this is aaronland

Imagine it : Baconmelon

/tag/restobook:unfiled

Or : restobook 0.3 restobook 0.31

Aside from a couple bug fixes, the biggest change in this version is the ability to post a restaurant to del.icio.us. These are not meant to be posts that you can share (right away) or immediately re-import back in to your address book. Instead, they are quick notes to self that you can add while you are out and about and later fill in the details when you have the time and are not trying to type stuff on a cell phone.

By design, restobook will prompt you for the name of the restaurant you want to add. It doesn't have to be the name, really, it can be whatever you want but the point is : You can only enter one chunk of text that will help you remember what you were thinking about at the time. That text is also used to build a temporary URL as a query term into the del.icio.us search system.

Posts are tagged with restobook:unfiled and there is an option to add others. I suppose in the absence in a related tags API method I might add some code to keep a history of tags that have been entered in the past. That might not be so bad except that when you create a popup menu with the search/type-ahead option enabled in Series60 Python nothing shows up in the menu until you actually start typing something. Details, details...

The remaining changes of note are all related to the weird bastard N3 stored in the description field for a post :

Go ahead, it's fun.

This blog post is full of links.

Ladies and gentlemen : filtr

Shortly after I arrived in Vancouver, in 2005, I stopped using my digital camera. I put it in a box and mailed it to a friend back home. Having never owned a cell phone prior to leaving Montréal, I had quickly discovered that being able to moblog was what I had been waiting for all along (despite an on-going dislike of the term itself).

Plus, it wasn't as though I was ever pleased with the photos my so-called proper camera took. During the two years that I used it there wasn't a single photo published that wasn't cropped or tweaked or kicked in the gut. The only wonder is why it took so long to do the same for my camera phone pictures.

Long story short : it took until September before I sat on the floor of my apartment, one Saturday morning, and just cranked it out. I grabbed a copy of the creating a Lomo filter with Image Magick script that's been floating around forever and used it as a template to try and teach the camera on the Nokia 6630 to sing. There was no science in my effort, only art and experimentation and the surprise at the end of each photo.

It took about 45 minutes to build a workflow to receive, process and finally publish photos. This was mostly because I simply ignored all of the details you need to account for when you publish code-y bits for other people to use. On the other hand, I was wandering around taking pictures that afternoon so it seemed like a worthwhile trade-off at the time.

So was born filtr. Over the next ten months, it was followed by a number of variations including:

postr.

postcrd.

dazd.

stndpipe.

movr.

And the ever-popular rockstr.

Some, like movr were mostly experiments to see if it could be done. The rest have been children of circumstance which usually meant weird lighting or a new camera. It's always been on my list to add some smarts to try and adjust the settings on the fly based on ... I don't know really, probably something pretty dorky but like I said I kind of prefer the surprise.

There's also one named after heathr whom you have to thank for this post. She stood in front of a room full of people and used filtr as one example to demonstrate the idea that, paraphrasing, This technology thing is what you make of it.

Which is about as good as it gets.

Here are some things you should know about filtr:

Ladies and gentlemen : filtr

This blog post is full of links.