Peter Forretbecause eloquence is, like, whatever
After reading all the raving reviews online about the new Apple M1-based Mac computers, and after losing too much time with my overheating MacBook Pro 2013 that’s on its last legs, I caved and bought a Mac Mini M1.
I’m developing a new service and I’ve decided to go all-in on Laravel. Not only am I developing the application in Laravel, and using ready-made components like Laravel Spark (SaaS user management and payment) and Spatie Mailcoach (mailing server), I also deploy to DigitalOcean with Laravel Forge. At 12$/month (for the ‘Hobby’ plan), even if it saves me only 15 minutes of time every month, that’s already worth it.
See this photo below? It was created with one, albeit rather long, command line:
When you’re creating software packages that will be used by other people, you need to get your versioning in order. For PHP libraries, this means: both the version number in composer.json as well as the git tag for Github/Bitbucket. For node.js projects, the version is kept by npm in package.json. It was always too easy to make small mistakes. So I decided to make a bash script <strong>semver.sh</strong> to manage it for me.
I’ve been doing some remote shoots recently, as the photographer obviously, and I’ve mainly used FaceTime ‘Live photos’ for captures. The result of such a shoot is a series of .HEIC files (it’s an Apple thing). Each file is a combination of a low-res 3-second movie with a mid-res image file. The image file, which is the one that interests me, is a 716×1280 pixels heavily compressed one. This is not a lot of pixels to start with in Lightroom/Photoshop. I found that it is possible to upscale such an image to 400% (2864×5120), and use this new big image to comfortably do the post-processing. Let me show you the best way to upscale low resolution photos to high resolution!
I spend a lot of my day in a terminal window, and I love automating stuff with bash scripts. Sometimes those scripts need to do perform actions based on external conditions: location (country), weather, bandwidth speed …
COVID19 has had a huge impact of pretty much everything. For portrait photography, the 6-feet-apart, no-travelling, use-mouth-mask lockdown had made it almost impossible to do an in-person photo shoot. But every limit is also a challenge, Is it possible to do an interesting remote shoot via the internet? The answer is yes. I will give you some tips on how to do this.
This is my 2nd QR Experiments post: make QR-codes from images, also check the first one on QR Roulette!
I started to do some QR code (two-dimensional matrix barcode) experiments recently and this is the first result: I developed an animated QR code, ‘QR Roulette‘ or QRoulette.
Imagemagick is a command-line tool to create and modify image files. It is an essential program if you want to work with media files (just like ffmpeg and sox). I have used it very often in my career and I still discover new applications. This blog post is about one of these experiments. How few pixels does one need to recognise a familiar/known image, in this case a movie poster? I created the Pixel Movie Quiz.
