Like the past couple of years, Andras Frenyo has invited me to join him covering the Sziget festival in fullscreen panoramas. Tomorrow is zero-day, but the festival does not really start until wednesday. I'll be leaving for Budapest tomorrow morning.

After long deliberation and consideration it finally has happened. Starting February I'm going freelance. Standing on my own two feet. It's kinda scary, no safety net, but also really exciting. My spanking new website is located at: Skizzie. I say "website" but really I mean "splash". At least until I find the time to design a real website. With any luck this will never happen because I'm way to busy ;-)

I've been working on an automated panorama head for a while (more about that in a later post), and wanted to see how far I could push it. This weekend, the Red Bull Air Race in Rotterdam provided an interesting view, and after a lot of stitching my very first gigapixel panorama was the result.

Click the image for a zoomable version.

June 6, 2008

In november, VRMag returned with a brand new issue. Marco Trezzini chose one of my Sziget panoramas for the interactive index of the issue. The issue got a very nice mention on boingboing. If you just glance over the article on boingboing, it is almost as if John Gaeta is talking about my panorama ;-)

Click the image for the interactive panorama.

This post is a reprint of the VRMag article, including some bonus images.

The good news I have is not the imminent release of Apple's new version of OS X.

You see, I really like my HP TC1100 tablet PC. But it was getting very sluggish, sometimes flaking out on me during presentations etc. Unfortunately, there has been very little in terms of an upgrade to that particular tablet; HP have moved away from the tablet formfactor and only have 'convertibles' these days. And I was not looking forward to Windows Vista on the new machine either. But I finally gave in and ordered a HP 2710p. I am still in the process of transfering my daily life to the new machine, but there's enough to like to this machine. I am keeping the TC1100 around though...

The great news for Mac lovers around the world is, that after a couple of days of use I am starting to get used to the ugglyness and inconsistencies that are Vista. So now that Leopard is picking up some of the same transparency ugliness and inexplicable inconsistency, there is hope for you yet: You'll get over it!

I warned you about this: I am getting famous! I got featured on the front page of the blog of Dutch technology lifestyle magazine Bright!

Here's a couple of videos of me at this summer's panorama conferences, showing the setup I brouight to Bright, as well as some others:

When I've been working too hard on projects that take a lot of energy, I often indulge myself in doing something completely different (though Tessa would argue that it's still behind a computer, so it is not all that different).

Ian Wood showed me some nice workflow tools for Aperture, and I wanted to do something similar with Bridge. Bridge, unlike Adobe Lightroom, is relatively easily extensible; many of Adobe's own applications use javascript to plug into Bridge, and they have a very nice SDK. There's even an embedded browser available in Bridge, based on Opera.

For the third year, I joined Andras Frenyo shooting panoramas at the Sziget Festival in Budapest, Hungary.

I arrived at the third day (the Panotools meeting in Lucerne coincided with the festival), so I missed out on Within Temptation, the only Dutch act of the festival; Even with only one Dutch act, I was somewhat surprised at the number of Dutch people at the festival.

There are so many stories still to tell about Tessa's and my trip, but as an intermezzo I shot this panorama at the Rotterdam Summer Carnival:

Click the image for the interactive panorama.

Today's Rotterdam Summer Carnival attracted just under a million spectators. This makes the Rotterdam carnival one of the largest in Europe.