Avoiding Disaster

Some people close to me know that I was somewhat annoyed with Blogger while creating my recent post on HDR photography at Algonquin.  It seemed unnecessarily difficult to position the pics within the tiny blog frame, which I mostly circumvented by editing the HTML directly, which worked out but not as well as I would have liked.  After very briefly looking through the various post settings on the site, I decided that the non-flexible frame width was to blame, because the pics were taking up almost the entire column.

My initial solution was to move the whole thing to Wordpress, and try the post over again more or less from scratch.  I did try that, but ran into the same problem of the pics being too big, the text not going where I want and the frame being too narrow.

This left me with two options: either to continue blogging sporadically on Blogger, or to leave the site behind and continue into the Wordpress world.  Given that I was going to encounter the same difficulties with image posting on either site, it was a matter of figuring out which site's other features I like better.  Although I certainly can't cover a comprehensive review of both sides in the small time that I have (limited by my attention span, honestly), I did come up with three things that made my decision a rather easy one.

The first is familiarity.  Of course, I'm far more familiar with Blogger than with Wordpress, having just opened my Wordpress account.  On Blogger, I know where things are and how to get done what I want to get done, or at least as much as possible.

Second, although I didn't explore very much what features and add-ons are available over at Wordpress, I did spend a fair bit of time way back when (three months ago?) figuring out what was available here at Blogger, and I like the arrangement that I have.  I also have more or less of an action plan for customizing the site with my own colours and graphics at some point, whenever I finally get around to it.

Third, and most important for me, is followers.  Yes, I currently have three followers, all good friends of mine in the offline world, so this is sort of a moot point.  Except that I also follow their blogs, and they all blog with Blogger.  All of this would have been no problem, except that after some invested searching, I could not find the section of the Wordpress dashboard that would let me follow blogs from any site that wasn't a Wordpress site!  To me, that's just stupid.  With Blogger I can follow any website with a feed.

The decision was mostly made up at this point, but two more things happened that definitely cemented my decision.  One, my long-time good friend who has been embarking on the early stages of a literary career finally got around to starting his own blog, which even he admits everyone was advising him to do.  Since I'm obviously going to support his endeavour into the blogosphere (is that still a thing?) I am going to both follow and promote his blog, Speculation and Skepticism, as much as possible.  Since it appears Wordpress won't allow me to follow his blog, I'm sticking with Blogger.

The other random thing that happened just a few minutes ago is I realized that I can edit the HTML of the blog template and just make the post display column wider.  Which solved the initial problem which was causing me to consider Wordpress in the first place.  I'm sort of embarassed that I didn't think of that a week ago.

w00t

High Definition Algonquin

Tay & I are back from our first (together) camping adventure! For most of last week we were on a whirlwind, poorly planned and much needed vacation from the city in Algonquin Provincial Park, about 3 hours north of Toronto. This was a great opportunity for me to try out the HDR capabilities of my 7-year-old Pentax Optio 330GS digital camera (3.2 megapixels!) with the new tripod I picked up at Factory Direct for about five bucks.

For those not familiar with high-dynamic-range (HDR) photography, have a look at this Wikipedia article. Basically, HDR overcomes the optical limitations of conventional imaging by taking several (three or more) images of a scene at different exposure levels, combining the images with software, and ending up with a compiled image more closely resembling what is seen by the human eye. The article has an interesting discussion on the methods that can be used to achieve this and the science behind how the eye sees an image, so I won't try to explain it here.

For me, and for most, this means I can record both the bright and dark areas of a scene reliably. My end result conveys the details of the scene, within the limited dynamic range of the media (your monitor) with a tradeoff in contrast. Following are some examples from our Algonquin trip.

This is a picture of an abandoned bridge constructed by the 19th-century logging town of Mowat, at the north end of Canoe Lake. The camera is incapable of recording different exposures for different parts of this image, so it automatically calculates the proper exposure to record the center of the frame (the bridge and trees) and takes an image, which results in the sky and most of the reflection in the water being overexposed. By taking two more images, one with a darker exposure to record the sky, and one with a brighter exposure to reveal the details in the dark reflections, the entire scene can be recreated.

In the resulting image, the details of the sky, the trees and the bridge are all clearly visible. This image represents the scene in a way that is much closer to what I actually saw from the canoe at that time, by combining the darker sky with the lighter forest.

One issue that can happen, which I just noticed is apparent in the bridge in this HDR photo, is that small variations between the frames result in ghosting in the final image. In this photo, since the canoe was moving slowly through the water and my 7-year-old camera can only take 1 picture about every 2 seconds, each of the three frames is taken from a slightly different angle, and the bridge is not in exactly the same spot in each one. Take a look at the photo full-size and you'll see what I mean.

From the bridge we canoed north along Potter's Creek, a peaceful trip but mostly not good for photography. We stopped here at a portage for lunch and to get out of the canoe for a bit. For the same reason as the bridge picture above, this scene would be difficult to render with a single photo because of the different exposures between the sky, the forest and the creek. This HDR rendering captures all three. Plus I think it looks pretty. Since the wind was mostly calm and the camera was on a tripod, I've avoided the ghosting effect apparent in the bridge picture. The clouds were moving pretty fast but only one of the images really catches the detail in that part of the frame. I plan to blow this up to 5x7 or so and get it printed, although I don't know exactly where it will fit in our apartment yet.

Although I have many more photos from the trip, I'm having issues trying to arrange them on the blog. At some point I guess I should open a Flickr account (so I'm told) and maybe this will be the motivation to do it. Anyway that's it for now. Get out there and take more photos!

Another PVR update!

Well it's been a little over two months since I posted anything, so why not another update on the status of all my computers? That seems like a good way to step back into blogging.

About three months ago, I blogged as I was working on setting up all my various computers in my new apartment. In particular I was working on reconfiguring my MythPVR box, which has become our main source of digital entertainment. Everything was more or less working with OpenSUSE 11.1 with KDE, except for a few console workarounds (like having to watch DVD's with vlc, and buying a new sound card for 5.1 sound support). We could watch and record many digital signals in the Toronto and Buffalo regions. We were free from our slavery to our programming schedule masters!

But I got tired of having to adapt solutions to fit the OpenSUSE OS any time there was a problem. The internet has a wealth of information for Ubuntu mythtv installations, and although OpenSUSE support is out there, Ubuntu seems to be the distro of choice for this particular application. So this past weekend, I started into a fresh install.

Right off the bat, I can say Ubuntu 9.04 boots faster than my old install. I had the same issues with my wireless card not having native firmware, my Nvidia graphics card not having a native driver, and my Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-950Q analog/digital tuner not having native support from the OS. A driver is provided for the tuner (au0828), but in my case it wouldn't tune any channels, and has no support for the analog tuner.

After a few internet searches, I settled on the video4linux v4l-dvb drivers, which provide support for both the digital and analog tuners. An initial scan of the analog band yielded a few weak results (as expected), and the digital scan picked up all the channels I had on the OpenSUSE install, plus a few I'd never seen before! I was excited to try it out, and ignored my houseguests to try out watching tv.

No go. The tuner wouldn't start.

The console revealed that the driver was trying to load a different version of the firmware for the tuner. I downloaded it and tried again.

No go. Mythtv wouldn't write to the recordings directory. Easy fix - I changed the permissions on the recordings directory to allow the mythtv group write access. (Mythtv runs as user mythtv, which is a member of the mythtv group.)

Again, no go. Although I wasn't able to determine what the problem really was, there were a few error messages related to the video codec of the analog stream on the console. I left it and went out with my friends, and came back to the problem last night. As a workaround, I disabled the analog tuner - I'm only really interested in watching digital TV anyway. And then ...

Success! The tuner started and the on-screen display indicated it was trying to tune channel 9-1, which is the local CTV affiliate. It wouldn't lock (not unusual on this channel) but a quick skip down to channel 5-1 brought up CBC's beautiful 1080i feed of the Rick Mercer Report! It was skipping, which can be due to a weak or intermittent signal (common in our treed area) but it looked to me more like the skipping associated with a misconfigured video driver unable to keep up with the feed. And with a 1080i feed, which requires somewhat more processing power than the usual 720p feeds in this area, that seemed more likely to me.

As a test, I worked on installing XvMC drivers for my video card, which supposedly allows the video card to offload some processing onto the main processor (as I understand it). I haven't had a chance to test out this configuration, since Tay woke up from her nap and I didn't want to subject her to me fiddling with minor settings in the OS. So we watched some converted-to-divx recordings of The Big Bang Theory for a while until we both fell asleep. Sheldon's Doppler effect costume is still one of our favourites :)

We'll see how some late-night recordings look this evening, if the weather prevents us from going outside!

Here are the local broadcasted digital channels we're able to watch with a very poorly designed antenna, near the lake, near ground level and surrounded by low buildings and high trees:

• 2-1 WGRZ (NBC Buffalo), 2-2 NBC Sports, 2-3 Retro TV Network
• 4-1 WIVB (CBS Buffalo)
• 5-1 CBLT (CBC Toronto)
• 7-1 WKBW (ABC Buffalo)
• 9-1 CFTO (CTV Toronto)
• 17-1 WNED (PBS Buffalo), 17-2 (WNED-SD), 17-3 PBS ThinkBright
  
• 23-1 WNLO (The CW Buffalo)
• 24-1 CBLFT (Radio-Canada)
• 26-1 WNYB (TCT Jamestown)
  
• 29-1 WUTV (FOX Buffalo), 29-2 (WUTV-SD)
• 41-1 CIII (Global Toronto)
• 44-1 CJMT (OMNI2)
• 49-1 WNYO (My TV Buffalo), 49-2 (WNYO-SD)
• 57-1 CITY (City TV Toronto)
• 64-1 CFMT (OMNI1)
• 66-1 CKXT (Sun TV)

Strangely, I seem to pick up the US stations much more reliably than the Toronto ones. I credit Lake Ontario, but I'm sure it would help if I could rotate my antenna. Eventually I will get around to building a better one.