In April I took a break from playing so many games to focus on comics and books. But I still go some play time in.

Civilization V (1 hour):

https://youtu.be/Arqezzfpfso?list=PLEJrELYLxNgVwd6MWpI64II_fu14o3KpB

Cook Serve Delicious (30 minutes):

I just wanted to test how well it would work on my Linux computer with Steam Big Picture. For some weird reason, it didn’t work with the Xbox controller despite the fact that I was able to use the controller with Big Picture and with Poker Night 2 (at least when streaming from the Windows computer). It worked OK with the keyboard. Strangely the mouse was a bit offset from where it was clicking.

Crop everyone else out!

That sweet, sweet bokeh. Although, you have to remember to increase that f-stop as soon as you start moving things out of one plane.

When Danielle brought out a hoodie for Sam a few weeks ago, I knew I had to photograph him in it for the incongruity of him just being a little baby in a hoodie. But I wasn’t sure what look I was going to go for. Then I remembered my snoot. Hooked that up to the flash and boom, no need for Photoshop or anything - this is exactly how it came out of the camera.

I’ve been looking at NAS implementations for a long time. I looked at FreeNAS for a while then OpenMediaVault. But what I really wanted was to be able to take advantage of btrfs and its great RAID abilities - especially its ability to dynamically expand. So I was happy when I discovered Rockstor on Reddit. Here are some videos in which I explore the interface and how to work with Rockstor using a VM before setting it up on bare metal.

What I edited and what I didn’t

Danielle mentioned that it looked like I’d messed around with the image because the strings on Sam’s photo looked fake. Actually, that’s how it was captured in the camera. The strings were reflective and, as I’m about to get into, there was a lot of light in this shoot. There are only two things I did to edit these photos. For both of them, the balloons ended up floating higher than the backdrop. So I had to extend the backdrop digitally. Luckily for other reasons that I’ll get into in the lessons learned section, I’d been trying to blow out the background and make it pure white. In computer terms, I wanted it represented by (255,255,255) or pure white. So it was less of a pain to extend the background to make it look real - I didn’t need to use a clone or healing brush. It was already white so I just painted in white (I actually did something a little more complex, but this is fine for the analogy). For Sam’s photo, the balloons and strings caused a bit of a shadow behind the strings so it’s not pure white there. The strings are so skinny that it wasn’t worth trying to paint over this with white. I tried a couple times and then gave up and reverted it.

A Storm of Swords by George R.R. Martin My rating: 4 of 5 stars

This book had a lot of great scenes - my favorite scenes from the TV show and more. (view spoiler)[I’m INCREDIBLY surprised that the TV show thus far has not incorporated resurrected Catlyn (hide spoiler)] This was where the two versions of this story began to diverge wildly. Overall, I continue to understand why various choices were made given that HBO only has 10 hours a season to get their story told. However, I also now completely understand why people got so upset about the extra rape and anti-women stuff. The reunion scene between Jaime and Cersei in particular was quite a different tone.

Now that Google has released the Nik Collection for free, I wondered which is the best way to convert a color image into a B&W image. So I wanted to compare the results from RawTherapee, GIMP G’MIC Plugin, and Nik Collection in Photoshop. What follows are four videos as go through the processes.

Here are the files: