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Week 19 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.

Week 18 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.

Trackmania is (next to the GTA-series) my favorite game. It’s THE game, if you’re looking for an exciting race game with jumps, loops and other crazy stuff.
Unfortunately, it isn’t available for the iPhone/iPod touch yet. Luckily enough though, there’s an alternative that will run smoothly even on the iPhone 1st Gen., which already tells you that it isn’t the kind of game that has a lot of bling-bling to offer when it comes to graphics. But that isn’t what the game is about anyways. It’s about testing your driving/flying skills and about competition.

I played Trackmania quite a while, was asked to join a clan and realized I’m playing too much. But Trackmania (and now also Jet Car Racing), is that kind of game that you can play if you have just 30 minutes or even 5 hours of time to spare and since it’s a racing game, you don’t miss out if you’re not playing for a while.

I’m excited that I found this game. If you like/d Trackmania on the computer, I’m sure you will like this game for your iPhone/iPod touch.
Here’s a video about the game:

Since I just posted an article on what HDR is and the link to how it’s done, I thought it’d be a good addition to let you know how to set up your camera.

Every camera that supports different exposures can take photos which can be merged into HDR-pictures on the computer. Generally, you’d take a normally exposed photo (0), a slightly underexposed photo (-2) and a slightly overexposed photo (+2) to achieve a good HDR-image result. This can easily be altered manually, but why the effort? The settings for HDR photos with a Canon EOS 500D (for example) are very straight forward. A feature called AE Bracketing will increase the likelihood of getting the exact same photo. This is vital to get a good result. Having to set the exposures manually may end up in photos that vary: clouds that moved on in between shots, for example. Some even suggest a remote control to decrease the chance of accidentally moving the tripod. AE Bracketing helps you very easily to take three shots with different preset exposures, allowing to get photos that were taken in a short amount of time. If you would like to make a HDR-image with more than three photos though, you’re on your own again.

Page 86 of the user manual will help you with the settings.

AE Bracketing on a Canon EOS 500D:

HDR(I) stands for High Dynamic Range (Imaging) and describes ‘… a set of techniques that allow a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas of an image than standard digital imaging techniques …’. This may sound weird, but it isn’t. A photo that was taken, doesn’t always picture the scene as the eye has seen it. There will always be a part in a photo that is either too dark or too bright for the camera, never mind how well exposed it is. And this is where HDR kicks in.

HDR is based on a very simple idea: take three or more pictures of the exact same scene (two will do as well), varying from under- to overexposed and merge them on a computer. This way, a dark space on a photo will get enough detail because of the overexposed photo, while a really bright space will get more detail because of the underexposed photo. Merging the photos will therefore not only give you great color, but also detail. I might add though, that the result is a photo that depicts a mixture between substantiality and fiction. Depending on your settings, the result has the tendency to be the latter, with overly bright colors and extreme details.

A really nice read and how-to from Markus Urban is available at abuzeedo.com.

To achieve this, you have quite a few software alternatives to choose from. The one mentioned in the article: Photomatix Pro, if you don’t mind spending a few € or $ that is. I can’t promise great results, but this program is widely used and it even has a Lightroom plugin, so that you can just select the images, export them, create a HDR-image and re-import them directly. Another possibility is Photoshop. If you know your way around, this should serve you well. But there’s also a free program available, which is called Qtpfsgui and is waiting to be downloaded from here. One great thing about this software besides being free, it’s running on all platforms (Mac OS X, Linux, Windows).

Flickr offers various groups, where people may help you on how to get the perfect HDR-image done. This is an example from me:

Photos as taken:

Underexposed:

‘Normal’

Overexposed:

HDR-image result:

This and more photos from me are available at www.flickr.com/photos/blogable/.

There are only three mobile phone companies for me: Apple, HTC and Nokia – in that order. That said, I actually start to forget about them (having an iPhone). Concentrating on the news about the upcoming version, I almost ignore news on other mobile phones such as the upcoming HTC Desire.

To find out more about this phone, watch the following video (more reviews are available on YouTube):

Flickr is a great place to share your photos. It took me some time before I became acquainted with Flickr, but since I started my Project 365, I’m using this plattform to share my photos.

To view new comments, upload pictures or more, a Flickr client on the iPhone can save precious time and is always available everywhere you take your phone. The official Flickr app though, is missing a few features one may like, such as photos near you and groups. Overall, I get the feeling that the official app is good for checking a new photo once in a while, but not if you intend to do more.

Darkslide instead is a Flickr client that pretty much gives me everything I could need – and more. I’m sure it’s going to fulfill you’re needs as well, but just check it out for yourself. There are both a free and a pro version available, while the only difference of those seems to be the advertisement.

Not being allowed to have a mobile phone with camera at work (because of security reasons), I’m forced to have a secondary phone, next to my iPhone. While this is already troublesome enough, as I can have only one phone registered in the network at a time, emails as well as my calendar and contacts aren’t sorted at all, which makes changes to them quite annoying – until now.

I finally managed to register at the OVI-store and get my old but still well working Nokia E61 to syncronize my contacts and my calendar. Also, push-email is finally working the way I like it. So how did I get it to work?:

1) I’m using Nuevasync, which works very well since I got it, That’s also the reason why I got a premium account. There’s a free trial though, to test the service.

2) Get an OVI account and download the newest version of Mail for Exchange of MfE.

3) Simply follow these steps and there you go, a synced calendar and contacts on all your phones as well as push-email.

I didn’t publish a lot of reviews in my Apps-section, but today I’d like to change that. The reason is my very high mobile phone bill, due to many calls to and from abroad.

Telekom offers an app with which you can easily check how much money you already spent and how many of your free minutes are left. I’m not a Telekom customer but rather decided to get a Simlock- and Netlock-free iPhone with Vodafone instead. Unfortunately, they don’t offer a similar app, as the iPhone isn’t sold by them. Nevertheless, if you’re guessing that someone else made the effort to create such an app, you’re right, it’s called Kosten Check D2.

Before I start writing about why I like it, I would like to pint out that a lot of people rated this app badly for it either not working at all or it having stopped doing so. Said that, to me it works fine thus far – knock on wood.

The app nicely shows you how much money you spent and how much free SMS, MMS and/or minutes you have left. This works because the app connects with Vodafone.de’s QuickCheck. Obviously since the app doesn’t really do much more, one would not see the need for it, but I prefer an app over websites any day. The app is nicely made and as I mentioned, it’s working well with me. So if you are looking for an app that helps you controlling your costs without having to log onto Vodafone’s website, this one may be the one you are looking for.

Week 17 of my Project 365 is now online. Within this project I will make one picture a day and publish it regularly.

Visit my Flickr photostream to find out more.