Page Icon (PixelArt)

I've just drawn a blog icon with Pixen. Finally, pixelart has a place in my blog.
Continue reading...

Get 'Em Analyzed

Recently, Google's just introduced a new web-based tool called Analytics. What does it do? It collects statistic data about your web site and that statistic tells you things like how many hits your site's got, how many distinct visitors, where they are from, how they get to your site? what operator systems they're working on, what web browsers they use, what connection speeds they have, what their screen resolutions are, and many many more. What do you get out of this information anyways? Well, from that information you can design your site accordingly. For example, it helps you to decide on the width of your web pages by reading collected information on screen resolution. If the majority of the visitors use 1024x640 resolution, then design your site best for that resolution. To conclude, it is a great tool and again it is FREE.
Continue reading...

Flash Ruby Programming Book

I'm really amazed by the writing style of the author. Check it out. It's great and it's FREEEE.
Continue reading...

Recent Flickr Photos with Javascript

I've just written a javascript code to extract my recent photos' thumbnails from flickr. You can see the demo on the sidebar of this blog. Yeah finally I made it :) You're welcome to download the code to use/modify. To get it working in your blog, replace YOUR-KEY in the first line of code with your Google API key, url in Feed with with your flickr feed, and create a new html/javascript widget with the code. That's set!
Continue reading...

I'm The Biggest Procrastinator But ...

I'm addressing my procrastination and trying to manage it. I've been quite productive in terms of my thesis in the last few days. I knew I needed some help on doing this and found an article on how to stop procrastinating. If you realize that you always leave your important work that needs to get done behind and do other things instead, that article is for you.
Continue reading...

Download/Save Unsavable Flickr Photos

Has it ever happened to you when you tried to save a flickr photo but you ended up saving another blank image file called "spaceball.gif" instead? I don't exactly know what flickr is trying to do. Preventing people from downloading those photos? Maybe. What flickr does is it uses another transparent image to overlay the main image to block users from downloading the actual image. Is there a way to get around it? Yeah of course. It's no wonder that if you can download youtube videos, you must be able to save protected flickr photos somehow. There are a few ways you can do this. One approach is to screenshot and then use image editing application to crop the part that you want but believe me it's such a pain in the arse. Another one is to actually read the code and extract the real image url and the paste it to browser address bar but i'm sure you don't wanna do this. Ok enough of all that hassle. I've written a few lines of javascript code that can be plugged into Greasemokey to display an actual link to the image. The code is written as follows:


// ==UserScript==
// @name SaveFlickrImg
// @namespace http://phalkunz.blogspot.com
// @description Displays a download link for an unsavable flickr photo
// @include http://www.flickr.*/*
//
// ==/UserScript==

var imgsrc;
var img;
var imgParent;
var flag = false;

var imgs = document.images;
for (var i=0; i<imgs.length; i++) {
var src = imgs[i].getAttribute("class");
if (src=="reflect"){
img = imgs[i];
imgParent = img.parentNode;
imgsrc=imgs[i].getAttribute("src");
flag = true;
}
}

if (flag) {
var my_banner = document.createElement("div");
my_banner.innerHTML = '<div style="border-bottom: 1px solid #333333; margin-bottom: 10px; font-size: small; background-color: #336699; color: #FFFFFF;>' +
'<p style="margin:0px;padding: 5px;">' +
' <a href="' + imgsrc + '" style="color:#FFFFFF; font-weight:bold; font-size:10px;">main image link</a>' +
'</p></div>';
imgParent.appendChild(my_banner);
}



Save that code as, for example, saveFlickrPhoto.user.js and install that file in greasemonkey. That's it. Go to that flickr photo that you couldn't download but this time it will show a link under the photo. That's it. I'm sure you know how to do it from there.
Continue reading...

Reverse Lens = Macro

I've been thinking of buying canon 100mm macro lens. This morning I was reading reviews and also looking at some sample photos taken by that lens on flick and then I found one guy's comment on one photo. He mentioned about reverse lens and a link to a reverse lens flickr photo groups. By the name of the technique I had an idea of doing it already so I started by detaching one lens of mine from my camera and held it the other way around to the camera and it worked. Thanks to those people out there and flickr as well. However, it is no substitute for lenses which are designed for macro photography because you have no control over focal length and aperture of the lens and the depth of field is too shallow (I tried with 18mm, 28mm and 70mm). At least it is something to experiment and play with and it can be used when you can't afford a macro lens. The above photo is a photo taken by my 50mm 1.8f (and here is another photo of the same subject taken from different perspective).
Continue reading...

The Light of Knowledge

I shot this photo like a month ago. Don't get it wrong it's NOT photoshoped. I did this by projecting my table lamp light through a camera lens onto a book. The picture of the light bulb is then printed onto the book. I'm quite proud that I discovered this by myself. This concept has been used for overhead projector but I only realized this after shooting that photo.
Continue reading...

Pixel Art

Some of you might know that apart from photography, graphic stuff is also my interest. Lately, I started to get interested in another form of graphic art. I've seen it many times on the web and magazines recently. It's not something new though, you saw this kinda graphic in old video games like Super Mario. I didn't know what it was called and was wondering what the heck people would call it until a few days back while looking through a graphic design magazine and I saw it again and so I scanned through the text and then I found out that it's called pixel art. This evening I was googling to see some pixel art works and I came across this website. The author of this site recommends a tool called GraphicGale for creating pixel graphics so I decided to download the program and gave it a try and after like an hour I had a picture (my canon camera) as below.
What is pixel art anyways? Literally, you create it by drawing pixel by pixel. As Mark (the author of the site above) says it is time consuming and often difficult. Well, I think that's what most arts are anyways. They requires a lot of patience and effort.

10 times zoom of the picture above

Related links:
- Isometric pixel art tutorial: http://rhysd.syntesis.org/tutorial/index.php
- Wax icon museum: http://www9.ocn.ne.jp/~iconwax/
- Flickr's pixel artist group: http://www.flickr.com/groups/the_pixel_artists/

Continue reading...

Rolleicord III type 2

I was thinking of buying Nikon FM2 a week ago. Why? I just thought I would own a durable film camera that I can use for my whole life and while digital cameras are much more convenient than film ones, the quality of film still cannot be replaced by digital yet. This morning I was suddenly reminded that there's a shop selling old cameras and stuff close to my place. So I decided to drop by and have a look whether they have the one I wanted. I went into the shop and I was so amazed by the old cameras, so many actually, some work and some do not. It turned out that they didn't have FM2 but then I got attracted to another one. It's Rolleicord, a medium-format twin lens reflex camera made in Germany. In the end, I decided to buy it with a roll of film. I haven't had time to test it out yet. I tested the aperture and exposure speed and they seem to work fine. Even if it doesn't work, I can still keep it. I know it's gonna be hard to use because it doesn't have exposure check so I'm thinking of using exposure meter of my digital camera hehe. I don't know which model of Rolleicord is it but according to this page, it's model III type 2 and the manufacture date is between 1952-1953. So it's much older than me. It's classic man ;) It's not a brand new one, so I didn't expect that it would include the case and manual but it does. Cool huh?
Continue reading...

Why can't you understand?

Have you ever asked yourself or other people why can't (s)he can't understand this or that? If so, you should read this article.
Continue reading...

Loofa

Scrub scrub scrub... hehehe
Continue reading...

Where Fishes Live

This was also taken on the goat island trip day. If you tilt your head down to the water, you can see blue maomaos swimming around but due to the low visibility of water I couldn't take any photos of them. I tried but it didn't work.
Continue reading...

Freeze

Continue reading...

Play At The Beach

The beach area near Goat Island where you would have to take the Glass bottom boat from.

Best viewed large.

Continue reading...