Tag Archives: Egypt

iPhoto ’09 – Faces and Places

iLife '09 Apple ComputerApple’s iPhoto 2009 has two great new features, Faces and Places. One lets you identify people, the other where photos were taken. It appears to merge with FaceBook and Flickr too but I haven’t tried that yet.

Faces: Wow, the face recognition stuff is pretty cool. Add a name to a person and it helps you identify all the photos with that person. It took some time, but it’s really great.

What’s Faces missing? An easy way to show every face that doesn’t have a name attached. Seems simple enough, thought I maybe I could build a rule, but no go. Fix this and I’m happy with this part. I’ve got 4,000 photos in iPhoto and I’m guessing less than 1% are of people I know.

I’m also afraid to tag photos of me as a kid, will it confuse it? I want to mark some people from behind, will that mess up the algorithm?

As an added bonus, if you upload photos to FaceBook and other people tag the it’s supposed to pull them back down to your computer tagged!

Places: A way to tag all your photos with a location. You do have to specify the photos, so it takes some time. It’s not just cities though, you can put in the name of a statium or roller rink and it’ll tag them with that location. It gives you a map with all the pins in place.

What’s Places missing? A lot! But most seems to be easy to remedy. (Or maybe I just don’t know how to do it).

Place needs a way to show all photos without a place attached to it (sound familiar). I sort of cheated with this one and built a rule for places with no spaces and it worked, until I got to “Egypt”, that didn’t have a space in it, if I could identify the cities those would fall out of the to-do list.

When I type a place, the first few choices should be from places I’ve already put it.

Places needs a way to mark a picture as non-location based (so when they fix the above part it’ll stop asking me about those blank ones).

It’s slow when opening the map with the pins, really slow, can’t imagine when I get more in place.

Bonus (needed) feature for Places: Let me plug in my GPS and you can tag my photos based on where I was! How cool would that be (need an option to adjust for time zones)?

Otherwise the feature set appears to be the same, just two new features…

Skype update

So I’ve always liked Skype it’s a great backup for my phone and it’s great for calling home when I’m on vacation. At 2.1 cents per minute, it’s hard to beat the price as long as you’ve got a semi-decent internet connection. Not that I talk a lot when I travel but I always feel like I’m being initiated when trying to figure out long distance calling when in a foreign country. They 2.1 cents is just for calls to the US, other countries have different rates.

Skype - call the world at rock bottom pricesThe goofy* thing is that it’s 2.1 cents to call the US wherever I am, from next door, Egypt or Costa Rica it’s all 2.1 cents! But with the same reasoning it’s 6.4 cents to call Costa Rica, that’s if I’m here in Michigan or down there. Of course if I’m calling someone else’s Skype computer it’s free from anywhere to anywhere.

I just upgraded to the new Mac version, I was 1.1 versions behind. I think the call quality is significantly better and I noticed the touch tones work better, so now I can call my (misplaced) cell phone and listen to my messages. Continue reading

How the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid at Giza

Smithsonian Magazine’s site has an article on a theory on How the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid at Giza. Pyramidsmithsonian

Tackling an ages-old puzzle, a French architect offers a new theory on how the Egyptians built the Great Pyramid at Giza

I think this is from the August 2007 issue, but it might just be only on their web site.

Karnak Temple

Found this cool 360 degree panorama of Karnak Temple. It requires Quicktime (I was there last year, BTW).

(I was actually looking for something on The Moon Landing which was 38 years ago today….)

Flowers – LensDay

2006-04-20 15-10-44.Img 0735So today’s LensDay dealt with flowers so this week so I submitted this photo that I took in Egypt. I thought most of the flowers from there seemedso bright and beautiful. The other people on the trip compared it to flowers in Hawaii but since I’ve never been there I attributed it to the Egyptian mystique…

I just thought they all seemed so bright and beautiful….

I found my Hieroglyphic Ring!!!!!

EgyptringI found my ring!!!! I lost it a few months ago and I realized this I was leaving my house. So I retraced my steps and dug through the garbage and everything. Plus, I examined my car from head to toe to see if I dropped it in there. But I never found it and it just had to be here somewhere…

So, I was just digging through my laptop backpack and I found it way at the bottom. So I’m pretty excited about this.

This is the ring that I bought in Egypt with the Hieroglyphic Alphabet all the way around it. It was always a little big, so now I guess I know it’s too big. It wasn’t very expensive but I’ll get it sized a tiny bit smaller. You can click the image for a larger view.

Egypt Day 6 – Edfu, a traditional night, and the day I saw the StarGate.

Hopefully you’re not getting too tired of the Egypt photos, here’s just under 100 from day 6.

On the Nile
Scenery, pollution and a big-ass bridge.
Riding to the Temple of Edfu
A quick view of the town during out carriage ride.
At the temple of Edfu
Some huge walls of hieroglyphics. Some interesting shots with light.
The ride back (and the visit to the StarGate)
Goats and a Stargate.
On the Nile and around the Ship
The view, the pool, some sailboats (falugah?), a traditional evening and more scenery.

Oops, here’s the link to the photos

Hopefully if you’ve just recently starting reading the blog you’ve read the older Egypt entries. Those were posted while I was in Egypt and that’s where the longer stories are…

You may have seen these, I had posted them a bit back but not written a post to go with them yet nor added descriptions (maybe 20 of them). They were at the bottom of the egypt photos page so if you were looking around.

North South Meme

What is the furthest North and the furthest South you’ve ever been?
North would have to be somewhere along the coast of Alaska. South would have to be Egypt or Costa Rica (I’m going to guess Egypt since it’s a lot hotter there). Coincidentally, they are the first and last places I’ve traveled on my own.

From Question of the Day.