The inevitable happened
May 25th, 2015
We could build a SPACESHIP
May 22nd, 2015
Daddy’s treated himself
May 22nd, 2015
Lego Scarlet from The Drift
April 12th, 2015
Oscar made this today. Maybe spending 2 weeks on the set of The Drift as a newborn affected him more than we realised!
Say YES to Dot Everyone
April 5th, 2015There’s so much to think about in this talk by Martha Lane Fox (or watch here). She’s calling for a new ‘institution’ (Dot Everyone) to shepherd Britain into becoming the pioneers of the Digital World. To counteract the problems and imbalances we’re facing.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s some snippets that stuck out to me.
Education:
It’s that simple, whoever you are. Whether you run a large organisation. Or a country:
“It’s not ok not to understand the Internet anymore.”
It doesn’t matter if you’re 80 or eight, if you’re online once a year or once a minute. Understanding where the internet came from and what it can do will help you make more sense of the world.
The lack of diversity in tech industries:
Do you think Apple would have released its much anticipated ‘Health’ kit without the ability to track periods if there’d been a woman high-up in the organisation? I don’t.
(I never even thought of that… And that’s symptomatic of the problem we’re facing new with no diversity in software engineering.)
What better way could there be to give the UK a huge leap in technology, than to inject those voices that are currently underrepresented?
Ethical and moral issues:
Do children need different rights online?
What are the implications of wearable technology? Of an Internet embedded in devices in your home?
How do we make sure that ‘smart cities’ are projects for the public good not just private profit?
How should we prepare for the so called ‘second machine age’ and the increased use of robots?
If you agree that these are problems worth solving, please sign the petition.
We created some of the greatest institutions of the 20th century – the BBC, the Open University and the NHS. We must be able to do the same for the 21st century.
It’s not beyond our collective ability to nail this.
Just think about, I know I get excited. I don’t want to get carried away, but it could be our generation’s moon-landing, our Great Exhibition, our Festival of Britain.
Say YES to Dot Everyone
April 5th, 2015There’s so much to think about in this talk by Martha Lane Fox (or watch here). She’s calling for a new ‘institution’ (Dot Everyone) to shepherd Britain into becoming the pioneers of the Digital World. To counteract the problems and imbalances we’re facing.
It’s worth reading the whole thing, but here’s some snippets that stuck out to me.
Education:
It’s that simple, whoever you are. Whether you run a large organisation. Or a country:
“It’s not ok not to understand the Internet anymore.”
It doesn’t matter if you’re 80 or eight, if you’re online once a year or once a minute. Understanding where the internet came from and what it can do will help you make more sense of the world.
The lack of diversity in tech industries:
Do you think Apple would have released its much anticipated ‘Health’ kit without the ability to track periods if there’d been a woman high-up in the organisation? I don’t.
(I never even thought of that… And that’s symptomatic of the problem we’re facing new with no diversity in software engineering.)
What better way could there be to give the UK a huge leap in technology, than to inject those voices that are currently underrepresented?
Ethical and moral issues:
Do children need different rights online?
What are the implications of wearable technology? Of an Internet embedded in devices in your home?
How do we make sure that ‘smart cities’ are projects for the public good not just private profit?
How should we prepare for the so called ‘second machine age’ and the increased use of robots?
If you agree that these are problems worth solving, please sign the petition.
We created some of the greatest institutions of the 20th century – the BBC, the Open University and the NHS. We must be able to do the same for the 21st century.
It’s not beyond our collective ability to nail this.
Just think about, I know I get excited. I don’t want to get carried away, but it could be our generation’s moon-landing, our Great Exhibition, our Festival of Britain.
Mountfitchet Castle, Norman Village and Toy Museum
April 4th, 2015
We had a big day out and explore of a Normal Village and a pretty impressive collection of toys today. Here’s a small set of pics from the day. Me and Oscar particularly enjoyed all the Star Wars toys and figures in the toy museum! Read the rest of this entry »
Oscar’s first lego model
March 16th, 2015
It might not be quite his first, but I’ll claim it is. He’s been able to build the men since forever, and stick blocks together. But I think this is the first time he decided he wanted to build a specific thing, found the pieces and put them together in some coherent shape. All with zero help (I had gotten bored with lego and was browsing the web at the time!)
Can you tell what it is?!
It’s a pair of dragon wings. (Made of 2 wing pieces held together by the red strip)
Later, Mummy helped him add a head. Oscar found a tail, and I tried adding legs, but Oscar didn’t approve of them so they didn’t last long.
Fix collection naming in Lightroom after Aperture import
February 28th, 2015I’ve created another open-source project, which helps you fix the collection names created by Lightroom when you import from Aperture.
It’s a pretty basic script, although it took a while to figure out all the hoops to jump through. Hopefully this will help someone else!
Get it at https://github.com/fredsherbet/lightroom-aperture-fix
After using Adobe’s Aperture importer, you’ll find all your Aperture projects have become Collection Sets in Lightroom, with a collection called ‘Project Photos’.
Fair enough… but then when you sync them all to Lightroom Mobile, all the collections you see on your iPhone/iPad are called ‘Project Photos’. Hardly helpful!
So, this script fixes it.
- Every collection called ‘Project Photos’ is renamed using its parent collection set
- Projects imported from Aperture that had no sub-albums are turned into a simple collection, rather than a collection set with one child collection.
Feel free to tweak the script to behave differently!
MAKE A BACKUP OF YOUR CATALOG BEFORE RUNNING THIS SCRIPT
Mass deleting photos from Google+ and Picasa
February 28th, 2015I’ve published some open source software!
I had a problem – I’d uploaded all my photos to Google+ (it’s super-easy to upload them with the Google Plus Auto Backup program. But I did a bunch of them at full res, and was stuck paying for extra Google storage. I decided having all my photos on Google+ wasn’t that great after all (it’s not very good for browsing/searching, and it’s story thing never seemed to work well – all the photos were muddle up despite me being careful to have good metadata on my photos)
So I wanted to stop paying for extra storage, and started looking for a way to get my photos deleted from Google+… turns out it’s a painstaking process! You have to manually delete one album at a time (I had 2500 because it creates an album for each day) or manually highlight all the photos (which would have involved scrolling through 120,000 photos – a process that would have taken days).
Even the help says:
Scroll all the way to the bottom (it may take a while, depending on how many photos you have).
A “while”?… yes. A long while!
I found Google have APIs, and wrote a Python script to do the deletion for me. I’ve now published the tool, so it’s a pip install PicasaDeleter away!
More information about PicasaDeleter here and the source code is on github too
