Wellingtonians have ingenious ideas when it comes to coffee, serving it, and finding cool locations for a cafe. This coffee shop “Flight Coffee” in an old fire truck is the latest addition to the coffee shop scene in New Zealand’s capital.

Coffee from a fire truck

The New Zealand Open Source Awards Ceremony took place in Wellington on November 9, 2010. It was an evening celebrating open source and the people involved in the community or if you look at each project individually, communities.

The evening was filled with laughter for the introductions to the various awards were often witty, great conversation, food and drink. People who had not known each other before learned about each other’s involvement in open source and expanded their horizon about where open source can be seen in action and who is involved in it.

I particularly liked that the awards were not only about open source software, but also about the people involved in its development, promotion, and use. That shows that open source is more than the software, but that it needs the community involvement and enthusiastic users to bring it along further, to make others aware of it and to help it grow.

As one of the three photographers for the night, I took a whole bunch of photos – 763 to be exact of which I 222 survived as rated 2+. As we had not asked people’s permission to take their photo, I only published the close-ups of the people on stage online which is 50 photos.

If you want to watch the recorded introductions to the categories and the acceptance speeches, head over to YouTube or watch the playlist below.

Wow! Somebody must have started to look at every photo of mine. The stats have gone through the roof. Or is it a glitch in flickr? I hope not. Suddenly, I am over 50,000 views altogether. Hadn’t thought to reach that number so quickly.

My stats are through the roof

Update: The final count of views on my photos and videos for October 15, 2010: 1,492 plus 16 views of the photostream comes to a grand total of 1,514 views.

Some weeks ago I decided to purchase Aperture 3 after a long time of non-decision due to bad reviews of Aperture crashing, eating photos and databases etc. Lucky for me, I had no problems importing my Aperture 2 database and photos and everything went smoothly.

I updated to Aperture 3 not necessarily to be up-to-date with the latest software, but to take advantage of some of its features. The ones very high on my list were:

• geotagging
• face recognition
• Flickr uploader

Geotagging

Up until this update, I have hardly ever geotagged my photos as the process was a bit cumbersome with an external software. It did work well, but was just not easy for the workflow. Now with “Places”, a browser view in Aperture that shows where your photos are on a map, geotagging became easy as pie. Of course, having the GPS coordinates committed to the metadata immediately upon taking the photograph would be even better, but I do not have that luxury. Thus, I go for the second best option: tagging manually.

Places works very well and you can easily see which photos you have already geotagged as they have a little red pin in the Places view.

Aperture 3: Places mode

Face recognition

At first I thought I would be finished with tagging the faces in my pictures very quickly as I hardly ever take photos with people in them (how wrong could I be?). Once I fired up the Faces browser mode, Aperture told me that it found over 10,000 (!) faces in my photos. First, I thought: Yeah, right. But then, when I saw some of the faces, it dawned on me that I indeed had a lot of photos with people in them. I just did not upload them onto Flickr. As I tend to document events like special seminars or conferences that we had organized, by default, these pictures featured mostly people.

So it took me a long while to sift through all my faces and label those that I wanted to have in my Faces browser and reject all others. As I rejected the majority of faces, Aperture was not so good in “learning faces”, but that was fine by me.

Faces is actually nothing more than a special tag for a photo with the name of the person’s face. I could have achieved something similar by tagging the photo with the name in the keyword field. However, then the name would show up as regular tag everywhere. In photos with a number of people in them, I would still not know who was who. The Faces tagging resolves that problem. In addition, I can quickly see how many photos I have of a certain person, and I only see their face in a close-up and not the entire photo. This is especially great for photos of small children. You can see their development in seconds by flipping through these close-ups.

Flickr uploader

I had hoped that the Flickr uploader that was incorporated would be FlickrExport 3 for Aperture or something similar. However, I got disappointed. The Flickr uploader merely takes photos that you have selected and creates a new album on Flickr for them. That is nice for people who start out with Flickr after purchasing Aperture, but not for all others who already have Flickr albums. The Flickr option in Aperture does not allow you to view your already existing Flickr albums and add photos to them. I learned that the hard way as I tried to upload a photo to one of my albums and another one with the same name was created in Aperture AND Flickr. In the heat of the moment, I moved the image to the already existing album and deleted the newly created one on Flickr. But alas, the album still existed in Aperture. And I can’t delete the album there. That is the only time when Aperture actually freezes me out.

Aperture still needs to do quite a bit of work on this Flickr uploader. Meanwhile, I use FlickrExport which works like a charm and does not give me headaches.

I haven’t set foot on my blog for a long time, but enjoyed the summer on the Hawaiian island of Moloka’i. Although I have been back for three weeks already, the summer feeling is not entirely gone yet. It’s rather quiet on campus because many others are on vacation now, and Luxembourg in general is on congé collectif (annual holiday).

Soon (September 14, 2009), however, a new semester will start in which I will give 17 workshops on Mahara to our students and teachers until mid-October. Furthermore, on the ed tech front, EC&I 831 with Alec Couros and CCK09 with George Siemens and Stephen Downes will start on September 8, 2009, and September 14, 2009, respectively. I am looking forward to these two courses, the discussions, and especially the synchronous sessions though I won’t be able to participate in all of them. Better to gather all my energy for this hot fall.

Until then I keep dreaming of paradise.

[flickr-gallery mode="photoset" photoset="72157621911616026"]

Now I know for sure that the apps that are suggested in the iTunes app store are country-specific or how else could I explain the #1 app being www.wort.lu? Too bad that I don’t see a general Top Ten list.

Country-specific recommendations for June 14, 2009

Today is May 1, Labor Day in Europe, and thus a holiday. I used it to see if I could get my WordPress MU installation running and actually create blogs which did not work earlier during the week. I had run into trouble when I used sub-domains, but the sub-directories work fine.

The reason behind the upgrade to WP MU was that I wanted to create a second blog on my server to showcase my daily photograph. Of course, I could always link to my flickr photo set, but I prefered to use a blog. Well, that was not a novel in itself, as others had already done so before me, e.g. D’Arcy Norman and also Alan Levine as I realized very recently. From them I got the idea to use the Monotone theme, which displays the photos with an individual background that matches the dominant color in the photographs. Way cool.

After having solved my blog creation problem and having moved my regular blog (this one here) over to my MU installation, I started to tackle my photo blog. As Alan Levine describes nicely in his post “(Almost) Effortless Photo Blog”, I wanted to connect my blog with flickr as well to be able to post immediately to my photo blog from there. I had no such luck until I found out that I had to activate the XML-RPC publishing protocol in my blog settings under “Writing”. Once the checkmark was placed, I could link my blog to my flickr account.

Now I had the monumental task to add all pictures to the blog. That took about four hours for 119 photos (I had missed to take a photo one day) because my internet connection was uncooperative today and everything was rather slow. However, now that I am done, I really like the result, and I also found the “Page Links To” plugin to allow a tab in the blog menu to open my photo blog immediately.

Update: I changed the archive page to display 31 photos instead of only 24. That is particularly nice when the archive of an entire month is displayed.

Today is April 10 which means that the year 2009 is 100 days old. Today also signifies the 100th photo that I took for each day being inspired by the flickr group 2009/365. I had heard about its predecessor 2008/366 from D’Arcy Norman, Alan Levine and Alec Couros. As I did not find out about this photo project until well into 2008, I did not start last year.

This year I wanted to see if I can accomplish to take and post a picture every day. Thus far, it worked out, but I still have 265 days to go. However, now that I have finished 100, I may post to the photo pool…

There are many “a photo a day” groups on flickr and some have more or less strict themes. I liked the openness of this group as it gives me the freedom to decide on the subjects.

This is a slideshow of my first 100 photos for 2009. I did take more since January and also posted a number of them, but there is only one for each day.

Sarah Perez’ post over at ReadWriteWeb entitled “Technology is Great, but Are We Forgetting to Live?” resonates with me. I don’t like to view everything through a camera lens and thus do not record everything that I see. Seeing fathers film every move of their families on vacation from the moment they wake up until they go to bed always puzzles me and I never want to do that.

If I want to record something, it is done with a still camera to capture that very moment. That is more like a cue for later to recall the event. If I looked at a video, I would not have to think so much myself but have everything played out before my eyes.

When I am behind a video camera lens, which happens primarily only when I record public lectures that are organized by our study programs at the university, I realize that I see the events differently. I cannot not look at the display to follow the lecturer or the participants. Of course, then my field of vision is limited and my attention is not so much focused on what is actually said, but thoughts of “is this shot positioned nicely”, “count till 4 until you pan again”, “don’t zoom in too jaggedly”, “oops, I should have started to move earlier”, “should I switch the light settings now or wait until later”, “will there be a good moment for switching camera tapes”, “great; I’m in the right position to tape the presentation” etc. shoot through my head. Thus, I miss a great many discussion points and can only console myself with the fact that I can watch the recording later on.

Using a still camera is easier for me. I can take it out fast and put it away as quickly. With a video camera, I feel I have to stay “on” longer to capture the conversation / what happens. My still camera gives me more freedom in deciding when, what, and for how long to record something. I carry a camera with me at all times (you gotta love these tiny digital cameras), but I do not take it out to snap away at everything. Sarah Perez put it nicely:

The fine line between what’s worth documenting and what’s not is a hard one to define. We immediately assume that the most important, the biggest, the most incredible moments are those that should be recorded. But it’s these very moments that are best to experience live, with our full focus.

And I surely did not record some of the best moments in my life, but these are the moments that do not require a visual or audiovisual cue to recall.

On November 3, 2008, the 3 billionth picture was uploaded to flickr generating 16,762 views for the photo until now. Had I not subscribed to Bryan Alexander’s blog this memorable moment would have passed unnoticed for me. Now I can pause for a second and contemplate a little bit.

• If every person on earth had uploaded a picture to flickr, almost 45% of the population would have already done so. According to the CIA World Factbook there are 6,706,993,152 people (estimate of July 2008).
• My flickr statistics show that I uploaded 373 photos. That is just 0.00001% of 3 billion.
• However, my pictures have already been viewed 3,614 times as of now (excluding my views). That is much more exposure than they would have ever gotten in my paper photo albums.
• One photo even made it into an online article.
• How many flickr photos do not have the traditional copyright? Most of the pictures I post have a Creative Commons license and can be used freely.

I have many more pictures still sitting on a hard drive waiting to be uploaded, and then there are all those that are not yet digitized… Thus, I will continue to contribute photos to flickr.

almost the 3 billionth photo