Creating My Next YouTube Video

Back in 2003 I had the chance to help sail a boat from Hawaii back to Los Angeles. It had just completed the Transpac yacht race and the owner needed help getting back home. I found out about the trip through a sailing friend and jumped at the chance to participate. During the trip I made sure to take a lot of pictures. Now I am using them to put together my next YouTube video where I describe the trip.

I started the video several months ago but then discovered that nearly all of my photos needed to be edited. When you are on a sailboat, it is difficult to see what is level. Back on land you will look at your photographs and wonder why the horizon is at an angle. Other boats look like they are heading uphill in one shot and downhill in another. The reason is that on a moving boat it is difficult to capture the horizon correctly. Over half of my photos capture the horizon and only a tiny fraction of them have the horizon level in the photo.

As a longtime user of GIMP, I am fairly good at using it to correct photos. Basically I have to rotate the image and crop it. Then I save the new image as a different file to keep the original in case I have to go back and do some more alterations. It takes about 2 minutes per photo and when I realized I had a lot of photos to edit, I got rather discouraged. Last night I set aside several hours and spent my time fixing photographs. Now I am ready to begin actually creating the video.

The moral of this story is that if you ever try to take pictures on a small boat, you will probably need to edit the photos. Otherwise they may look skewed once you see them on land.

Photo Editing with GIMP

Yesterday my youngest son and daughter-in-law dropped my granddaughter off so they could drive to Ohio in preparation for a move. I have always told my kids that they are welcome to leave their kids with us but to not be surprised if we take the kids to Disneyland. With COVID-19 that is impossible right now as the park is closed. I still wanted to send them a picture of us in Disneyland.

I searched through my phone and found a picture of the Millennium Falcon in Galaxy's Edge from our most recent trip back in September. Then I had my wife take a picture of me and my granddaughter at my work desk. The rest should be easy. Everyone always talks about Photoshop'ing people into pictures, so how hard can it be.

 My first idea was to use Microsoft Teams. I have been using it for a lot of my conference calls and rather than use my own office background, I have added a picture of the Snowbird tram to my Teams picture library. I figure I could add one of Disneyland, start up MS Teams, and take a screenshot. After playing for a bit, I decided that I didn't like my picture with my hands out reaching for the keyboard. Interestingly enough, my oldest daughter thought that I had used a Zoom background for the finished picture.

Instead I decided to try GIMP. I actually use GIMP quite frequently as it is a great little tool for editing photos and other computer graphics. Lately I have created a bunch of icons for a project at work with it. Unfortunately I have never used it to take a person (or two in this case) from one photo and add them to another. My first stop was YouTube. I watched the process where you add an alpha-channel to the photo with your people and then use the free-hand tool to trace them. Once you have them traced, you cut out the background. That looked really tough and so I searched for another video in case there is a trick to use. The second video showed multiple tricks. First, make the picture really large so you can see the fine edges. You can then drag the free-hand lines to fit the outline of the people better. The second video also suggested going in sections so you are pulling off a bit at a time.

I didn't really care that I did a great job creating the fake photo. In fact I wanted it to be fairly obvious that I had created the picture. Then I stumbled upon some more tricks that make my fake actually look pretty good. One is that I cut out my granddaughter and myself from a fairly large picture. Then I shrunk us down before pasting us into the Disneyland background. Shrinking the photo removed a lot of the imperfections from my cutting out the background. Then I only used a section of the picture above my waist so you couldn't tell I was sitting in my office chair. The finished photo actually turned out pretty good even though I didn't mean it to.

Once I finished the picture, I Air Dropped it to my phone and then texted it out to the family. My oldest daughter replied almost instantly with her suggestion on how I pulled off the faked picture. I got a few laughs from everyone.

Now that I know how to Photoshop someone into a picture, it is not that difficult. I'm sure there are a ton of tricks to make the photo turn out even much better than I did and I encourage you to do some Internet searching. I don't know how to make hair look more natural but figure it is just a matter of patience and choosing a picture with a well-combed head. Today my wife and I will be taking my granddaughter to Paris. Wanna come?

Building a Prototype Web Application

This past week I have been putting together a fairly simple prototype web application. Ultimately I will build it with a back-end database but right now it is about a dozen static HTML pages. This will allow others to look at the design and suggest changes or refinements before we spend a lot more time and money on the finished internal application.

Putting together static HTML pages is something I did many years ago while working as a consultant. Back then I would hand code all of the HTML as automated tools didn't really exist. Sure I could use something like Dreamweaver from Adobe but the underlying code was difficult to maintain in a non-Dreamweaver environment. That was close to 20 years ago and so I did a quick survey of HTML tools to see if there is something that would work for me.

I must have gone through 30 different tools and none really worked. Some had a steep learning curve and wouldn't quite create the look I wanted. Others were just plain awful. Ultimately I decided I didn't need anything too fancy and used a word processor to create my initial design. Then I had it save my file in an HTML format. That sort of worked, but not quite. Next I pulled out GIMP and did a lot of layout work with the graphics. Then I did an few Internet searches and brushed up on my cascading stylesheet (CSS) skills. Once I had a design I liked, I tweaked the look by hand editing the HTML using my favorite text editor: vi.

Now I am building out a few follow-up pages simply by copying the original page and making a few edits. I don't need to build more than a dozen pages to help my colleagues understand what I am trying to build and so this process works fine. If I needed to build a more complex prototype with a lot more pages, I might want to take the time to learn one of the more complicated tools. Until then, my current process seems to be working fine.

The Right Tool

This morning I took my son to Snowbird and we arrived at 6:45 am. He is on the ski team and has early morning training all of this week and the next. That means he gets to race down the mountain 2 hours before the general public is even allowed to load the lifts. In the past I have just gone to sleep in the car. One of my Christmas gifts was a set of climbing skins to go with my super fat powder skis that also have backcountry bindings. So instead of sleeping in the car, I got out of the car and hiked up the mountain. It has been difficult hiking in the past because I have had to carry my skis and hike in my hard-plastic ski boots. Having the right equipment makes things so much easier.

As I have had a lot of time off because of the Christmas break, I have also been working with my oldest son to fix his car. He is driving a 1996 Jeep Cherokee that keeps misfiring. This problem was occurring when we purchased the vehicle and the dealership that sold it to us was trying to narrow down the problem before we took over. They replaced the spark plugs and distributor cap. They also gave us a fuel filter that we had to install. We also replaced the fuel injectors thanks to a local salvage yard. While things keep getting better, we are still not solving the problem completely. I have narrowed it down to 2 possible problems: The fuel pump or a broken valve spring. Unfortunately I don't have the tools to figure out either one. So this afternoon, I will head to my local auto parts store and borrow a fuel pressure gauge and a compression test gauge. Both are necessary to further diagnose the problem. Having the right tool is very important for me to finish this job.

Computers, tablet computers, and smart phones are another area where it is important to have the right tool. While you can edit an electronic photo with a paint program, it is significantly easier with a photo editing program like Adobe's Photoshop or the open source program GIMP. So if you find yourself taking a lot of time to do something on your computer, tablet, or phone, you might not be using the right tool. Chances are, there's an app for that.

One Man's Junk is Another Man's Treasure

Yesterday I decided to clean out my food storage area in my basement. As a scoutmaster I live by the Boy Scout motto of "Be Prepared." This means I have a store room of about two to three months worth of food. The idea is that if there is a major snowstorm or a swine flu outbreak that causes me to be quarantined, I won't run out of food.

I started organizing things and realized that I was running low on a few items. My only problem was that spending a bunch of money to augment my food storage is not in the budget this month. So I decided to try an experiment. I set the goal to raise $50 from some other means than my usual computer consulting. At the end of the day I wanted to be able to add $50 of canned goods to my existing supply.

I knew I had a set of old studded snow tires in my garage taking up space. The car they were used with was sold a while ago and so I decided to list them on an online site. I first thought about eBay but didn't want to pay their fees nor did I want to have to worry about shipping them to some far-flug location. I thought about craigslist because it is free and has the ability to define items by location as well as category. In the end I decided on KSL which is a local news company that has TV, radio, and web outlets. They allow you to post classified ads for free. More importantly they are generally only used by people in my geographical area.

I logged onto their website and saw that they currently have close to 3,000 wheels and tires listed. My heart sank. Who was going to look through that many listings for a pair of old snow tires. I decided to give it a try anyways.

I went to the garage and pulled out one of the tires. I made sure to hose it off so it looked clean. I let it sit in the sun while I ate lunch and then took a picture of it with my iPhone. I made sure to get in close so you could see the condition of the tread as well as the gnarly metal studs that really grip the ice. I pulled the picture off my iPhone and shrunk it down to 640x480 pixels using Gimp (KSL's requirement for picture sizes). Then I attached the photo to my ad where I talked about how those tires could climb a greased telephone pole. I then went back to work with crossed fingers.

At 7pm last night I got a call from a guy looking for tires for his daughter's car. I explained that these tires had been used for my daughter's Buick and that they were very safe when driving in the snow. With all the skiing we do, we never got stuck with those tires. An hour later he came by the house, looked at the tires, and paid me with cash.

As soon as his car was down the street, I jumped into mine and headed to the local supermarket where they were just finishing up their case-lot sale. I managed to pick up the items I needed to round out my food storage. Now it is time to go through my house looking for other junk to unload. Maybe I can get myself a new TV.

GIMP: A Free Photoshop Clone

Recently I was asked to provide an up-to-date family picture. Those that know me know that I hate taking family portraits. I prefer to get the family together on vacation or while we are skiing and have someone take a quick snapshot. Well it has been a while since we have all been together and I don't really have a recent picture of us. I am reminded of the scene in "Cheaper by the Dozen" where the father, played by Steve Martin, tells everyone that he will just Photoshop the absent oldest child into the family portrait they are about to take. The most recent portrait we have is missing our oldest daughter who is away at school and so I was hoping I could just Photoshop her into the picture.

The only problem is that Photoshop is a $700 piece of software. Luckily there is a free alternative called GIMP. It is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. That covers about all home computing environments.

GIMP is an acronym that stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. Seeing as "gimp" is a word that is generally a friendly yet derogatory term we use with one of our friends who has recently injured an arm or let, I would probably have used a different acronym. However that is is the name the program was given and it is anything but a handicapped tool.

One of the first uses you may have for GIMP is to remove that annoying "red eye" effect you get when taking a picture of someone using a flash. Simply go into the "filter" menu and under "enhance" is an option for red eye removal. Doing a quick scan of the other filters reveals a number of really cool effects that you can add to your photographs. Just be sure to always work on a copy instead of the original. We have one screwed-up family picture where we tried to remove our dog's "green eye" effect (people have red eyes but dogs have green eyes when their pictures are taken with a flash) and didn't save a copy of the original.

There are a lot of classes, books, and Internet tutorials devoted to Photoshop. A lot of this teaching material translates to GIMP because the two programs are so similar. However there are some differences and so you will want to see if there is a tutorial specifically built around GIMP first. One of my favorite GIMP-specific tutorials shows how to make really spectacular buttons to use on a website (one is shown below).



My oldest college-aged daughter was doing some work for me this summer and I taught her some basic GIMP tricks. At the end of her day, she would hang around on the computer after work to do some image editing for herself. She built complex animated graphics of ballerinas dancing around the screen as well as collages of all her friends. When I asked her what she thought of GIMP she told me that she had been searching for an image editing program and was glad I had showed it to her.

While it is fairly easy to steal yourself a copy of Photoshop and avoid paying that $700 price, it is still stealing. Since a free version of a comparable product exists there is no need to become a software pirate.