www.rolfje.com – Page 12

Why you want a Polarizer Filter

2009-06-16 rolfje 2 Comments

I recently bought a 50mm lens with a circular polarizer. I though I’d share some quick examples to show what a polarizer filter does for your photo’s.

The polarization effect is probably one of the few (if not only) effect which you can not reproduce in photoshop or any other image processing program. Most applications try by increasing saturation, which is nowhere near the effect of a real polarizer.

By rotating the filter, you have the luxury of choosing how much effect you want to have, anywhere between 0% and 100%. The shots below give you an idea what the range of the effect is:

Uncategorized

Starting Java app from Applescript

2009-06-11 rolfje No Comments

Suppose you have a Java Swing application which you can start by typing the following on the command line:

java -jar myTerrificSwingApp.jar

If you want to make that application start from the Finder in OSX, there are a lot of options which range from ugly to convoluted. If you need a quick fix, here’s how to do it.

Apple, Software

T(w)inkering

2009-06-07 rolfje 2 Comments

Now that the twitter hype is cooling down, and companies tart to realize that it is, in fact, just CB radio in a new asynchronous form, only the “true tweeps” still hang around. And now, it’s time to t(w)inker with it.

Migrate from Password Gorilla to KeePass

2009-05-12 rolfje 3 Comments

I used to use Password Gorilla to store my passwords, because it can run on both Mac and Windows. Because my password database keeps growing, Password Gorilla is becomming a very slow starter, even on my new solid state disk. A few weeks ago I learned that KeePass is a much more modern application, and is available for both Mac and Windows. Here’s what I did to get all my passwords into KeePass:

Uncategorized

Shooting 16:9 with a 4:3 Camera

2009-05-03 rolfje 1 Comment

If you have a Canon Ixus 80IS, like me, and you shoot video for your widescreen television at home (like me), you may want to try out this little trick.

The Canon Ixus is a 4:3 camera. The video that comes out of it is almost square shaped. When you try to make a 16:9 video, you can stretch it, or crop it. Cropping is far better, but you need some “headroom” to do that. If you made a closeup, chances are that you do not have enough room to crop to a 16:9 format.

I solved this by making this little chart, which I placed on a memorycard and put in my camera. By previewing the image on the camera’s display, you know where the “16:9 limit” is. I put two pieces of half-translucent tape on the camera, so I can tell what fit’s inside the 16:9 frame. I also included the other formats, like 3:2, and 2.39:1, should you want to make wide-screen theater movies 🙂

Then, I load up the movie in iMovie, and it will be cropped perfectly. Suppose you missed the 16:9 frame or want to re-center your shot, you can always press the “crop” button in your project to tell iMovie which piece of the image you want.

Hardware

Packing bags on a Speed Triple

2009-04-18 rolfje No Comments

As you may know, I traded in my Honda Sevenfifty for a nice Triumph Speed Triple. While waiting for the bike to be delivered, I tried to fiend out how I can take my hefty 4-star ART chainlock on this bike. Apparently, nobody uses chainlocks on their bikes because I could find no information at all about transporting chainlocks.

Hardware, Workshop

Design Gripes

2009-04-08 rolfje No Comments

Dear Akio Morita,

Lately I have some small issues with a lot of design decisions being made by the company you founded a while ago. If you look at my irritations seperately they’re just small gripes of a grumpy old customer. But the increasing number of design mistakes have me worried about your user acceptance testing and quality assurance processes. Given the sheer size of your company, and the fact that the very same people who are sabotaging your overall product quality can silently delete my complaint, I thought I’d share it with you here, on my very private blog. Nobody else will read this. Honest.

Javascript Window Shake

2009-03-12 rolfje 2 Comments

This evening I came accross the window.moveBy() JavaScript function and thought it would be cool to shake the browser window when a user fails to log in. It turns out that I was not the only one thinking this, but none of the examples worked for me. Some had no proper delays, others only worked from the page header, and some were plain unreadable.

I’m no Javascript guru, but I hacked this together which is working pretty nicely. It is in fact almost undistinguishable from the Apple login window shake at a login failure:

<script type="text/javascript">
if (window.moveBy) {
	delay = 70;
	shakes = 3;
	window.moveBy(-10, 0);
	for (j = shakes; j > 0; j--) {
		setTimeout( "window.moveBy(20, 0)", j*delay );
		setTimeout( "window.moveBy(-20, 0)", 
					j*delay+(delay/2));
	}
	setTimeout( "window.moveBy(10, 0)", (shakes+1)*delay );
}
</script>

In my case, I surrounded this code with a Tapestry @Conditional and made it into a reusable Tapestry component so that I can make any window shake as soon as it contains an error.

The code will work anywhere on your page, but I advise you to put it at the bottom of the HTML. This will make sure that the content is shown in the browser before you shake it.

It’s visually much stronger than just adding an errortext to the page. If people log in a couple of times a day, they don’t even notice extra text on the screen. This will “shake” them awake 🙂

Have fun!

Fun, Software

LED’s in your livingroom?

2009-03-08 rolfje 7 Comments

In some countries, there is some talk on banishing the classic (incandescant) lightbulb. I think this whole discussion is needless. The only reason why it exists, is that the fluorescent bulbs are often of mediocre quality, and certain people are here to enforce their bad tastes upon us “for a greater purpose”.

Don’t get me wrong, I really like trees and birds around my house, and I would be more than happy to install energy-efficient appliances in my home, even if they cost me slightly more. But especially if I’m paying more, I expect to get a certain level of quality.

Because of the inefficiency of incandescent bulbs, and the number of bulbs in my household, I decided to look around for energy efficient solutions. Particulary LED lighting caught my interest, because it is not only energy efficient, it’s also dimmable with normal (cheap) floor dimmers. They even stay cold enough so that children touching them do not burn their fingers.

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Uncategorized

How to put DVD’s on your iPhone (for free)

2009-02-28 rolfje 11 Comments

For A Few Dollars More

A lot of companies like to sell you applications to put DVD’s on your iPhone. Usually these apps are just wrappers around existing tools, and are pretty expensive if you consider you can do it for free. And you don’t need to be a computer wizard either! The steps are simple:

Use Handbrake to rip the DVD to iPhone format
Drag the generated mp4 file into iTunes
Sync it to your iPhone like all other content

To show you exactly how this is done, I’ve written up this “babystep-by-babystep” tutorial. Let me show you how I ripped “For A Few Dollars More” and put it on my iPhone:

Disclaimer: The DVD I ripped is bought and payed for. This article does not relief you of your responsibility to obey the law, so please be careful. And be nice, don’t pirate.

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Apple