More on NextGEN Gallery

Posted on 13 April 2011 by Thea Stainsby

After importing photos from my iPhone on the iPhone app to NextGEN Gallery and finding they were not correctly oriented, I went about experimenting with photos that had hit Windows XP using the Windows Live Photo Gallery and Adobe Photoshop Elements Version 6.0

It is true that I am a bit behind the times with my software on this computer, but since my outcomes were satisfactory I can only assume that later releases of software will continue to behave in the same manner.

In all the photos that follow, I rotated the camera and Bruce pointed in the direction of the top of the camera.  For the iPhone “Normal” orientation appears to be when the phone is held horizontally with the button on the right.  For the Panasonic camera, “Normal” orientation is landscape mode.

  1. So my first experiment is iPhone photos imported to Windows Live Photos Gallery:
    [Show slideshow]

  2. Next is iPhone photos imported to Adobe PSE6:
    [Show slideshow]


  3. And third is photos from my Panasonic DMC-TZ5 to Adobe PSE6:
    [Show slideshow]


As you can see, all images behaved correctly.  The only images I have problems with are those imported from the iPhone using the WordPress NextGEN app for the iPhone.  In summary, I don’t think the iPhone app can see or manage the Orientation metadata.

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NextGEN Gallery from the iPhone!

Posted on 30 March 2011 by Thea Stainsby

The photo gallery plugin that I use now has an iPhone app to load a gallery. If I am lucky, what you see below came from there!

[Show slideshow]

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New blogger in the Stainsby family

Posted on 23 March 2011 by Thea Stainsby

With Hayden’s help, I have set up a blog site for Evan and Steph and I hope they spend some time recording their adventures on it whilst they are away.

Updated March 25th 2011

This is not a temporary site – they now have their own domain “the-silent-partner”.

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Going and Gone

Posted on 16 March 2011 by Thea Stainsby

Hayden has come and gone. I think this is the last time he will return home to us for a couple of years – time to knuckle down to study. No one else he knows is getting married. As always he leaves a legacy. This time it is my introduction to WordPress (the framework used for this blog) and a string of iPhone apps he is developing for Bravo Tango Bravo clients.

Evan is going… he and Steph are heading off to Bangladesh and Nepal and will be away for all of April. I am so excited for them and look forward to following their adventures.

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Under Construction

Posted on 4 March 2011 by Thea Stainsby

For my birthday Hayden gave me the book Smashing WordPress by Thord Daniel Hedengren, and Bruce has just recently designed a header for this blog. That means that this site is “Under Construction” as I work out how to adjust a theme to match Bruce’s design.

Wish me luck!

And if the site looks awful… please come back!

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Vietnamese Roads

Posted on 22 February 2011 by Thea Stainsby

The first experience on a road in Vietnam is horrific. As an international visitor you are likely to be in a modern bus or car with a little grunt therefore most other vehicles travel more slowly than you.

There are all sorts of vehicles that share the roads, trucks and buses, scooters, push bikes and cyclos and a few private cars. Bike and scooters will stay on the kerbside lane, most of the time, even if they are travelling the opposite direction.

Cyclos may well be ladened up with furniture, goods for sale, a portable food stall or rubbish, so they take up more road room.

Roads are mostly two lanes and the road markings appear fair, broken lines, single lines and even double lines mark appropriate straight, curved and dangerous zones.

Funny thing is that the drivers appear to ignore these symbols of road etiquette and overtake whenever and wherever they wish.

Traffic lights present their own challenges. It is fair to say that most drivers stop, but if you are turning right or left or you can see a clear path through the crossing traffic, then hang the red light and keep going.

As a visitor, you get used to the weaving and ducking that goes on, jostling for a bit of road whether it be negotiating an intersection in the city or getting there quicker on the open road.

I will just have to remember road etiquette when I get back behind the wheel in Australia.

Meanwhile, for more of our Indochina adventures, click here.

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Cleaning Up – 2010

Posted on 22 December 2010 by Thea Stainsby

 What happens when you are not rushing off to work every day?

You notice that this could be cleaned and that could be cleaner and oh… look at that over there, it needs a dust.

And so that was how Bruce started retirement and the year of 2010.  The year of the big clean and where it led us…

–          clean to sell
–          clean to move out
–          clean to move in
–          clean the holiday house (well, why not)
–          then Ev asked us to help him clean to move out – by then we were experts

After 31 years at Ocean Street we have cleaned up, moved out and down sized to apartment living in Sandringham, with stunning views across the bay.  Sally-the-dog has managed her new life style very well.  Hayden came to stay and was impressed.  Evan loves to visit.

We have also retired.  Although we both have grand ideas for future activities, we will start with a bit of travelling – Indochina (Vietnam, Laos & Cambodia) during January and February and more later in the year.

Hayden has visited us twice from Barcelona this year, for Sally & Michael’s wedding in April and Cat & Andy’s in November.  He has also completed two masters (Computer Architecture in Spanish and Multi Media Design in English – ask him if you want more details), started a PhD (Pure Maths), got himself a girlfriend (Andrea from Granada) and still holds down a part time job in London – excellent outcome in a year.  Hayden keeps a blog at http://voo-du.net/ if you would like to track his day-to-day activities.

Evan continues his creative journey, packed some graphic design study into the year as well as ongoing training in various, very complicated, film editing applications.  He and Steph have moved to the “dark side”, north of the Yarra to Fitzroy where the Greens rule.  It is a great part of town and they make the most of it, visiting interesting restaurants and tracking down the numerous local festivals.  This time last year Ev and Steph were adventuring in Central America.  Their next planned adventure is Bangladesh and Nepal in April!  You will find Ev on Facebook.

Bruce & I have both succumbed to publishing thoughts and activities:

http://moustache.com.au/
https://stainsbyte.com/

And so we send you our very warm greetings for a wonderful Christmas and an exciting 2011. 

We hope ours will be somewhat nomadic, so look out for blogs, emails and even the occasional postcard from exotic places.

Continue reading →

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Early Adopter or Follower?

Posted on 7 December 2010 by Thea Stainsby

I don’t especially regard myself as an early adopter but I hate to think of myself as a follower.  I think I sit somewhere in the middle, take up new technology after others have proven it but before it is mainstream.

And so the agonising decision 20 months ago about an iPhone or something else.

The iPhone was new and lacked some sophistication I thought was paramount, like decent editing, ability to read files in different formats and good email access.  The Blackberry fulfilled many of my needs.

So I selected the Blackberry Storm – very new on the market.  Oops, I found myself as an early adopter.

In the following 2 years the apps and features on Bruce’s iPhone improved enormously, but the poor old Blackberry seemed left in its wake.  And when we moved homes recently, the reception on the Storm was “useless”.

After many calls to Vodafone I believe they came to regard me as a serial nuisance.  In my anger and frustration I attempted to purchase an iPhone online to replace my current handset.  I was subsequently told this was not the way around replacing my handset – I would have to wait in the queue for one of these rare devices.

Amazingly, my “failed” online order resulted in a parcel in my mail box (the tangible, physical style mail box).  So now I am now the proud owner of an iPhone 4.

Perhaps I can now help Hayden test his iPhone apps?

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Learning PHP

Posted on 28 November 2010 by Thea Stainsby

It is wild and windy outside, not a good day to be out and about, so I spent some of my day learning the basics of PHP. I created a test site, with a form to key in some information and output calculated values.

More particularly the form asks for your name and your birthday and tells you how many days old you are.

When I asked Bruce to test it, we discovered that today he is 22,999 days old and tomorrow he will be 23,000 days old – perhaps we could celebrate!

The challenges I faced included:

  • getting the local time rather than the server time
  • creating a form
  • converting numbers entered into the form into date format
  • converting both “today” and the entered date into Julian format
  • remembering to put a semi-colon (;) at the end of each line of PHP code
  • sorting out the differences between PHP and HTML coding, including comment lines

    • So that is my Sunday. A good day’s work!!

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    Why am I here?

    Posted on 14 November 2010 by Thea Stainsby

    I have started a new life – living off the funds accumulated over a previous lifetime of work.  It’s called retirement.

    This is an opportunity to do all the things I’ve been meaning to do in the other lifetimes, and to talk about it.  So here goes.

    Hayden is home (again) and encouraging me to “go for it”.  First step is to import blogs from Blogger and link to my Flickr account.

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