The Tao of Walking Ridge

Many abstract styles utilize monochromatic colors, or nearly monochromatic. For this painting I used mostly blue and blue-green colors. In the acrylic palette, the blue hue has many options from light to dark, especially when focusing on opaque colors as used in this painting.

Caribbean Shanty - Brian Kelly, 2010 acrylic on canvas board, 9″ x 12″

The image stabilization system in small point and shoot cameras such as the Canon SD780IS used for these photos combined with the high photo capacity of digital cameras and SD cards are great for Kite Aerial Photography. A successful flight can gather a couple of hundred photos. This photo grabbed a shot of a distant shore from the peninsula I was shooting from in Grindstone City. It was cropped from a larger photo rotated to bring the horizon level.

Grindstone City is located at the top of the thumb of Michigan. A small town with a history of mining stone. Some of the grindstones remain, and some are along the shore of the public access peninsula. The peninsula was a great location for KAP with great wind along the shore. The hacked Canon SD780IS worked perfectly. With an interval timer installed, it took photos until the limit was reached and shut down.

Some of the round stones can be seen in the closer shot of the shoreline.

Time lapse settings on a camera or interval shooting is a great option for kite aerial photography. It allows you to set the camera and launch it, then concentrate on flying the kite. The light weight of point and shoot cameras are also perfect for the purpose. But the interval option is not offered on many point and shoot digital cameras any more. Enter the hacker.

CHDK stands for Canon Hack Development Kit. Their Wiki contains resources to gain more complete access to many Canon model cameras. The “firmware updates” are actually temporarily loaded updates that are lost upon turning off the camera. They are loaded through the SD card and specific key strokes. In addition to interval shooting the hack provides other controls for the camera such as motion capture or exposure control not in the standard menu. I was able to install it in a G9 and a SD780IS. The 780 sometimes hung and did not let me shut the camera off with the on/off button (it was a beta version), but popping the battery out and resetting it put everything back to normal. It takes a little persistence, but it was well worth the effort and there is a lot of resources at the wiki.

Wordpress is great software for data entry and link management (stuff important for blogging). But after accumulating a lot of entries, I wanted to download or publish the blog to a pdf format to put on a Kindle for portable reference. I’d lose the videos and MP3s, but I’d have the written word and pictures. Apparently, I’m not alone in this desire.

After checking out several plugins I discovered none that were especially easy to use and compatible with my old version of Wordpress (v2.5). I did find one plugin easy to use for v2.8, but only text, no pictures. Then I stumbled into a very easy and quick method.

In the Mozilla web browser available in Linux (I’m running Ubuntu Hardy Heron) you can print to PDF. So I just popped into the reading settings of my blog, raised the number of pages to show to 400 temporarily, and printed to PDF. In the /PDF directory was a pdf with all pages in my blog. Moving forward, I’ll probably print by year to keep the file sizes smaller.

The pagination left some open spaces, and definitely did not line up with the posts. While one post per page would have been nice, I have no complaints. It was very easy and instantly included all graphics. It is just fine for a personal reference document.