First things first, I did not really have an idea. This is the fourth year in a row I make a custom Christmas card, the one I made last year was a bit too ambitious, and I was already sick when I did it so afterwards I was in bed for a week with fever, heh. The years before that I added myself to Pixar movies, which is partially what inspired me this year.

When I was away taking a speed course in motorcycling I lived at my cousins’ place, and they are very much Harry Potter geeks, undeniably! While there I half participated in a Harry Potter movie marathon which we ended with seeing the last movie in the theater, as it was on around that time. As this week is what was most memorable from 2011, it was very intensive and slightly crazy, it just had to be the inspiration for my card.

I started looking around for suitable photos from the film in which I could insert myself, I was first eyeing a motorcycle picture where Hagrid is just leaving with Harry, but I couldn’t find it in a good enough quality, in the end I used a picture with professor Dumbledore instead. Lets start with how I shot the photo of me.

To get myself to sit at the right angle, at the right distance, and have my feet in the right spot I used my old and quite crappy projector to display the Dumbledore photo on the backdrop I had picked. It was my bed cover, the best colored material I got to match the tonality of the photo to make extraction of myself easier, avoiding getting too contrasty edges.

After matching the size of my head with Dumbledore’s, which was a bit tricky as his beard and hair covers most of his face in addition to him wearing a hat, I fixed supports for my feet to match the steps I would sit on in the picture. When happy with that I turned the projector off and set up lighting to match the other picture.

I used two flashes, one close to where I was sitting with a white translucent umbrella for the light coming from the left and one behind the camera as a fill light with a black reflective umbrella. In addition I had a reflector to the right to brighten up the shadows a bit. I used the reflective umbrella on the fill flash because I had to use it in slave mode due to the camera only triggering one flash if I used cables for both. Slightly annoying. At this point I had spent an hour on setting things up.

The last thing to do was to come up with a good pose which would make sense. I am holding a paintbrush I had borrowed from my parents garage, I should probably have included a can of paint too but I was too tired to match that up too. The final concept was to make it appear as if I had painted the professor with red paint, to force him into a Santa role, and that he would not be very enthusiastic about it. After yet another hour when I finally ended up with a picture I liked, which happened to be one of the first photos in the final series I took, I jumped into Photoshop.

I will use progress pictures to describe what I did in Photoshop. It’s pretty much basic photo editing stuff. Extraction, color correcting, blurring, painting shadows, adding sprites and a bit of distortion. It will make more sense if you click the images below, I will try to describe what I did in that step with the title.

I didn’t actually send the cards until the 22nd. I did some finishing touches in Photoshop the days after the actual shoot before I could print them and then I wrote a personal greeting on each one. It would just feel like I made an incomplete product if I did not use the space available to make the card personal for the receiver. As for delivery, It would seem like at least the local cards arrived on the 23rd, I had written most greetings on them assuming they would arrive after the weekend, but oh well.

Tribar8
2011-11-30

Linework | Fillwork

This impossible tribar has internal connections between two of the bars, the number of connecting bars are different for each side.

Not winning is of course a disappointment, but as I participate in plenty of contests I’m kind of getting used to it :P One thing that annoys me though is when the hosts of a contest ignore their own rules, and I have experienced this multiple times, and it happened again with this contest.

As I mentioned in the previous post a very big majority of the submissions lacked the required caption to be valid entries. After the public vote they announced the finalists and out of the 50 only 14 had a valid caption and another 5 had an almost valid caption. It does step on the toes of the people who expected the rules to be honored, like me, it feels like the people who wrote the rules would also follow them!

Again, this has happened to me before. It seems like when you host a contest it’s easy to make up rules but hard to get participants to follow them or to remember them yourself during judging. One time I participated in a Christmas rhyme contest to promote a brand and their hint for what to send in was “Longer is not always better!”, this while the winner ended up being a quite long poem that did not communicate what was sought after and did not even rhyme. Definitely not what was asked for, things like this puts me off.

I will also bring up a good example of how contests should be run, in my opinion. For a couple of years (during University studies) I was an active member of HBO. When they hosted a contest there were often strict rules and it was very clearly stated that if you did not follow those rules your entry would be tossed. If it was a creative contest it would be rules about what to make, what kind of files to submit, what information to include and how to submit it. Get one detail wrong and you were out. Very easy and very fair!

For this contest GoPro completely skipped specific things in their own rules, especially that both photo and creative entries “must be captioned”. I can see why they decided to do this as many of the nice looking pictures would otherwise be disqualified, among those the grand prize pictures. In a response to me on Facebook they did say that this contest was a learning experience and that more contests will come in the future. I do hope that they either make sure people read and follow the rules, that they themselves enforce the rules or that the rules are more relaxed to start out with.

I still love the GoPro brand, just not as much as before, they lost a chunk of goodwill for me. At least I still want to buy their products ;)

As a reflection, the nicest thing about this contest was to talk to people on Facebook whom I had not talked to in a while. And the most annoying part was the same, to have to hunt for votes, I really hope they skip this in upcoming events. Some people I contacted clearly stated that they wanted nothing to do with voting on Facebook due to privacy issues, and I fully understood that as I myself use very few apps on there.

As a last note, this was a very timely comic. Oh, and happy new year! Lets hope this year will bring less stress, I’m not so sure about that though.

Floors2
2011-10-29

Linework | Fillwork

This is four intersecting objects where one side encloses the neighbor while the other side is enclosed instead.

As my head was filled with motorcycling my project naturally ended up being to drive with a camera on the bike. The concept would be to take long exposures where the instruments and the traffic ahead of me were  sharp and the rest blurry streaks, showing the speed. At that point I had very little experience so I did not realize how much a bike vibrates or moves when you are riding it.

In the end the contest was won by a person who was going on a trip to Norway, and needed a camera to document the trip with. That sounds a bit more interesting than my project, or at least larger. At this point I had already bought a suction cup mount and gotten my motorcycle license(!!), so why not do it? The results were mixed, the video below show you how it went. If you watch it on a computer you use a button to skip the first half, a half that might not be so much about the project, but it was what I remember the most from the endeavor :P

I think the pictures are at least a bit interesting, they work to look at because the lights are kind of sharp while the rest is not. You can find the pictures with exposure information and comments below! All in all it was a fairly frustrating experience, but I learned a few things from it ;)

Note: I did manage to take my license on the 3rd of October :D My computer kind of chokes on editing together all the video material I have collected though.. hrm.

Levels
2011-09-18

Linework | Fillwork

Starting from the left one single floor turns into four floors, then into one floor again, and at the far right four floors again.

To sort out the finalists there is currently a public voting period where participants get to fish for votes in any way they can. Voting is done via the Facebook app so you need to have an account there. When you vote you get to sign in, and as that has made some people hesitant I contacted GoPro on their fan page about it and this is what they said:

You need to login to vote because otherwise it’s too easy for vote fraud to occur. We just want to keep things legit. We promise not to spam anyone.

I don’t think you have to worry about your privacy or personal information, and I GoPro has been very good to me when it comes to support etc so I trust them :) In any case, I submitted four photo entries which are displayed below. Sadly I didn’t have time to complete any artistic entries but photos would have to do.

So, if you like what you see, please vote for me on Facebook :) Thanks!

There are only two more days of voting left, it ends the 17th, so don’t hesitate ;) To fish for votes I spent quite some time yesterday chatting with people on Facebook which I hadn’t contacted in a long time. I have to say that this is something I should do more often, as I got quite a few nice exchanges.

As anyone who knows me can vouch for I’m awfully bad at keeping in contact, for some reason, I mostly get around to it if I have an actual inquiry to the person. It did feel a bit awkward to start most conversations by asking for a vote though, it’s totally not my style to ask for favors as a very manly manage-on-your-own man, but there are a few circumstances here that drove up my motivation. Allow me to elaborate.

If we read the official rules page we find the following text in section 2. Bolds added by me.

Entrants may submit entries in the following two (2) categories with the entry form (each such entry deemed a “Submission”): 

a. Submit a photograph (not a frame or screen grab) taken by you with a Sponsor camera (an “Entry Photo”) that made you think about Sponsor camera, We want to see that epic moment, the photo that you showed all your friends, that photo you could only get using a GoPro camera. Photo must be captioned “I Love My GoPro!”; or

b. Submit a GIF, JPEG, PNG or other supported digital ?le of an original work (such as a drawing, painting, sculpture, or the like) created by you that depicts a Sponsor camera (an “Entry Creative Work”) that you believe demonstrates what is unique, inspiring, and/or awesome about Sponsor’s products, fans, or the images they produce. Entry must be captioned “I Love My GoPro!”;

Each Submission that advances to the Final Round (defined below) will be judged against the other Submissions in the applicable category as further described in Section 5 below.

Submissions will be accepted only during the Submission Period. Up to four (4) Entry Photos and/or four (4) Entry Creative Works per person, household and/or email address are permitted, however, Submissions must be made all at one time as a single upload. Entrants submitting more than eight (8) total Submissions may be disqualified.

This is interesting because the majority of the submissions fail to meet these requirements. There are numerous photos that are clearly screen-shots or grabs; some even contain the media player or the entire OS, some are clearly not shot with a GoPro and almost none of the photographs has been captioned “I Love My GoPro!”. Actually, hardly any of the creative works have a valid caption either. There are also people that have submitted more than four photos.

In section 3 we can read:

c. If a Submission does not meet the criteria set forth herein, Sponsor will disqualify and discard the Submission either immediately or at any time during the Promotion.

This means that I probably have a fighting chance :) which is why I go to some lengths to gather votes, thus also, this blog post.

In closing, to be honest, one of my photos most likely does not meet all the requirements either. You are supposed to have written consents or releases for the people that can be identified in your submissions, and I think it will be hard to get that from everyone in the wedding picture. I do wonder when someone is seen as identifiable thuogh?

Thanks again if you voted for me :) It will be interesting to see how this goes!

Early this week Google pushed the new version of Google Reader onto users. The fact sharing would be removed had been announced a week prior to the update, but really, that had sounded like a bad nightmare and too illogical to be true. Why would they remove such a wonderful feature? To keep my sanity I just assumed that they would get their senses together or that it was misinformation. But alas, here we are, the new version is out and I will explain why I think the product is so much worse now.

Disclaimer: I love most things Google, am an avid and advanced user of many of their services and I convert people to Gmail and Docs as much as I dare. Perhaps I am overly negative here as I am used to their updates being, you know, improvements.

New Spacious Interface

Usually I really look forward to Google’s service updates, it normally brings more and better functionality, usability and streamlining! But lately the general Google interface has gotten fairly unoptimized. There is a ton of whitespace mostly everywhere, large margins, overly simplified graphics and void of color. In Google Docs I instantly changed to the Compact display mode to get more onto the screen at once, that actually makes it look usable again. The upcoming Gmail interface will have the same display option but oddly enough Google Reader currently lacks it.

In addition to wasting lots of screen real estate the new interface has hardly no distinctive separation of areas, has colored just about everything in tones of gray and it feels slower. Though, the speed issues might depend on the service as a whole as the update seems to have introduced a few issues.

As well as making everything float together by removing any kind of borders or boxes around different areas they also hide the vertical scrollbar for your list if you don’t hover it, this means your eyes have no guidance and the page is harder to use. And for some reason they make the already read posts very visible by making the entire row a stark contrast gray while unread posts are white and like most other things melt into the background. New content is where I want to have my attention, now I get distracted by the read posts instead! And I also missclick the title for the feed because I think it’s an unread post! Gah, too much white everywhere!

The last thing I have to comment on regarding the interface are the icons for folders and tags (what’s the difference really?). They are now dully gray instead of happily yellow. Actually, as I mentioned above, mostly everything is gray, even titles and links are black instead of blue! The entire site feels dead, lifeless. I have only read one university class in the subject machine-human interaction and interface, but going away from very old conventions about how hyperlinks look and work should be a big no-no. If you want to be user friendly, use what people are familiar with, even if it might be a bit uglier.

Enough about the interface, they can always be worked around, this next section is what really bombed the entire service.

New Integration with Google+

You know, what I was waiting for was for Google+ to get integrated into Google Reader. I wanted a special feed for the stream(s) on Google+ so I wouldn’t have to constantly monitor the site, which is how I currently get to use Facebook and Twitter, it’s far from time efficient or convenient. This integration should have been possible as Google+ and Google Reader both are under the Google umbrella.

But, Google did it the other way around. Instead of accessing features of Google+ in Google Reader you now have to go into Google+ to access features that were previously found in Google Reader. They completely removed the ability to share items and likes internally in Google Reader and replaced it with the ability to +1 and share posts via your Google+ stream. In addition to removing the actual shares, they also removed all your followers and who you were following. You can download the data so it is not completely lost, but the question is how many another service can actually use the data?

The entire concept with using RSS feeds for me was to get site updates in an inbox, like email, you have unread and read items, you have it all collected in one place, you can easily browse what you want to read by titles and you can choose to read at any point in time. None of these features exists for shares when using Google+. Nothing in a stream is marked as read or unread, to see what different people have shared I have to browse to their profiles, everything in the streams is mixed with other content, if you don’t keep up with the streams posts will quickly vanish down the bottom of the page where you will never discover them.

How is this an improvement? It makes sharing stuff just like sharing on Facebook, and guess what, I shared at least 100 times more things in Google Reader than I do on Facebook. A social network is the venue for personal updates, pictures and all that kind of fluff, and spamming the stream with videos and news would quickly get obnoxious and people would be hiding all my updates or unfriend me. In Google Reader when I spammed YouTube videos people could easily pick out what they found interesting and skip the rest, mark all as read.

The last thing about sharing is that it is no longer casual or inviting to get access to someone’s shares. Previously you could follow someone and you would get their shares in your Google Reader. Now it’s the other way around yet again, the person that shares would have to add you to his/her reader circle. Instead of opting in by yourself you have to personally request to be included. It changes the experience of sharing from that of listening to a street musician to trying to get into a disco.

How to fix it

So, how could Google make this update less emotionally distressing for affected users? Just integrate Google+ with Google Reader as well! Give me a special folder in Google Reader with all of my friends’ shares, include a comment system that bumps all comments back to Google+. Even if everything else like status updates and pictures were included in the folder it would be closer to the old Shared Items than nothing at all.

In the end, If I do like Google wants me to and start to share everything I shared in Google Reader on Google+ instead, that would be the only thing the service would be good for because my stream would be too cluttered for normal updates to stand out. How is this solution even a good alternative?

Reactions on the Internet

During the few days after the update there has been a bit more news about this than anyone would expect. Looking at twitter I am far from alone missing the sharing function or criticizing the interface. Brian Shih, a former product manager for Google Reader, shared his thoughts. Kevin Fox, a former Google Reader lead designer has offered his services. I will also provide links in random order to The Atlantic Wire, William Toll, Googlesystem, TechCrunch, Andrew R H Girdwood, Business Insider, Robin Sloan, The Atlantic, Adweek, Garrett Guillotte, Forbes.

Even if it is a free service that I am very thankful for it is hard to ignore the senseless removal of functionality. I still love you Google, just not as much :/

Bonus: I got an unexpected outcry from a friend. Buzz is gone! Apparently she followed my blog, youtube uploads and tweets via Buzz! See, it was actually used by someone!

Update: You can still access and manage your followers and who you are following through the Google Dashboard. There are also extensions for Chrome and Firefox to access shared stuff again, it’s not perfect as it does not attribute shared items to users in the list and comments are not there yet, but it’s better than nothing! As it was made in just a few days I think more features might be coming soon. As long as Google doesn’t shut down the backend stuff, I guess we can expect that at some point but as long as they allow users to download their data they might keep it alive…

I have always liked tower defense games, not sure why. It’s not like I play them all the time, but I enjoy them whenever I bump into (a well made) one.

It so came to pass that my brother and his friend were coding a tower defense game as a university assignment and they needed someone to make more graphics for them, as their first slave had kind of quit. I decided to whip something together and it was actually fun :) It took me a few evenings but it felt refreshing.

In the game the monsters start at the spawning portal and try to find the best way to the end castle. As in any tower defense game you build offensive towers, earn credits when the towers kill monsters and the challenge is come up with the right strategy to survive the level.

I made the monsters below from scratch and while I did not make the original towers (green and red) I butched together a blue tower and added the different upgrade stages. I also drew the spawning portal and the quite weird end castle.

Wohoo, they are running like crazy! The animations are made either by reversing a single picture  horizontally or simply by cycling two separate frames. The different color versions represent different amounts of evil, as the monsters turn more evil (dangerous) the further you get in the game!

The towers have five levels where fire power, range and fire rate are upgraded sporadically. The obvious graphical steps are bare, iron, bronze, silver and gold where gold really is a bit illogical as it is a fairly soft metal, but it looks nice :P

I think the castle gave me the most trouble, this is version two. In contrast the portal was quite straight forward to make. In addition I also made some particle graphics and projectiles, but they’re so few pixels I will leave them out :)

If they eventually put the game online I’ll provide a link!

Cage
2011-08-30

Linework | Fillwork

In the bottom left corner green is up top, while in the top right corner it is at the bottom. And in those two corners the three layers are spaced by pillars, while in the other two corners they are intersecting so that green and red actually touches.