It's been a while since I've posted about any Blender or animation related stuff on here, having moved onto other pursuits these days. But tonight, I'm going to briefly break my silence to link to the following demo clip for an addon that I've gotta say is pretty awesome looking!
Well done to everyone involved in making this happen! Very nicely done! Simple yet effective 😍
The other day, I went through and did an initial breakdown of the components that would need to be developed as part of my "Picasa Replacement" project, in order to have a workable alternative.
I made this breakdown as a way of going in more level-headed about what exactly I was about to lock myself into (and hopefully convince myself against rashly diving into headfirst), as I was definitely getting "the itch" to just dive right in and build "just the basic photo management tool" part (i.e. "part 4", with "part 1" thrown in to have anything to show, and part 2 inevitably having to be done to before I could even contemplate setting up part 4), with the idea that the actual non-destructive image editing engine would be more of a slow burn afterwards (i.e. the exposure + colour edits would then be ported over as-time-allows, once I had the functional media management tool that I needed first)
(*) I must admit, I have also been slowly digging through Darktable's source code, trying to figure out how much of the iop code can be harvested + refactored into powering the core of my own pipeline (as some of those operations are really powerful in the ways I want, but simply using the sidecar files to pass data to it doesn't seem as viable an option as I had though, given the horrid way it handles storing state - i.e. obscure hashed / binary-dump data in the sidecar files, coupled with only the database actually having the most recent settings once it loads a file once)
Anyway, here is the breakdown notes from my notebook, in case anyone else would like to attempt this (or join in the efforts at some point).
(TBH: Seeing this breakdown is and should be very sobering... It is probably a decent 4-5 years of man-effort - assuming semi-consistent progress at a fast rate gets made even - to get to a somewhat useful point. Hence why I wouldn't really recommend anyone attempts this on a whim!)
This weekend, I've finally been looking into finally transferring across to using the new phone I'd gotten a few months ago (*).
As feared, there are currently a whole bunch of "manual intervention" bottlenecks that are not syncing over and require lots of manual effort to fix. Some of which are really silly and should be rectified by various vendors, while others are historical mistakes coming back to haunt
A discussion with a friend yesterday about portable audio recorders had me thinking about something fun to do while travelling that I only really recently realised I should try doing more of.
That is: Recording short audio clips (in addition to any video clips I'm already capturing, though again... more random clips from different places are again something fun to have) from various places during my travels - and in particular, doing it for any public transit route you end up spending a lot of your time during the trip using.
I just read a very thought provoking blog post from Geoffrey Litt, based on some ideas pitched some 30-ish years ago by Mark Weiser
Blog Title: "Enough AI Copilots, We Need AI HUD's"
https://www.geoffreylitt.com/2025/07/27/enough-ai-copilots-we-need-ai-huds
My (Non-AI Powered) Summary, with additional spin on top:
1) The industry at large is going about this all wrong!
2) The "me too" industry frenzy currently of just piling in on top of the "tasteless" (to paraphrase Steve Jobs) zombie train of building digital versions of Tom Riddle's horcrux-diary is stupid.
I'm with Mark on this - as those who've followed me for long enough know, I'm very much against all this "chat" and "agent" style crap that all the AI-TechBros are currently all still hyping up.
3) HCI + Interaction Design specialists/experts such as myself should really be stepping in and stepping up to meet this challenge head on - to get back in there to steer the ship as it were, instead of being backseat passengers to an almost certain trainwreck - by doing what we do best:
a) Taking a step back, and asking the essential basic questions about what exactly we're trying to really achieve, and **WHY**...
b) Crucially, not letting the existing framing cloud our judgement, and obscuring our own personal ethical + philosophical principles on the direction that we wish to steer technology in
4) What is it that we have to offer then?
A) Show Don't Tell - If your tech is really that fancy, it doesn't need to be in our faces all the time. We shouldn't *need* to be constantly "conversing" with it, like micro-managing a third-rate annoying minion
B) An Assistive Superpower - (Now where have we heard *that* before? ;) Yep, the emphasis here should be on the tech taking care of the mundane stuff, while using its strengths to highlight stuff we can't figure out as humans...
*NOW* we're talking.
i) Harnessing tech to help people do what they couldn't otherwise do
ii) Augmenting + Building Up, NOT Replacing + Subjugating!
These are indeed very much things that are right in my wheelhouse, and problems that I can get behind! (Whereas the "AI" discourse to date has very much been a very alienating, and unpalatable soup of world-destroying slop that make me and countless others sick to our very core)
Thanks for the reminder Geoffrey!
As for the rest of us: It's high time we started getting cracking, and righting this ship! There's lots of work to do!
In the latest installment of my ongoing series of posts about my current "Picasa Replacement Project", a few days ago, I managed to make a few more easy wins:
1) First, by applying some of the simpler manipulations to a "calibration" image, and trying to match the results - This has quickly revealed some starting points for working with the "Tilt" and "Color Temperature" sliders (even if the values obtained still seem a bit odd / weird, and may still need some fine-tuning)
2) It turns out that during an earlier search session, I had in fact managed to dredge up a bunch of very useful posts about the various formats used - especially for the on-disk thumbnails / preview images databases (which will prove useful for having a way to batch-test some of these filter calibrations later (i.e. the thing apparently uses the standard Windows "Thumbs.db" format, for which libraries do exist !!!)
However, to protect all this info, I'm gonna have to make sure I save off all of it on the various archive sites (in addition to having already grabbed copies for my own stash, in case they disappear before I manage to do even that)... So yeah, I'm not going to publish the list of links until I have secured them.
It's taken a few more days than originally planned, but I've just reached a first concrete milestone:
The rudimentary parser for Picasa.ini settings file is now able to fully parse the settings file for the test folder I chose from my collection! (Albeit, this was one of the newer ones that I haven't applied as heavy edits on as some of those in the full collection... but it's still a starting point!)
There's lots more to do still to make it actually useful, including:
* 1) Set up a Git repo for this project, so it can be used by others
EDIT: The code can be found here https://github.com/Aligorith/picasa_lib_utils
* 2) Need to unpack how a handful of other filters I've sometimes used on other photos have their parameters done too
* 3) Figure out what the pixel-level operations some of these were actually doing (i.e. most critical is the "finetune2" filter though that is the hardest; but even something like the "tilt" filter will need translating into a concrete rotation angle)
What follows are a bunch of late night ramblings + musings about things I can't help wondering after seeing seeing a YT rabbithole analysing the relative downfall of Pixar in the last few years...
(Disclaimer: As some of the topics here are apparently contentious, I will be moderating any comments on this post heavily as I see fit... you have been warned)
Following Monday's incident, I have decided to urgently bring forward + accelerate my plans to start developing a replacement solution to my Picasa-based Photo Management workflow. As this incident had highlighted, I do somewhat urgently need to find a reliable automated solution to migrate my almost 2 decade library of non-destructive edits over to a future-proof solution I fully control!
As a result, I made a bunch of promising progress on my Picasa Reverse Engineering project last night - i.e. the first night of a new journey!
This evening, Picasa suddenly started freezing on Windows 10 here. (Yes, it has been officially discontinued for years now... but for my workflow, it is still much better than many of the alternatives I've tried, and so, until I manage to get my own self-built alternative up and running, I'm continuing to use it...)
After a whole bunch of sleuthing (including deleting my old DB and rebuilding it, in case of some database corruption there), it turns out that the culprit was Windows Defender!
TLDR: To fix this, add an exclusion for the following setting (i.e. "Block Untrusted Fonts") for Picasa3.exe
EDIT: Posted too soon! While doing that gets things moving a little at least, a few seconds later, after letting you scroll, it will again lock up, while it now starts another batch of CPU activity. Doh! (Trying again with disabling a whole lot more to see what sticks...)
EDIT 2: Tried a bunch more stuff, but annoyingly each "fix" only seems to last about 5 seconds before Windows Defender catches on and locks down even harder!
Things that didn't go down well:
* Going through disabling *every* checkbox in that infernal program-settings-override dialog. Doing that just makes it worse it seems!
* Switching "Compatability Mode" to "Windows 8" - This worked for about 5 seconds (i.e. longer than when just doing "open + scroll" tests, but still it locked right up!
Ultimately, after an hour of testing this crap, I'm going have to call it a night on this here, and have ended up filing a bugreport with MS about this... hopefully they do resolve it! Gah!
(PS: The project to again try to migrate my personal workstation to Linux ahead of October just got another massive boost again tonight!)
Many people know this old building as the old "Canterbury Public Library" building
For me, this was and always will be: "The Original Home of 'Jade Garden' - Dim Sum Chinese Restaurant" (although apparently, they may have been in one other location before this one IIRC)
I was inspired to write this little oral history down for posterity when stumbling across the photo below earlier today (complete with the caption that showed below it). It was one of the first times I'd come across a decent photo of the place, so thought it was a good chance to write this down.
Canterbury Public Library 19 December 1981. Exterior of the former Canterbury Public Library building on the corner of Cambridge Terrace and Hereford Street. Christchurch Star archive photo
I've just released a minor update to WhioDoc to add some clarity + tweaks around the formatting of range-specifiers, and guidance on how "complex type specifiers" should be documented (i.e. "there is no established standard here yet, as you're probably doing something wrong if you need it")
Links to WhioDoc Repo:
* The Repo: https://github.com/Aligorith/whiodoc
* Today's Updates:
https://github.com/Aligorith/whiodoc/commit/66aba8762073eabd948872e149323f17584a2b87
Key Points:
* Changed the delimiter for "type vs range" parts of the range-specifiers to use "::" instead of "-"
This has been changed after I realised on my current project that the "-" is really not too visible in my text editor (where I usually have "show all whitespace" enabled now - long story for another day), and a more heavy-weight symbol was needed.
i.e. The recommended format is now something like:
(Num :: 0.1 <= v < 0.9)
In other news:
The lack of news / updates here recently is because I'm currently hard at work on a bunch of projects, with a view towards getting some of them in a shippable state. And with that, I need to get back to actually building stuff, and less time talking about building it! Over and out!