When was the last time you thought to yourself, “I wish I could turn that photo I just took into a mosaic made from Lego!”? Probably never. But just in case you ever have the urge, now you can turn photos into Lego mosaics with the first official app from Lego. It’s called Lego Photo, and it’s free to download.
User Interface
When you open up the app, the UI is extremely simple; just two great big buttons, one with a camera icon and one that lets you open up your photo library and choose a photo. Obviously on an iPod touch there’s no camera, but you can still Lego-ify the photos you’ve added through iTunes. It’s also very simple to create a mosaic – either take a photo or choose one and it’ll automatically be changed. Once your mosaic has been made, you can just tap it to change the colour of the Lego used.
Results
In some cases, the results of the app are very good – the photo of the hand in the gallery, for example. The colours don’t come out matching the photo’s colours, but they’re not supposed to. As I mentioned before, you can change the colours used if you don’t like the random ones chosen at first. As you can see from the hand photo in the gallery, the app does a good job at picking out small details. However, sometimes this detriments the effect. In a complicated photo, such as the second photo in the gallery, the app can get a bit confused and colour things a bit randomly (That second photo is a house and garden, by the way). Once you have created your mosaic, you can save the result by tapping the ‘i’ icon, and then tapping Save at the bottom. This very quickly saves the mosaic to your camera roll, ready to send in an email, an MMS or however you choose.
Verdict
Even though sometimes the app doesn’t always give perfect results, and it doesn’t have an amazing feature set, but it is free, and so it can’t hurt to download it and give it a go.
Everyone has the same problem with headphones: they get tangled as soon as you stop using them. If you put them in your pocket, or a bag, or anywhere at all, they tangle around each other and when you want to use them again you have to spent five minutes straightening them back out. There are many so-called ’solutions’ to this, but almost all of them require wrapping your headphones tightly around something. This is a bad idea because it can damage the cable inside the wires, which means you’re going to have to buy a new pair.
But now, for iPhone 3GS users, there is a way to stop tangling 99% of the time with no tight wrapping or damage occurring. Olly Farshi, of The Apple Blog has prepared a video tutorial on how to do this:
Hopefully this will stop tangling and damage to our Apple-issue headphones. If I remember to do this each time, that is.
It’s been exactly two months I’ve kept you all waiting for this moment, but it’s finally here: MCSMS Episode 23 has been released! In case you’ve forgotten, access it by adding the episode number (23) onto the end of http://bit.ly/mcsms – so in the rare event you want to share a link with a friend, shove http://bit.ly/mcsms23 in their inbox/message window/throat.
But what’s this? Where is that endearing title sequence with the strange child sitting on a chair and waving? It’s gone, as of this episode. It’s one of the reasons this episode took so long – I’ve revamped the style of MCSMS and created new titles and credits. I hope you like them, but feel free to mouth off in the comments if you hate them!
And finally, you’ll notice a tiny little button in the bottom right of the YouTube player. It’s a rectangle with two letters in it… ‘H’ and ‘D’… Does this mean..? Yes, it does; MCSMS is actually in real High Definition for the first time ever! Just ignore the fact that it’s really blotchy and the image is noisy… I’ll sort that out next time… However, I have one more thing to bore you with: There’s also a new shortcut, if you want to access the HD version directly. Just take your bit.ly URL, then stick ‘hd’ on the end. So this one would be http://bit.ly/mcsms23hd – got that? Only episodes 23 and onwards will have HD, so don’t go trying it with the others!
I’ve been mean and not given you the links… Here you are: Regular Resolution version HD version
Happy viewing!
We all have heard all the warnings, and have been told again and again: Let the battery in your portable devices run a full cycle each time to avoid damaging it. Well, firstly, what does this mean? It means that you should charge the battery right up until it’s at 100% (or tells you it’s finished). Then you should use it normally, ignoring the life left in the battery. The final step is to, once the battery has completely depleted, charge it then and only then. This is easy on something such as a MacBook or Nintendo DS – the MacBook will go to sleep when its battery runs down, sending you a message to plug it in, and the DS will just run out of charge and turn off. But what about the iPhone? Yes, you can charge it up to 100% and then use it normally, but when do you decide to plug it back in? At the first warning at 20%? At the second, at 10%? Or do you just let it run down to zero and turn off? The battery warnings tell us to run it right down to zero. But this isn’t practical on an iPhone, or any other phone for that matter. It’s a phone, which means we need it on permanently, or close to it, so that we can be contacted. That is, after all the whole point. So if you let the battery die, you’ll be left with a useless brick of metal and plastic until you can get back to a USB cable and either a computer or a plug socket. So why not start charging it back up once you get the 10% or 20% warnings? Well, according to the ‘label’, that will eventually mangle the battery; “If you don’t let the battery run down completely, you might cause it to never run down past that point again, lowering the life of your battery forever”, they say. They also call that effect ‘battery memory’ or something like that. So does the iPhone battery have a ‘battery memory’? If you plug it in when it gets to 25%, will it only ever go back down to 25%? I don’t know. Maybe Apple have solved this problem somehow. get back to me in the comments below if you know. There’s also another problem with the iPhone. Because it syncs with iTunes rather than just plugging into the wall, there are many times when you want (or need) to sync it when the battery is only down to 50 or 60% – what about those times? Will the battery be obliterated within three weeks? Again, leave a comment if you know the answer.
So that’s about it for this rant on batteries. As you may be able to see, since my last post the blog has gone through a bit of decoration. It’s not quite finished yet, B&Q ran out of the paint I need.
The long-awaited next episode of Mr Cheese’s Stop Motion Show is finally here! Episode 17.1 was made public around an hour ago. The new episode is a follow-on from Episode 17, and continues the wHiteboard touch theme. This time, the first of a series of featured iPhone/iPod touch applications which I deem to be, well, great! The featured app this time is Flight Control, the awesome aircraft landing game from Firemint! I won’t give any more details, you’ll have to watch it yourself! Have fun!
Episode Statistics:
Time taken to create: Approx. 4.5 hours
Frames captured: 589
Episode length: 1 minute 13 seconds
Medium used: Whiteboard and dry-wipe markers
Episode Trivia:
Despite only being called wHiteboard touch, the device still shows a 3G connection to O2-UK in the status bar.
The status bar does not include the time in the centre.
In the real Flight Control, not only are the aircraft much slower, but they also turn white once their flight path has been drawn.
Although the device goes to sleep at the end of the video because of low battery, at the beginning the battery indicator showed almost 100%.
There are six different coloured pens used in the video.
During the video, the device starts to move round clockwise, supposedly by itself.
That’s right, folks – Mr Cheese’s Stop Motion Show is now available to watch in High Quality. Every single episode, from Episode 1 right through to Episode 22, can be viewed in crisp detail, newly provided by my excellent host YouTube. It’s not the same as watching in HD, mind – my little webcam can’t handle HD video – but stop complaining! It’s not like you’re paying to watch these videos! Anyway, to watch them in crisper detail, click the little HQ box in the bottom right. You’ll have to wait while another page loads, but I assure you, it’s probably worth it.
Well, for the first time in the seven months I’ve had my iPod Touch (2nd Generation), it has just had a major crash incident. And by that, I mean that it wouldn’t do anything at all – except charge. I was playing an innocent game of Wild West Pinball, and it suddenly turned off. I thought nothing of it, because it was running low on battery, and I assumed it had just run out. So I fired up the MacBook, and plugged in the iPod. Nothing. All it did was start charging (don’t you just love that little noise it makes when you plug it in?) and showed the dreaded Connect to iTunes screen. The next step in the Plan Of Action was to restore the device from a backup, but when I tried to connect to it in iTunes, it said that it was locked with a passcode – obviously I couldn’t enter the code because the Connect to iTunes screen was there. So I turned it off and on a couple of times, used a different USB cable and even tried a different MacBook, but nothing was working. In the end, I scoured the Internet for a solution. I ended up on some forum or other, which told me that I should put the iPod into DFU mode*. I tried it out, and sure enough, there was my iPod right there in iTunes! I hastily clicked the Restore button so that I could start using it again. The OS had been completely wiped and so I’m currently re-downloading the next version it would allow me to install, 2.2.1 – I don’t have a backup of 3.0 on the MacBook because I usually sync with the iMac. At the moment, the iPod won’t turn on – it doesn’t have an OS, after all – but at least I can see it in iTunes! The downside to restoring it on the laptop is I don’t have all the applications downloaded onto the hard drive, so I’m going to have to get them again from the iPod. I’m also going to have to wait until it has synced all my 260 songs back onto the iPod before I can use it properly again. At least it works, though! Problem solved!
*How to use DFU mode:
Connect your iPod Touch/iPhone to your computer using a USB cable.
Hold the Sleep/Wake and Home buttons together for about 10 seconds.
Release the Sleep/Wake button but continue holding the Home button.
That was my three-and-a-half word review of Espresso, the HTML/PHP/Java/CSS/etc editor for Mac. That last word is supposed to say ‘missing’, but a left a bit out so that it would match the main point of the review. One of the main selling points of Espresso is the Live Preview feature, which is supposed to give you an always-updating view of the document you’re editing as if it was published. What it actually does is one of two things:
If you’re working on pure HTML, congratulations! Live Preview will work perfectly fine. As you change the code, your view of the ‘published’ page will change almost as soon as you type!
If you’re working on anything else, sorry! Live Preview will not work perfectly fine. As you change the code, your view of the ‘published’ page will stay the same until you press refresh. It will also show a plain text file instead of the finished page.
Of these two options, my Espresso workflow always involves number 2. I use it to edit the PHP and CSS of this site, so I’m not using any HTML. To edit any details I have to edit, save, refresh. It gets rather tedious, but I’m used to it because that’s what I had to do to create my fake websites, before Espresso. And yes, I was sad enough to type out all the code for a website, which to be honest were pretty rubbish, and open it in Safari to see what it would look like if I had a website.
The FTP features of Espresso also let the app down. There are approximately 70 folders in the base Wordpress folder. Using Espresso, FTP is meant to be simple – set up your server settings, then either click ‘publish’ or turn on quick publishing, which publishes every time you save. The first time I tried to upload my WP files, it sat there all night and still hadn’t uploaded any of them. In the end, I had to download a specialised FTP client to upload them. This is not what I expected from a program where “there is no need to leave the app when you need to do some serious remote file management” – I’d say 70 folders is “serious” file management. Once everything was uploaded, and I was down to editing one file at a time, the publishing started to work fine. It was just when uploading multiple files it was a bit flakey.
If that wasn’t enough, when you come across problems like this and want to see if there are any answers, there’s no help file. In the app’s words, “Help isn’t available for Espresso”. So there’s no file, but look! There’s a link underneath: Espresso Wiki. That sounded helpful – how wrong I was. The front page shows some good signs, but clicking a link in the sidebar makes it all go wrong. A lot of the pages show blank space, and there isn’t really a lot of help anyway. For example, I searched for ‘FTP’ to try and find a solution for the multiple upload problem, but all that brought up was a page detailing the release notes (that weren’t even for the latest version, by the way). Fat lot of use that was. The final link goes to the Espresso forums. Finally, someone was speaking some sense! There was no input from Macrabbit, the developer, but there were a lot of users in the same position as me – problems all over the place. It all boils down to one thing: Macrabbit can’t find solutions for the problems with their app, so they’re keeping quiet about it.
I have Espresso for one reason, and one reason only: I was given it as part of the MacHeist bundle I got gifted. I wasn’t really on the lookout for a new web editor, because I didn’t have this site. In fact, I set up the site because of Espresso, in a way. Anyway, back to the point. Although Espresso is a great little editor, I wish MacHeist had chosen a more complete editor (Coda, anyone?) to feature in their bundle, because Espresso still needs some work.
Welcome to my new Wordpress blog, hosted on my very own site! I offer thanks to UrbanGiraffe, who provided the PDF I needed to get designed and ready to upload. I’m still working – this current design is temporary – and I’ll be blogging about the process. Hopefully I’ll be making a corkboard theme. That is, the posts will be posted on a corkboard background. Check back soon to see the progress I’ve made. Oh, and feel free to comment with any tips, questions etc. See you soon!
Well, for the first time in the seven months I’ve had my iPod Touch (2nd Generation), it has just had a major crash incident. And by that, I mean that it wouldn’t do anything at all – except charge. I was playing an innocent game of 
