christopher's lives (v5.3)

(originally posted on Flickr – but, i wanted it here, too…)

first i want to point out that this is on a 42" lcd hdtv in the living room and i use a wireless kb and mouse…

second, pretty much everything you see is Yahoo! Widgets, Rainmeter, ObjectDock, and Stickies… if you want your desktop like mine, just google those names…

on the left is our budget for the month using Stickies, but, if you look, it is a bit transparent and you will see it is actually the top sticky atop a few others, but this is the only open one – they roll up… (i hide windows desktop icons under my sticky notes…) you can see i have another little note in the middle of the screen, at the top…
beneath the budget are a couple icons of stuff i need to do – check out the PlayOn app, put Iron Man on my mom’s psp, etc…. it’s sorta’ my to-do stack… and the bottom left hand corner – that little blue thing – i can drag a file onto that and it will auto-magically upload it to the ’stuff’ directory on my website…

ok, at the bottom edge is ObjectDock – ya’ know, like the dock on a mac… it is hidden until i hover my mouse at the bottom of the screen and, as my mouse moves, the icons under it enlarge… in this pic, i clicked on ‘APPS’ and it opened the assortment of apps i keep handy… not pictured is the other ObjectDock, which i have set up as the system tray/task bar – it’s hidden on the left… i have used ObjectDock (paid version) for years and can’t live without it… it does many more tricks i won’t get into here…

ok, the news headlines are Rainmeter – which is like a widget engine, but not for the faint-of-heart – it is very complex to customize and you need to have some coding knowledge… as you see, i have rss feeds from home-barista for coffee geek discussions, playstation lifestyle for ps3/psp stuff and google for "real" news…

in the middle, since i love love love photography, a Yahoo Widget showing recent popular photos posted on DeviantArt on the left and another Yahoo Widget on the right with recent popular photos posted to Flickr… they are set to change every few minutes… i leave room since the photos come in all shapes and sizes… both have very impressive customization settings as far as what kind of content to show… for instance, the deviantart widget, of course, has tons more types of art than photography and the flickr widget can show your own stream, favorites, photos from groups and/or contacts, and you can even use it to upload to flickr…

at the top, pretty obvious, Yahoo Widgets for date/time, cpu usage, and upload/download speed…

which brings us to the right edge… i have been a webcam junkie for years and this is a Yahoo Widget called WebImages – several instances of it, of course… i have used several methods for desktop webcam monitoring and this one blows all the others away… the depth of options and customization can be intimidating at first and there is a bit of a learning curve, but it is SOOOO worth it… the radar is the local weather radar, of course… the rest are cams that update once a minute… i have each set up to sort of a theme and each contains more than one cam – when it updates, it switches to the next cam that one monitors… for instance, the top is local – alternating between a cam in cloudcroft and one in las cruces… the next down is home – albuquerque – four different cams and once a minute, it shows a different view… the next three are assorted cool/interesting places – cams in las vegas, italy, california, and others – all three contain a list of all my favorite cams around the world and, once a minute (or whatever i choose to set it to from once a second to once a day) it cycles to the next cam in its list… or, if one of them has something really interesting going on, i stop the cycling and set it to update in near-real-time and each one has a button when you mouse over it to enlarge it as big as you like… you can hit another button to save the current image, even…
but, now i’m gushing ;P
oh, and the very bottom one is NASATV – the widget can stream the video, but, i just have it set to show a still every 15 seconds…

anyway… that’s my desktop…

ok, firstly, the pics from february are up…
i did sort of a rush job, so, some should have been touched up, and i chose the wrong skin color scheme, so, it isn’t pretty, but, meh, at least they’re finally online…
anyway, no autostitch pics from feb (march has a few to look forward to, though), but, there are a few webcam shots… also, this set finally has some pics of “Truman“, my new computer, so, everyone can see what i’ve been describing…
enjoy…

ok, next, since i get a lot of comments/questions about it, i would like to publicly let everyone know that my webcam sucks (hey, it was $15, you get watcha pay for)… it freezes up quite a bit, so, yes, when you view my webcam image, it might not be live… the program that uploads the images does just fine, so, it will have a current timestamp, but, it doesn’t realize the cam has frozen, so, it just keeps uploading the last image the cam provided before it froze…
the way it usually works is that after a few hours, the cam just freezes… so, while i’m at work, or when i am out for the day, at some point or another, the cam stops giving new images, and i don’t fix it until i get home…
BUT FOR THAT MATTER, keep in mind that, when i have it off, i have it set to just leave up the last image it took… i like that better than something that says “cam currently offline”… but, you can tell by the timestamp when i’ve done that…
anyway, maybe i’ll buy a new cam soon… buuuuuuut, the cam software i use is a bit of a resource hog, so, sometimes i shut it down intentionally when i have several progs open at once… if anyone wants to recommend a lightweight cam app that has ftp, feel free to hit that comment link below and lemme’ know…

and speaking of new progs, i am now playing around with SCWebCam and am lovin’ it…
it does something a little different… it takes a snapshot of my monitors and uploads them… soooo, when you look at my sidebar over there, you will see a new image below the webcam thumb and that is a live shot of my computer monitors… click on it and i have a full page set up for it like my webcam page, with the chatterbox and everything… plus, the two pages are also now cross-linked to each other…
since i am running two monitors and am letting the image be at 80% of actual size, it is pretty large… it may be a problem for those on dial-up… but, i have it auto-refreshing once a minute, so, that will hopefully be enough time for it to download completely…
(oh, and, in case someone might point it out, yes, SCWebCam also provides webcam features, BUT, it doesn’t have a feature or two i love on ConquerCam, like the dynamic caption that i can change in seconds from a button in the system tray (it’s the blue text at the top of the webcam image)…)

anyway, that’s it for now… oh, except that i was graciously donated a scanner by manuel, so, perhaps i will start uploading scans of photos from the old days…
we’ll see…

ok then, it’s what, the eighteenth of february?

ah well…

couple new things again this month…
like last month, i have a folder of panoramic pics made with AutoStitch…
this month, there is a new folder called “WebCam” and it has a very few notable moments caught on my cam… this will continue from here on out, assuming there are things worth posting and i actually hit that little ‘archive’ button on my cam when those moments happen…
i have also done something that was much-needed and actually made thumbnails for the vids this time around…

i think that is all there is to tell, right this way to the January 2006 pics…

oh, btw, i am playing with the settings in JAlbum to figure out how complicated it would be to start posting my pics semi-live… see, it can generate an album and then, you can add more pics to it and it re-generates all the pages and such… then, i could just continually post pics throughout the month, rather than doing one huge batch every month… just not sure if that’s what i want to do or not…
we’ll see…

anyway, site news…

first, briefly, i’ve changed the way the photos directories display and you can now read the full descriptions of all the folders… that’s awesome, take my word for it… sooner or later all the people who have complained in the past will see it and will no longer complain…

secondly, since no one else is around to do it, i spend a lot of time cleaning up people’s computers, installing new software and such, and, on my usb swiss army knife i carry my “Christopher Pack” (if google and lifehacker can have one, so can i), so, this all inspired me to add a list of links to info about apps i cant live without… you’ll find said list on the sidebar, under Links, the list is called “Apps I Can’t Live Without”… now everyone can be as 1337 as me :P
ok, next, no, i never officially announced it in a post, but, yup, i gotta’ cheapy webcam here in my living room earlier this week… it’s on 24 hours a day, except when it’s not, refreshing every 10 seconds, unless i have it set for every 30 seconds :P :P :P
needless to say, there’s not much in the way of alwayses and nevers with it, but, it’s already been fun…
it sits atop my monitor (erm, the primary monitor, the one on the coffee table) and shows me and everything behind me… of course, it’s often too dark to see much… some day i may just point it out the window for the cool view… in the webcam folder of this month’s pics, you can see an example of the view i have in mind… for now, i’ve been having too much fun waving to people and putting little “hello!” messages on it… it has a quick access dynamic caption feature, plus i have it set up to show my foreground window as well as what’s playing on winamp… man, from decade-long recluse to webcammer…
anyway, over on the sidebar, under “My Stuff”, you’ll see a thumbnail image from it and you can click on it to get to the full webcam image view page thingy… also, i have inserted the chatterbox into it so people can leave comments and, boy have they… never had so many chatterbox comments in the three years or so i’ve had one…

(btw, as of feb14, i have been back on the internet five years, here’s a little post from a couple years ago about it…)

oh, almost forgot… huge thing here… i upgraded to WordPress 2.0 here a little while back and it has an import wizard… so, i thought and thought and thought and finally decided to do it, i imported ALL my posts from my old website… that caused me to jump to 170 posts, dating back to april ‘03… you can see a month-by-month list on the sidebar under “Archives”, which is right under my webcam thumbnail image… i still need to add category tags to all of them and that is a big job… (my “uncategorized” category grew immensely when i did the import…)
i wasn’t going to import the old posts and just leave the old site as sort of an old abandoned building to be explored by the venturous… i may still undo the import (if i can figure out how) and stick with that plan… BIIIIIIG difference between the christophercornelius.com website/life and the insidiousplots.com website/life and i have never thought it was a good idea to mix the two…

ok, anyway, one last thing, as you will catch hints of in the pics, i now have a new computer… the old one died a horrible death… i have a bunch of new pics of it in the upcoming february batch, it is integrated into the home theater system, with dvd, optical digital audio, and everything… i’m lovin’ it, it is so much better than my last one… you can check out more info about it than you could ever care about, i have uploaded the main page of my belarc advisor profile of it, it is the big bold link under “My Stuff”, the very first link, it says “Truman”… you see, i named the computer “Truman”… that’s my dad’s middle name and my dad is the one who got me started in computers when i was 10… he also gave me most of the parts to build this computer and much technical support… THANKS, DAD!

anyway, whew, what a long post, but, i think i’m done…

ok, so, the december pics are up…

most of them are from the two weeks of resets… overnight work in abq/etc., santa fe, gallup, and farmington, me as the boss with between two and four temps as my crew on any given night… see, i had to take my cam to take pics of the bays when we finished them, so, i used it as an opportunity to take pics of work, something i never had pics of before… of course, this is not what i normally do for a living, but, meh…
before i move on, let me point out that somehow, there are some mistakes in the chronology of pics… specifically, it has the pics taken at the bernalillo store dated dec22, when they are actually the night of the 15th/morning of the 16th… no idea how the heck that happened… that is the only error i noticed…
anyway, a bunch of pics of me, jim, nicole, natalie, and robert doing triple resets in nine stores… that makes up most of this month’s collection (though, that includes some nice scenic stuff during the drives between gallup, farmington, and back home)… on that note, the last page of pics has a folder called “for work” and it is all the post-reset pics… i wanted to save them for future reference, they are not at all interesting, which is why they are at the end of the collection…

however…
the folder at the beginning of the collection is quite interesting, which brings me to the next stuff i wanted to cover, that being the two cool programs i have been using this month…

on the first page of pics is a folder called “autostitch”… the last couple weeks i have been playing with this amazing new app called (as you may have guessed) AutoStitch…
From the official website:

Autostitch is the world’s first fully automatic 2D image stitcher. Capable of stitching full view panoramas without any user input whatsoever, Autostitch is a breakthrough technology for panoramic photography, VR and visualisation applications. This is the first solution to stitch any panorama completely automatically, whether 1D (horizontal) or 2D (horizontal and vertical).

see the new image at the top of my webpages? that’s a panoramic view from my balcony of the mountains, created by AutoStitch… in the folder, i have quite a few test shots – sunrises, sunsets, many of my apt… so, be sure to look through those and, if it’s your thing, download the program and have as much fun as i’ve been having…
i’m sure i’ll be posting many pics made with this app in the coming months… (um, and just to be clear, the pics i’ve made so far with it are nothing special, just trying it out… but, you’ll see the potential from the pics i posted…)
and, btw, BIG THANKS to SuperDaveNM for posting about this program over on flickr!

ok, also, now that i have been using Irfanview all month, i must say i highly recommend it… the quickest thing i can say about it is that so many pics i took this month, like every month, were absolutely hopeless… too dark, too blurry, too washed out, etc…. and, with this prog, i saved MANY of them… not to say that other programs can’t do this (feel free to let me know of better ones!), but, this is the first i have used and am loving it to death… it made a DRAMATIC impact on this month’s pics… the first two pics in the collection show a great example of a pic i would have, without any doubt, deleted, but thanks to irfanview it was made into a keeper… gamma correction, contrast, color saturation, many great settings to do some great photo manipulation… and it is even a very nice media viewer in general, i even downloaded a movie and watched it the other day and it ran much smoother than even winamp… it’s a “thousand and one uses” kinda’ program, for sure…

ok, i think that’s about it… first i said i started using JAlbum and wanted to go back an “JAlbumize” all my past pics… well, now i want to go back and “Irfanviewize” many from the past and even see which ones could be “pano’d” by autostitch…

until that far off day, you’ll have to settle for clicking here to see all the december pics…

live info from AlbuquerqueGasPrices.com, a handy little site that tells you where to go to get the cheapest gas (though, atm as i am posting this, it is showing a low of 2.62 and the site says the lowest around is 2.85, so, i guess it is not bug-free)… i doubt i will add this to the side bar, but, i at least wanted to mention the site since i gave everyone the wrong address at the little get-together tonight… oops…

also, via DCF, “OurABQTrib.com“, which has promise to be a cool site about our beloved city… news for me, by me… at least, that’s what it says…

and, just because i thought it was cool, via i-don’t-remember-where, this one is called “How To Pimp Your Windows XP Desktop to Look Like a Cool Mac Desktop“…
i must try this out… later this week… even a three-day weekend was not long enough…

if you use firefox, do yourself a favor and go get some extensions!!

i have been using a few since day one, but, i finally went and got a bunch and there are some truly amazing ones…

case in point is the text-to-images… you know how my photo directories are just a bunch of numbered links? well, use this extension and it will show you thumbnails instead… well, not actual thumbnails, they are just re-sized versions of the full images, so, i don’t recommend people on dial-up use it, but, for the broadbanders, it is nothing short of amazing… (so far, i just got it and haven’t thoroughly tested it…)
for the dial-up crowd, there are a couple different extensions that at least make browsing those type of photo directories easier by giving you buttons where you can just click “next” to go to the next photo… (see, since the filenames are numbered, it just does a little math and increases the number by one…)

i have at least twenty installed now, including “quicknote”, a nice little notepad that i have on the left instead of bookmarks, one called “CustomizeGoogle” that removes the ads from google search results and adds things like links to other search engine results, one that gives the weather at the bottom of my browser, which sits right below the news scroll, which is also an extension… and there is even one where you can play pong (!) with other people online (!!)… now that’s geeky…

anyway, i know a couple of my “twinner” friends (people i know both in “the real world” and online) are trying out firefox and may not even know about extensions so i am mostly posting this for the benefit of you guys…

been meaning to check these out…

Kinja, the weblog guide
Bloogz: The Blog Search Engine
bloglines

The Online Journal of David Berkowitz

The Memory Hole
“stores and makes available information that disappears from the net; this blog posts news about disappearing data.”

a few Psion/Epoc things…

“RealMaps is a mature mapping utility with enough guidance and forethought to help even beginners become competent cartographers and navigators”
Solun – The Pocket Planetarium “Perhaps the world’s first astronomical program designed for a pocket computer”

epoc zone
nice tucows site
many downloadable books
World of Software – Psion – Contents

Pscience5 – Compact Flash
deep info and also a handy database file “containing reported makes/sizes of CF cards working/not working in Psions”…
Pscience5 – Digital Cameras
a few thoughts about the CF card variety for use with Psions…

PDABuyersGuide.com

and a great craigslist post…

hmmm…… :| <—– me. (not to scale)