BB would have no interest in the much-vaunted Mozilla Firefox…if it weren’t for the Live Bookmarks feature, and particularly the Sage extension that makes use of this to provide a full RSS feed browser. Otherwise, we’d rather avoid dumbed-down, reduced featureset applications in favour of old-fashioned (but powerful) Mozilla (or Seamonkey as the project is now). As it is, we’re currently running two slightly different browsers for different purposes and trying to keep them in sync manually. Fortunately, RSS extensions for the latter are starting to come online, although none yet match the capabilities of Sage.

Following the Welsh theme of the last post, here are a couple of good blogs spotted at the Welsh Blogs aggregator recently:

• Chris Cope is an American columnist who learnt Welsh solely online using the BBC’s website and has now brought his “child bride” to Cardiff to take a degree course in the language. This is an excellent and amusing take on British and Welsh society from an outsider’s perspective, although like BB you’ll probably cringe in horror when he seriously contemplates “Tesco bitter, four cans for only 92p!”
• Alan Cole “dropped out of the rat race”, moved his family to Ynys Las and started a small web design business. And the very best of luck to him, the jammy … (I mean, just read this entry!)
• Not exactly a blog, but Cerys Conner’s Wales photoset on Flickr is a thing of great beauty, and none of it the usual clichéd landscapes. There’s something distinctly Holga-ish about her shots, but we suspect she’s not actually using a Holga for many (any?) of them.
• Lest you think it’s the promised land: the downside (props to Chris for the link). (Update: There’s now a Flickr group for this.)

(Note to Americans who aren’t Chris: if you come across a blog with entries that read like “Dwi wedi bod wrthi y wythnos ‘ma yn adeiladu canoedd…”, it’s Welsh, not page corruption. Note to Welsh people: we have no idea what the quoted text means so apologies if it’s offensive or simply mundane.)

I have a number of long-term photographic projects on the go, and I’ve just formally launched the latest by creating a dedicated album for it in my PhotographyBlog gallery. This is a round-up of what they are and what their purpose is.

What’s up with Bibble?

Bibble is a raw converter and image enhancement application for Windows, Mac and Linux. It’s particularly geared to large scale batch processing of many images. In terms of enhancement features, it supplies almost everything except selections and direct editing functions: for example, lens correction, sharpening, exposure fixing, etc.

The only fly in the ointment is that it’s a pain in the mouse to use.

A review of LightZone

I’ll get right to the point: LightZone is so good, it was worth installing Java for.

In over eight years of PC ownership, I’ve never yet found a need to install Java - the megabytes of libraries, the bloat, the slowness, just for a few footling GUI applications. LightZone changes that (and the bonus is, after holding back for so long, it seems like Java performance has finally caught up with real world expectations).

“…For the purposes of this book, I will be dealing with rock music and pop music, the subtle distinction being that ‘rock music’ is a loud aggressive form of entertainment enjoyed by many people, whereas ‘pop music’ is crap.”

Many years ago, BB bought a small yellow hardback called “What with being Stone Deaf and Everything” from a remaindered books shop in Manchester. It was a satirical guide to being a musician and caused much hilarity when taken into the studio that the Scarlet Martyrs were using at the time; for example, it quickly became verboten to argue with Meic the producer because, as the book said, he “watches Channel 4 and ‘knows what the kids want’”.

smart-sharpen2 v0.3b is my modified version of John Hall’s sharpening script from the GIMP FAQ site.

Changes:

• Dialogue to modify sharpening and edge-detection parameters.
• Optional despeckling applied to the layer mask prior to edge-detection; this removes a lot of the grain on scanned negatives and thus avoids sharpening it along with everything else. (The grain is still visible on the image, it just looks better without sharpening.) You may still wish to adjust the black, white and mid points for the mask in Levels.
• Handle both RGB and grayscale images, with optimisations for grayscale (copies rather than decomposes the image, since the Value component is the same in this case).

Otherwise, the script is substantially the same as the original. I’ve offered the changes to John, but he prefers his version to remain non-interactive for batch processing and there’s no way to run the same script in different ways. Hence the modified one is here for those who want more control over the process.

You want some fancy new lenses for your SLR. Want! WAAAANNNTT!!

But new lenses cost lots of money. Spondoolicks! MOOLAAAAHHH!!

And you don’t have much of that, because of what the SLR cost you in the first place. Boo! Waaahh! SUUUCKS!!

Fortunately, there are lots of other low cost options if you want something fun ‘n’ groovy to stick on your F-mount. They tend to be made of plastic, sometimes in Hong Kong, and they usually look really cheap too. But they are guaranteed to have er…unique and special characteristics.

Warning: If you care about maximum optical quality and tack-sharpness, go back to your usual boring landscape photography website now. Or get over it and enjoy your photography instead.

“Incrediblania was a kingdom, though it didn’t sound like one. In fact most people who heard its name for the first time thought it was either an illness or the name of a new kind of dance. But it was a kingdom. A rather small kingdom, certainly, but what it lacked in size, Incrediblania more than made up in completeness.”
- The Home-made Dragon And Other Incredible Stories

BB’s Junior Research Assistant is in dire need of further bedtime reading to accompany her loud attempts to destroy her bedroom. (Given that the JRA currently isn’t the sort to sit quietly and listen, BB figures we may as well at least read something that we enjoy.) Hence, we’ve just ordered one copy of every Norman Hunter Incrediblania book that we could find on ABEbooks.

Finally, a Fedora upgrade that Just Works … it’s called CentOS.