Berlin, July 2011



The pictures from my first trip to Berlin are online now.

This time, I decided to experiment with post-processing instead of simply uploading the pictures as they came from the camera. Nothing too fancy, just playing with a couple of GIMP plug-ins, essential actions such as adjusting brightness and contrast, and of course realigning pictures (as I take slightly tilted pictures all the time, but not on purpose, as you can imagine). I also used RawTherapee to process the RAW files. It’s absolutely my favourite RAW editor.

I chose this black and white finish because that’s what Berlin inspired me. There’s this strong sense of the past still being present, even in a violent manner, and still it’s somehow very much like a spirit trying to free itself from old considerations. There’s a tension all over the place between legacy and modernity, even if apparently Berliners carefully tiptoe over the dividing line and seem to ignore said tension, or perhaps they are simply internalising the conflict and transforming it into something else; maybe that’s why there are so many sprawls of graffiti and artsy inspiring stuff all over the city, often in the most unexpected corners. Some places were just immensely sad while others were so lively and energising…!

And before you ask: no, I didn’t attempt to sketch anything serious on this trip, as it was quite short and I still had to finish the London-NY sketchbook.

Now that I finished this (I’ve had to postpone it for months), I am finally free to fix Nerdstalgia. I think I found the source of all the troubles I’m having with certain phones (namely that the app doesn’t work at all, grrr). If that doesn’t work I don’t know what else I’ll do! Double grrr!

“London-NY (and back)” for Amazon Kindle!



London-NY (and back)

I finally got round to finish the conversion of London-NY (and back) (my travel sketchbook) to Kindle, so you can now buy an e-book version of my sketchbook at Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Amazon Germany, Amazon Spain or Amazon Italy.

I’m selling it at a special promotional price of $1.99 (around €1.78 or £1.30) which isn’t expensive at all, so if you liked the web version it’s a good way of showing your appreciation… and also having an offline copy to read/look at everywhere you go: the train, the tube, buses, tramways and even planes!

The Kindle version doesn’t have DRM and besides it’s under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike Unported 3.0 license, so you can print it or make a copy for your friends or family members, for example!

You can also flattr the sketchbook, as I added it as a “thing” to my flattr account.

Hope you enjoy the e-book! :-)

My favourite GIMP plug-ins



When I used Ubuntu I normally installed a fancy package called gimp-plugin-registry that came with most of the plug-ins I liked, and then some more stuff that I never used. I had learnt to ignore that, but there was still the pain of not knowing where things were. Some filters went to “Colors”, others to “Light and shadow”, etc. It was extremely hard to remember where each filter was meant to be.

Now that I’m using Arch I couldn’t find any equivalent package but I thought that it was OK–that way I would only install what I really needed to install. In the process I’ve found a couple more plug-ins that I didn’t know about, so it’s been quite productive.

What I’ve done is I’ve written a script that takes care of downloading the scripts from the specified URLs, placing them in the appropriate gimp folder (~/.gimp2-6/scripts in my case), and the best of all is that it also patches them so that all are under the Filters/Photo menu entry. Yay! No more wandering around menus and submenus! My brain is now happy, I can just focus on playing with the pictures!

If you want to use this script just download it (it’s on my snippets repository). You might want to modify it as you wish. There are a couple of TO DO’s but the file is fully functional (as long as you’ve got Ruby installed).

Oh, and pardon my rudimentary Ruby. It’s been ages since I last wrote anything with Ruby. I still don’t know what I want to use. Ideally I’d like something as easy as php but with a syntax that is a mix of Python and Ruby, and lots of easy functional and metaprogramming.

I guess my problem is that I know too much, but still so little, not enough. Maybe if I just knew one language, I would be happy with that one. In any case, I’ll keep on experimenting and try to decide what I like best. Maybe my Japanese side will win over the European one? Who knows!

Meanwhile, be sure to enjoy the filters! Wooo!

London-New York (and back), via Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo and San Francisco



London-New York (and back), via Hong Kong, Macau, Tokyo and San Francisco

The sketch book I mentioned a couple weeks ago has finally been released! To recap (just in case you accidentally ended here and have no context), it is a travel sketchbook depicting our experiences while travelling around the world these past April and May.

I’ve finally settled on building a simple HTML(5) page with a sprinkle of Javascript to navigate the bigger images. Something that gets the job done, which is showing you my crazy sketches!

I might possibly build a Kindle version in the near future, so if you’re a Kindle user, stay tuned ;-)

In the meantime you can read a bit about the background and the “tools” in the project page.

A hack to parse RSS feeds with php



Just happened to assemble this script hack recently, out of the requirement for a quick’n'dirty feed parsing feature:

$feed_contents = file_get_contents($feed_url);
$xml = simplexml_load_string($feed_contents, LIBXML_NOCDATA);
$feed_array = json_decode(json_encode($xml));
print_r($feed_array); // Surprise!!

Now this evidently is not SimplePie or Magpie RSS or whatever feed reader library tickles your fancy*, but assuming the feed will never be malformed, it can save you lots of time! Isn’t that what php was meant for? :-P
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