I spent several evenings last week trying to make an interval timer for shooting time lapse movies out of a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit. This involved several trips to Maplin and some soldering as well as learning to program in the weird drag and drop enviroment. I’d nearly finished when I came across a cheap interval timer on ebay. Didn’t cost much more than the parts I had bought at Maplin and is loads better. Ho hum… I had fun tinkering.

This is my first attempt with the ebay time. There is a great deal wrong with it but I think I know what to do next.

I have been messing around trying to make my blog more photo-friendly – but without much joy. I use Apple Aperture which is integrated with MobileMe and Flickr. I have a MobileMe gallery so I could include images from there but Apple don’t provide an API just a rather inadequate RSS feed. I could use Flickr as they have a nifty “blog this” feature that would enable me to pick photos from my stream and add them to the blog. Unfortunately this would mean the images stay in Flickr and I only link to them so I would be bound to maintaining a Flickr account and eventually paying for it which would be yet another account to look after.

I could use PixelPost but that would be yet more software to keep up to date and backup.

My conclusion at the moment is simply to export photos from Aperture and upload them one at a time and one per blog post to my regular blog. At least they then stay with the blog and its data.

I think I need to look for some photo blogging software. This gallery isn’t that inspiring.

View this full screen!

This is my first reasonably high resolution Gigapan. It is around 760 megapixel. It was a dark day on Saturday but I am quite happy with the results. You can see this pan along with some of my other efforts on my Gigapan home page. What I think is really ‘cool’ – and there is no other word for it I am afraid – is the ability to view these panoramas in Google Earth. If you have version 4.2 or later installed on your machine you can click on this link and it should launch Google Earth and

Back in April when I knew the RMS was going to close for three years for renovation I decided to do some panoramas to capture its pre-renovation state. As with many projects it reached a set level then sat on my hard drive without being launched. A chance conversation reminded me of it so I have put it on the web. Take a look at Royal Museum of Scotland – as it was in April ’08 . You may find it looks better in Firefox than IE. I haven’t had a chance to mess with a Windows machine and work around the inevitable IE bugs.

The site uses the open source Java panoview rather than the commercial Pure viewer I have been playing with recently. Both approaches to publishing pans are rather clunky and inadequate I think.

Tapestry by Jo Barker

I spent a fun evening recently helping Jo Barker photograph her tapestries for an upcoming catalogue and exhibition. Her work is amazing. This one is my favourite of the session. Jo’s exhibition is at the Scottish Gallery and opens on 7th January.