Winter

Winter

Flickr Slideshow

This is a slideshow from Flickr.



It's a very nice feature.

1.  Create a set in Flickr, and make sure the photos in it are set to Public.
2.  View the set, and type "Show" (No quotes) at the end of the URL.  That opens the slideshow
3.  Click share, and "Customize this HTML".
4.  Change the size to whatever you want.
5.  Copy and paste the html in to your blog or web page.

When you change the set on Flickr by adding or removing photos, it will change your slideshow.  Sometimes the changes take a minute or two to peculate through Flickr's servers, but it works well.

Sleeping Cherub

Fall day #blog November 23, 2013 at 12:54PM

Nature!

Philly

Camera Phones part 3

To review: my Mototola Photon Q phone has a very nice native phone app. I downloaded the Silent Camera app, which is like a different camera. Then I downloaded Fotor to edit pictures, and I discovered it has a pretty nice integrated camera That's a little different from the other two. Which got me thinking about the cameras in my other apps. Instagram has one, of course, and Facebook does too. They are both simple. Here is Instagram's camera.

Twitter, Tumbler and blogger all have camera buttons, but they seem to use the native camera. The advantage to using the native camera from one of these apps is that the photo immediately appears in the app where it was opened. For example, if you start a new post in Tumblr, and take a photo, it immediately goes in to your post. No need to take the photo, the share it in to Tumbler or start Tumbler and import it in. In summary, don't get too caught up using your native camera as the only camera in your phone. It depends what features you need, and where you want your picture to end up. You have lots of options.

Camera Phones part 2

In my last post I talked about downloading the Silent Camera app, and discovering that Silent Camera gave me at least one different feature than my native camera. Next I downloaded an app called Fotor, which I wanted to use to edit photos. It's like Instagram editing on steroids. It has many more features to edit photos. Nice! So I was taking photos with my native camera, then importing them to Fotor to edit them. But then I noticed Fotor has its' own camera. You can open Fotor, and use the camera to take photos, which are immediately in Fotor for editing. No need to open the native camera and do that dumb import process! The Fotor camera has some neat features, including "big button", which makes the entire screen be the shutter button, so you can tap anywhere to take the shot.

So here's yet another camera for my phone! But wait, there are more, and each one is different!

Your Camera Phone

Let's talk about camera phones. In the olden days, cameras were cameras. You would take photos that would be saved on your camera, and then you would use a cable or card reader to transfer the photos to your Computer. You saved all your photos on memory cards or your hard drive. When camera phones came along, they were used the same way. Photos were saved on your phone, and then transferred to your Computer. But phones soon allowed you to send your photo via email or MMS. You could share your photos from your phone without transferring them to your PC first. In the mean time, online databases like Facebook, various Google products, Flickr, Instagram and Dropbox, gave you on line storage where you could stash your photos. Now those technologies have merged, and you can automatically transfer your photos to an online storage space immediately while you are taking photos. These days I use Flickr to save my photos, and an app called Flickr Uploader on my phone to automatically upload all my photos as I take them.

I use my phone's camera to take these photos, which seems obvious, but hold that thought. My camera phone takes really nice photos, and has some features such as a real nice panorama mode.

One crazy thing about my Motorola Photon Q's camera is that it makes a really loud shutter sound. Taking a picture sounds like a bear breaking a horse's femur. And you can't turn the sound off! In a quite banquet or during some sort of silent observance, it is extremely irritating. I discovered this is because my camera is sold in South Korea,where there is a law that requires cameras to make a sound, I guess for privacy concerns. I discovered a workaround by downloading Silent Camera, which doesn't make a sound.

Notice that Silent Camera has some different controls compared to my native camera. It doesn't have panorama mode, but it does have a strange mode called "serial shot" which takes a shot every half second or so until you turn it off. This got me thinking about my camera, and whether the camera really is the camera. Stay tuned.

Hands on House Half Marathon 2013

Photo post

Photo post

Electrical Phases

I walked in to a problem at one of our business locations today - one of the electrical phases was out.  This is referred to as "losing a leg".  When you lose a leg, all the big breakers stop working correctly, and some of the regular sized breakers stop working,  It has to so with which power bar the breakers are attached to in the panel, because the "leg" is one of those power bars.

Basically, half the lights and outlets stop working, and it seems random.

This location has three phase electric, which is a little confusing.  I looked it up on Wikipeda and learned this: "There is nothing magical about three-phase power. It is simply three single phases synchronized and offset by 120 degrees."

I don't really understand what all that means, but in a 3 phase panel, you have three big power wires coming in from the top, powering the breakers.  You can see those in the panel here.  They are the three big black wires coming in from the top. (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electrical_wiring_in_North_America)

In our restaurant, some of the breakers went off, and all the triple size breakers were turned off by the responding electrician as a precaution.  Evidently if a piece of 3 phase equipment, like an air conditioner, is running on one too few phases, it will burn up the motors. There are two triples on the right of this photo below.

The electrician said we should go out to the pole outside, and see if we could find a blown fuse laying on the ground, or a dead squirel who caused the short.  We went outside.  The 3 phases are the parallel wires on the top of the poles.  In this situation, each one of the power wires has a little connector attached, to the right of the pole, that has a power wire going down to fuses.  In this photo, you can see three clamps on the top three wires that each go down through fuses, and feed in to the conduit beside the pole so they can be buried underground.

The electrician said all the fuses looked intact upon a visual inspection (no wires hanging down like in a broken light bulb filament,) so one of them probably burned up internally.  We searched the ground, and immediately found a dead hawk.  It was a fresh death with no flies or maggots, so we think this guy caused the short, and got zapped.

The power company took it from there to identify and replace the bad fuse.

Around my house, the 3 phases are often wired vertically, not horizontally.  In the photo below, there are three phases, but the power connection is to one house with a single phase (the top wire).  The doohickey at the bottom hanging out on the left of the pole is the fuse (the bucket thing is the transformer, which is another story).

We also have single phase out at some of the farms where I jog.  This photo below shows single phase (one wire on the top).  The other wires are phone and structural.

Here is another triple phase pole, below, powering a single phase house.  This time with the middle wire.  Are you getting it?

My house has single phase.  Here is my pole.  Squirrels shorted this out several times, until the power company put in squirrel proof equipment.  Or all the dumb squirrel died and the smart ones reproduced.  Not sure.

The other side of our development has underground electric, which is OK until something goes wrong.

Then there is digging all over the place.

And painted lines about where to dig and where not to dig.

With overhead power, you gain visibility, and that is a huge advantage.

Thank you for reading.

Dad. #blog September 06, 2013 at 11:23PM

More storm. #blog September 02, 2013 at 10:29PM

Prestorm. #blog September 02, 2013 at 10:21PM

Storm. #blog September 02, 2013 at 10:17PM

Now there's a screen shot. Took 3 hands. #blog August 30, 2013 at 09:52PM

Me and Dad. #blog August 30, 2013 at 07:59PM

Lancaster #blog August 29, 2013 at 05:35PM

Zoom zoom zoom. #blog August 25, 2013 at 09:12PM

Bridges #blog August 25, 2013 at 09:10PM

Barn #nofilter #blog August 25, 2013 at 08:57PM

Off to college. Bye. #blog August 25, 2013 at 11:56AM

CSA basket. This summer I realized factory food requires less cleaning. #blog August 24, 2013 at 03:43PM

Steak and eggs. Post run protein. #blog August 24, 2013 at 11:08AM

#blog August 22, 2013 at 08:14PM

IFTTT

I like that when I am on Instagram, I can also share on FaceBook and Tumblr by simply selecting one of those other services when I share (and I could share on Flicker and Twitter and Foursquare, but I don't have any use for sharing there.)  I wanted to put Blogger in that little open block on the bottom right so I could post my photos to my Blog at the same time:

I

That's when I discovered IFTTT, which stands for "If This, Then That," and is pronounced like "Gift," without the "G".

 In a few simple steps, I was able to create an IFTTT account, then link it to my other account.  Here I am linking it to my Tumbler Account, which is a public little blog where I post experimental and non-family stuff.

I also connected it to Instagram and Blogger.

Then I was able to connect my accounts using recipes.  In the first recipe, it defines "If I post to Blogger and put 'Tumblr' in the Label, the post will be copied to Tumblr.

The second recipe defines that if I post to Instagram and use the hashtag '#Blog', the photo will post to my Blogger blog.

It's very cool.  Every 15 minutes or so the service cycles, and copies posts and photos to their respective areas according to the rules.

There are some part of the recipe definition where you can customize the default choices.

And some of the defenitions get specific to the service.  For example, here are choices for posting to Tumbler.  They are the different types of Posts that you can start with for a new post on Tumblr,

I skimmed the privacy section and TOS, and I'm OK with those.  They reserve the right to charge for this in the future.  It's not stated, but I think IFTTT may charge services to include them in IFTTT.  Otherwise, I see no advertisements or sources of current income.

It sure solved a little irritation for me!

Post to try something

This is a test post to try some functionality.

Test post #blog August 22, 2013 at 12:13PM

Train taking Jody to Philly