43am on Friday. I got most of what I needed done on Friday but I still needed to test the e-commerce credit card verification part but I will do that this weekend and Monday. I was so beat that I ended up sleeping the rest of the day away.

On Thursday I received my copies of the 37Signals, “Defensive Design for the Web” and Dan Cedarholm’s “Web Standards Solutions”. I have not had much time to get into the books but what I have been able to read they both are going to be great. The web standards book looks to be really great because it also discusses proper markup. This is something that the other books I’ve read don’t focus on.

The hardest thing I had to deal with this week also happened on Wednesday when I got a call from my Mom who filled me in on my fathers condition. She said that I should come home soon because he’s so bad that we don’t know how much time he has left. He was diagnosed with Parkinsons about 3 to 4 years ago but he was still able to get around some. For just about the last year though, he has been in a nursing home. About 3 weeks ago he was still able to talk and he was smiling but when I saw him today he couldn’t talk, he barely opened his eyes, and he was barely able to swallow his food. His quality of life appears to be completely gone. Seeing him made me think even harder about the decisions that we make and whether or not I want to continue my work in the world of IT. I never receive the fulfillment from creating yet another web application as I did when I worked as a carpenter and was involved in improving peoples homes. I also don’t do anything physical anymore and that has been really hard on me. I am not good with time and trying to add something else, like working out, to my day is just too hard. I still haven’t come to my conclusion but something will have to happen soon and definitely before the little one comes along. Well this was quite the pouring out of the soul and I apologize for any boredom that may have occurred during the reading of this post but I needed to get it out.

Beginning Photography tips

Joe — Fri, 04 Jun 2004 19:26:26 +0000

I stumbled across this article while reading Gurus v. Bloggers, Round 2. This is appropriate for me as I just purchased a a new camera not too long ago.
I was familiar with this information but, as with math, unless you use it often you will forget most of it.