Declan's Blog

I wanted to show some support to the NO on Proposition 8 movement in California, and I couldn’t find any nice icons/avatar to change my picture to on Twitter. So I played around in Photoshop and made this one:

Gabe wanted something stronger:

Please feel free to use them.

Another place that Maureen suggested I visit on my down day was Watkins Glen. There is a large gorge carved out that’s full of waterfalls. I got there fairly close to sunset, so I was moving as fast as I could, but I did bring the tripod to get some nice shots:

I need to tone the sky down on that one. I’m reading a book about image editing and this will be one of the ones I’ll pour some work into.

This one is a little contrived, but hey, it gets the path, some fall colors, and water:

The word “gloaming” kept coming into my head:

I didn’t know how much of the sky I wanted, so I tried leaving it out. Kinda works:

I was able to get behind one of the falls and shoot with a flash to get the droplets:

While attending the Access 2008 conference in Hamilton, ON Canada, I got to visit the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum. It was a social event where we could mingle, look at planes, and play video games on large screen projectors. There were some very neat planes:

Great colors:

And library geeks playing games:

I had an extra day in Central NY, so Maureen suggested I visit the Corning Museum of Glass in nearby Corning, NY. I packed up the camera and headed over. It’s a very neat space, a working art glass plant with an informative museum grafted on to the front. I love watching glassblowing, so this was a great stop for me. Here are some of my favorite shots:

It was such a neat collection of historical and modern works, and people actually making things. I’m so glad I went!

After attending Access 2008 in Hamilton, ON this year, I drove down to Erin, NY to visit with my old college buddy, Maureen and her daughter Ruby:

They have a neat house in the woods:

Which let me grab some Fall color:

We hadn’t seen each other in 12 years, but we talked like we’d seen each other yesterday. Thanks for a great visit, Maureen!

So, I decided to jailbreak the glassbroken iphone:

I used Pwnage following these instructions and it all worked well.

One app I really wanted to try out was Cycorder because it allows you to make videos with the iPhone camera. I used the Cydia installer that comes with Pwnage to install Cycorder. Running the app is simple, just remember to hold the iPhone sideways so the video isn’t sideways like I did here:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q282oUWz_FI[/youtube]

Next, I wanted to grab the video and put it on my web site at home. I installed OpenSSH from Cydia or the InstallerApp (not sure which, but they both come with Pwnage), then sftp’d the files over to my home server from the iPhone’s hard drive at /var/mobile/Media/Videos. Remember that OpenSSH’s default login is “root” and the password is “alpine”. (I highly suggest changing the password using the iPhone terminal application.) That directory has .mov files that copy over and play just fine on Windows or the Mac.

Next, I wanted to put the movies up in YouTube because my home server is so slow. It was as simple as uploading anything to YouTube, but the audio was bad. Every few seconds there was a loud hissing noise. So, I used iSquint to convert the .mov files to .mp4 files, uploaded the .mp4 files to YouTube, and that cleared up the audio noise.

Too bad it doesn’t make the quality of the video content any better: 😉

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aVwkY1Q-weM[/youtube]

Just to make mjgiarlo feel worse about missing Access!

They always try to get ya with the coffee break cookies.

I’m at another conference with too much free food.