For all you Lost fans out there, I came across an interesting article this morning. If you type the mysterious numbers from Lost (4 8 15 16 23 42) into Google Maps, they correspond to the approximate latitude and longitude of an island in the middle of the Pacific. Hmmm, is that where they are?

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Tags: google, lost

I’m sure you’ve used Google Maps before to find an address or get some driving directions. But how about for a greeting card of sorts? Well, someone has cobbled together a pretty cool site called geogreeting.com which allows you to do just that. How you say? Well, magically (and don’t ask me how) they have found buildings in the satellite imagery used for the site for all the letters of the alphabet. The result? See for yourself:

By clicking on one of the letters, say the “k” in Mike, you will quickly see that building is located in  Salt Lake City, Utah. (Click on the map above to see it --- and where all the other buildings -- are located).
 
Give it a try over at geogreeting.com

Tags: entertainment, google

For my new friends over at Backyardtheater.com, I thought you’d like to see the “marketing campaign” behind our upcoming Halloween party movie showing.
 
We’re going to be showing The Nightmare Before Christmas in the backyard. And before that, in true Southern California tradition, we will watch a live performance of Oingo Boingo. For those of you outside So Cal, Oingo Boingo was the greatest band to never quite make it out of LA. The band would play sold out shows all over LA (and had a tradition of playing Irvine Meadows every Halloween). But enough with that...

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Tags: backyard theater, entertainment, oingo boingo, nightmare before christmas

I took a few pictures during last night’s movie. The one below is a favorite. A little doctoring to get the screen to have something on it. But don’t tell anyone



Link to pictures: 4 September 2006 Morperhaus Theater

Tags: photography, entertainment, backyard theater

This whole backyard theater thang has been a lot of fun. After figuring out what equipment to buy for our theater under the stars, then getting carried away with creating a trailer that plays before each movie, I have now taken it all to the next level by automating the presentation of our movies. Before you read any farther, I will mention that I provide both of my automation workflows for download at the end of this posting.

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Tags: backyard theater, hobbies

This one is kinda cool. Thanks to Digg-ers for finding this one. For those of us that were kids of the 1980s, you will recognize all of the video games in this 1:33 movie. [ Link to 80s video game movie ]

Tags: entertainment, frogger

Last night we did our first showing in the backyard home theater. Now known “officially” as Morperhaus Theater. We had about 20 folks over last night for a viewing of The Incredibles. Here is a movie I put together on how we created the backyard theater.

Tags: backyard theater, hobbies

Pretty funny. Some guy posted over at MAKE Blog how to make a 360 pano head outta wood for ten bucks. I’m thinking Manfrotto doesn’t have anything to worry about here. But “A” for effort.

Tags: cameras, panoramic

A couple of days ago, Jon Stewart and his “Resident Expert” John Hodgman (who is also the “I'm a PC” guy in the latest Get a Mac ads) did a great skit on Net Neutrality. The folks at Buzz Out Loud should be proud. Take a moment to watch the Senator Ted Stevens Net Neutrality segment.

Tags: daily show, jon stewart, technology

A couple of weeks ago, I read an article in the newspaper about making a home theater in your backyard. Imagine, fire up the BBQ, and watching a movie on a 90” screen. After checking out a couple of websites, we got inspired. So, last night we took our first steps -- we bought a screen and a projector.
 
The equipment checklist is looking something like this:
 

• Projector
• Screen
• Sound system
• DVD player

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Tags: backyard theater

I am participating in a photography contest at the moment. I just got an email this week that my image is in the gallery of images for the contest. No idea if I won or not. I’m not holding my breath I guess I find out in the next couple of weeks.

Here is a link to my panorama of Catherine de Médici's Gardens outside the Chateau de Chenonceau on the contest website. And if you want to see the photograph as a fullscreen, immersive panoramic (aka QuickTime VR), here is another link to the panorama of Chenonceau.

Tags: panoramic

I have played around for several years in Photoshop trying to produce good quality black and white images. But hands down, the best way I have found to produce images that look like they were originally shot on Tri-X (or similar) film is to use a great Photoshop automation tool from Fred Miranda. Check out his Black and White Workflow Pro Plug-in. The amount of control you have over your image with this automation plugin is amazing.



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Tags: photoshop, software

Today, I reposted my camera collection. All of my Kodak cameras -- and a few others -- dating as far back as the late 1800s are now back up on my site. Link: Mike's classic camera collection.

Tags: cameras

Here are a bunch of interesting maps visually representing different socio economic information. In the case above, this is a map representing refined petroleum imports.

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Tags: mashup, visualization

Um.... wow, what to say. Should the folks that put this together be praised or just institutionalized? For your geekery enjoyment, you can watch all of episode IV (that was that first Star Wars that came out in the late '70s) is ASCII. What's ASCII? Look at the picture and you'll get the idea.

So how can you see this? Yeah, you need to be a dork (I musta qualified). Open up a Terminal session and enter: telnet towel.blinkenlights.nl.

May the force be with you.

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Tags: star wars

Hmmmm, me thinks Apple realized they released a less-than-stellar product. Please let me know the last time you saw Apple (or any other manufacturer for that matter) reduce the cost of a product between dot versions!

OK, good form that Apple realized their user community was less than happy about the 1.0 release (check out the forums if you don't believe me) and took corrective measures. According to the Apple site:

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Tags: apple, photography, aperture

Kekus Digital has introduced a prerelease of a new stitcher called Calico Panorama. In addition to single row panoramic images, Calico also supports multi-row images. Cool. And the best part? You don't need to be an uber propeller head to figure it out. Just load your images and let it do its thang.

As I am writing this, I am in the process of stitching a 14 image single row panorama on my G3 Powerbook. So far so good. Calico does not support fisheye images (go use PTMac for that) however, you can still output 360x180 images if you want from within Calico, your source images must be rectilinear.

Way to go Kekus Digital!

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Tags: photography, panoramic