Monthly Archive for January, 2011

TV Show scoring: the decline of True Blood

Published on January 29, 2011 in TV. Closed Tags: .

I got the DVDs of the 3 True Blood seasons for Christmas and when I started watching , I really got into it. Sookie is adorable, Jason is charming with a low IQ (and strongly resembles George W), there’s the interesting parts of how vampires and humans live together, with some comments on racism and homophobia. Season 1 was just great, and I was telling everyone around me to start watching it too.

Then, during Season 2, the quality seemed to drop. The dialogues seemed ridiculous at times, the script didn’t go anywhere, and then at the end, there were two really silly episodes. I’m currently watching Season 3, and still I am frequently disappointed by the acting, the lines, the plot. So I thought: wouldn’t it be nice that if you start watching a show that has been around for some time, several seasons for instance, that you could get some idea about what quality to expect. Is there data for this? Yes, my favourite TV show portal TV.com has collected scores for each episode from its users. All I needed was some way to summarize and visualize it. So that’s what I made.

http://tools.forret.com/tv.com/

TV Show scores for True Blood

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Shooting portraits of strangers

Published on January 13, 2011 in photography. Closed Tags: .

Shooting Portraits of Strangers
This was quite a discovery: Danny Santos has been shooting portraits of complete strangers on Orchard Road, Singapore. The story was featured on JPG Magazine with some beautiful examples and that post pointed to his Facebook album, which pointed to his blog post about it. This phrase he wrote made me think: “Suddenly, strangers were no longer unwitting victims subjects, they were now willing participants … and that gave different life to the photograph, and a new awareness and dimension to my idea of shooting in the streets.” Touches a weak point of mine: asking strangers for permission to photograph them.

What I like a lot about the photographs is their shallow depth-of-field. He talks about his material: a Nikon D300 with a 85mm f/1.4 lens. That’s a $999 lens, so one can expect some good results.

Let’s see what that looks like in my depth-of-field calculator: there is one picture on his blog that shows him taking a picture of someone at +- 2m away, so let’s use that as distance. If we fill in the right values (1.5 crop factor for a Nikon D300, f/1.4 aperture, 85mm focal length, 2m distance, 3:2 aspect ratio) we get this:

Depth of field calculation
0.019 mm Circle of confusion
1.99 m Near limit (anything closer will be too blurred)
2.01 m Far limit (anything further will be too blurred)
2.8 cm Total (1.4% of the subject distance)

portraits of strangers: depth-of-field

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How to delete old data in Google Calendar

Published on January 8, 2011 in Google. Closed Tags: , , .

I use Google Calendar as a vital piece of milonga.be: me and some 20 other editors keep an up-to-date calendar of tango events in Belgium. We’ve been doing that for the last 3 years, so there was a lot of old, no-longer-relevant data in the agenda. The way I use the calendar on the site is that I download all the appointments as a .ICS (iCal/gCal) file and then format/display it with another program. But with all the old data still present, that ICS file had grown to more than 1MB, and this size slowed down the updates (I download the whole thing every 30 min). So I decided to delete all old data (2007 – 2009). Not that easy.

Google Calendar’s web interface doesn’t really allow you to bulk delete. There is no way to select several dozens of appointments and delete them in one go. But I found a way that works (suggested here):

  • Install Mozilla Thunderbird (desktop email client)
  • Install Mozilla Lightning (calendar plugin for Thunderbird)
  • Install Provider for Google Calendar (Gcal plugin for Lightning)
  • Look up the Google Calendar Private iCal URL of your calendar (something like http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/...%40group.calendar.google.com/private-.../basic.ics)
  • Add it to Thunderbird with FILE/NEW/CALENDAR/NETWORK/GOOGLE CALENDAR
  • You now have a read/write connection to your Google Calendar!

Select the appointments you want to delete, hit the ‘Del’ button and see them disappear one by one.