The built in iSight in Apple's iMac can see infrared light!

While playing around with our new iMac I discovered that the built in iSight can see infrared light for example from the Apple Remote that comes with it. Or any remote for that matter. Take a look at a video here and a larger picture here.

Edit: Well, it turns out that most cameras can see IR as said in the comments. My Canon IXUS 700 can. I'd never noticed that before…

New 24" iMac

Ok, ok I said I would be posting more on my blog but I failed; I admit it. But big news today! Our new 24 inch iMac has arrived. I'll run through the specs first: 2.16GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GBs of RAM, 250GB hard drive, 24 inch display (which is also a lot brighter than the old G4 iMac), and Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mighty Mouse.

Well the first thing is this thing is absolutely enormous! Especially coming from a 1024 by 768 15" iMac. ;-) Quite a change. The screen is also really, really bright. A bit too much so for my taste. I have it on about one quarter of full brightness now. Performance seems pretty good. Even Photoshop Elements is really fast under Rosetta. Of course, I'm comparing to a super slow 700MGhz G4 Mac. Hmmmm. What was I saying? I just took a break to help my mom set up her shiny new 2GB iPod nano. Oh well. Oh, now I remember! Front Row! Front Row is really cool. It works great. It's really nice to be able to control iTunes with the remote control. Something you may not have known: you can use the Apple Remote outside of Front Row with for example iTunes or iPhoto slideshows. Well that's about it. I've uploaded some pictures to Flickr: take a look at them here http://www.flickr.com/photos/graeme_smith/sets/72157594309085331/

Check out my new blog!

Check out the new blog I've started: the Slime Volleyball Replays blog. If you don't know what Slime Volleyball is take a look at the first post. I will also try to start updating this blog a bit more often from now on. Have fun watching Slime Replays!

First ski of the season!

Ok, its not quite the first ski of the season since I skied at ski training and at school on Friday so its the third ski. But it's the first longer one. We went to Svartbekken which is about half an hour north from here. The first half of the ski was pretty good but then it got warmer and started raining and our wax wouldn't grip at all. So we turned back and had to double poll or skate all the way back. Right now its about 0 degrees Celsius. We did get some fairly good pictures though. Take a look at them on Flickr!

Making a Transparent Screen

A transparent screen is an optical illusion like this one where the screen looks like you can see right through it. The fun part is doing this entirely without Photoshop. Its easy too just take one picture with a laptop's screen closed and another one with the screen open, and then just paste the background on top of the screen in Photoshop. Here is how you go about doing it Photoshop free (well actually you do use Photoshop a little…): first set up the laptop (or desktop or iPod or whatever you are using) how you want it and set up your camera where you want it. Its much easier with a tripod. I've never even tried without. Anyway, then you close the laptop's screen and a take a picture. Then open the screen at the angle you want it and take another picture. Be sure you don't move the laptop or camera at all from now on. Next you import both pictures. Open the one with the laptop screen closed in Photoshop. Then open the second one and paste it on top as a layer and set the transparency to about 50%. Select the laptop's screen with the Polygonal Lasso, delete the layer with the laptop screen open and crop the selection. If you didn't take the picture from straight on, then what you have left isn't rectangular. I prefer to stretch it out in the latest version of GraphicConverter. Save the picture as a Photoshop file and open it in GraphicConverter. Select Unscew from the picture or effect menu, I can't remember which and select the part of your image that you just cropped out in Photoshop. Scale the picture to your display resolution. Now just display this picture full screen and take another picture on the camera and it should line up so the screen looks transparent. The hard part is getting the color right. Depending on the lighting you may need to tweak the color of the picture on screen. Dimming the display can also help. Changing it to black & white makes it easy too. Thats it! Hopefully you'll be able to make a transparent screen how.

Thats how you make a normal transparent screen without any special effects. There are also other things you can do like stick your hand through the screen like I did here (still without Photoshop). Here is how you do that: the first thing to do differently is when you take the picture that goes on screen your hand needs to be in it. It makes things easier later on if you pull up your sleeve so it doesn't show. Then before you take the final shot you hold your sleeve in front of the screen so it looks like your hand on screen is coming out of you sleeve. Just pull your real hand up your sleeve so it doesn't show. It can be hard to hold your sleeve in the right place if you can't see the camera screen, though. For mine I held a mirror behind the camera. That makes it loads easier.

By the way, make sure you check out the Transparent Screens group on Flickr to see tons more transparent screens.

Thats it: a short guide to making transparent screens. Good luck! And if you have any questions please post a comment.

I won iLounges Black & White photo contest!

I won iLounges Black & White photo contest with this photo! The goal of the contest was to take a black and white picture that featured a iPod in some interesting way. The winners were announced in the Holiday Buyers' Guide, which can be downloaded here. Make sure you check out the second place winner and the honorable mentions too, as there are tons of excellent photos. The top two winners get a free iPod nano as a prize. I can't wait till mine comes. I'm not sure if I should be black or white, though.

Winter has come!

Winter has come!
Originally uploaded by Graeme Smith.

Winter has finally come to Nittedal. This morning it started snowing and it still hasn't stopped. I think we have about 15cms now. Thats defiantly enough for sledding and soon we'll be able to ski! Hopfully it keeps snowing for a long time. Maybe by tomorrow we'll have a meter! :-)

Leirskole

On Friday I got back from Leirskole. If your not Norwegian you probably have no idea what that is. Leirskole literally means "Camp School". Every 7th grade class in Norway goes to the mountains or the sea for a week. We went to a place down south called Skottevig which is near Kristiansand. (Their website isn't in English but their are a couple of pictures you might want to look at.) Unfortunately I didn't take a camera or I could have taken lots of pictures. We did lots of cool stuff their. We rowed and canoed some. There were also some longer boat trips. On the way back from one of them it was a bit windy and we were going against the waves so it splashed a lot and every body got really wet. We also got to pull up a fishing net and see all the fish and crabs (and a couple seastars) plus we did some crab fishing. Unfortunately the food there wasn't that great. I didn't think the supper was terrible (though lots of kids did) but on the other hand it wasn't very good and there wasn't that much variety. For breakfast and lunch we just got "Brødskiver" ("Breadslices": Bread with butter, cheese, meat, jam or chocolate spread) and milk, which we ate in our cabins. When we ran out of something we had to get more and half the time we didn't have enough bread. The other half of the time we didn't have any "Pålegg" or "Put On": you know, cheese and stuff to put on the bread so we had to eat it plain… So all in all the food was not that great, or in other words… sorry, one other word, it was terrible. It also felt like we always had to do something in about five minutes and there were tons of times we had to remember to do this or do that. There was also a daily inspection to see if our cabin was clean. We were all supposed to help but me and Simon did almost all the work. It felt like we were washing the floor and other stuff all the time. ****** was always outside playing around and never helped and ******** left all his stuff lying around and didn't help much either. Plus ******* didn't help sometimes. So me and Simon must have done about 80 percent or so of all the work. So it ended up being a pretty terrible week with the food, cleaning and constantly having to do this and that.