A couple more hours of applied effort and I had a macro that looped through all the images in a directory tree and laid them out in Excel. I spent the next four days surfing the web and handing out files.

The first time I did any programming it was more than likely a “Hello World” script in ASP. However, I do remember doing something very similar to what Kan did to automate a process which a fellow employee spent hours a day doing.

I worked for a brokerage and each and every day a fellow employee had to take about 100 stock ticker symbols and run reports on them and input that data into an Excel spreadsheet. This was circa 2000. This went on for nearly a year before I caught wind of what they were doing. On a break or at lunch I was talking to this person and they explained to me what they did nearly every morning for two hours. I was astounded.

When I got back to my desk I fired up my code editor (EditPlus I believe) and in about an hour I had built a very simple PHP script to pull the relevant information for all 100 stock tickers using Yahoo! Finance’s CSV creator. Then a simple Excel macro formatted the data the way that this person had been doing. In all it took the script and macro about 45 seconds to run and create an email with the new data as an attachment.

It wasn’t long after I shared this workflow with my boss that the person that had been doing that job needed to figure out something else to do or they’d probably be of little use to the company. Whoops. Not my intention.

Another co-worker and friend at the time bought me a sticker from Thinkgeek and stuck it to the side of my computer. It read “Go away or I’ll replace you with a very small Shell script.” (Now available in T-shirt form.)

There has been a lot of hoopla lately about the fact that people believe that everyone should learn to code. Some are taking that quite literally to mean that everyone should learn how to build applications or websites. I don’t take it that way. I think everyone should learn the “languages” that their applications speak so that they too can take advantage of working smarter rather than harder. If you are tasked with using Excel all day become the very best at it you can be. And that means being able to program macros. If you are asked to use multiple applications on a Mac learn how to use Services or Automator to do some of your reoccurring tasks for you.

This type of programming won’t put you out of the job. It will free you up to get more work done. To use your time to do other things rather than the same thing every single day. If you do the same task more than once a week you should seriously consider learning how to automate it.

Remember my iPhone macro lens? If not, here is how I made it and here is a video demonstration of it in action. My solution to the iPhone’s lacking built-in lens did what I wanted it to do, but it wasn’t a very elegant solution.

The team at Griffin Technology, the company that churns out the best accessories for Apple products, has recently released an iPhone 3G case that has a built-in macro lens.

The case looks amazingly simple and the lens itself seems to do just what it says it will, all without getting in the way.  When, and if, I upgrade to an iPhone 3G – this would be the first accessory I buy for it.

Source: Griffin Technology: Clarifi.

I was wrong about the marsh, but I was able to get a few good photographs anyway.

But, that’s ok.  I fully expect to be wrong now and then.  I spent maybe only about 30 minutes pushing through some thick brush in order to get to the place I wanted to be to find nothing but a small trickle of a stream.  I’ll get over it.

Hmmm, where to shoot next?  Maybe it will be a good spot, maybe not – but I’ll keep trying regardless.

Tiananmen Square

Mike Stimpson does an excellent job recreating classic photos using Legos. Some of the most notable photos include:

• Tiananmen Square (pictured)
• V.J. Day Times Square
• Lunch Atop a Skyscraper

More please.

(Source: Classics in Lego – a photoset on Flickr)

More or less testing

Another one of the examples from the video. Oh, and also a test.

The photo I took in today’s video demo of the iPhone macro lens.

Well, here it is.

Sorry for the quality of the video, it could have been better, but I wanted to do it quickly and so I used an old iSight I had laying around, sort of propped it up on my coin collector thingy, and, well, here is the result.

I’m still anxious to create a wide-angle lens for the iPhone, I just haven’t found the right materials for doing so. I’ve toyed with a few things that I have laying around, and even rummaged through my brother-in-law’s basement to see if I could find something there. So far, no dice. If anyone has any suggestions, or knows of something someone else created, please share a link to that in the comments.

What do geeks do when they have a little free time on their hands? They accessorize! On Sunday I found myself wanting to play with my iPhone’s camera. Since getting the iPhone, and even more since I because posting mobile photos to Flickr, I’ve wanted to try out new ways of distorting, enhancing, and affecting the images capture by the iPhone.

The make-shift macro lens

A few years ago one of my digital cameras just decided it didn’t want to work anymore. It wouldn’t turn on. Actually, to be more accurate, the thing wouldn’t turn off. Turns out that there was a small screw inside that busted up the innards. No idea how that happened.

Well, like any self respecting geek I kept the camera’s body around for a few years always thinking I’d do something with it eventually. You know, the same way car enthusiasts keep around old Corvette parts thinking one day they’ll rebuild those. That’s me with electronics – only, I’m horrible at rebuilding things, but fantastic at ripping them apart.

I figured that inside of this extraordinarily complex device I would surely find some way to manipulate the way the iPhone took photos. Turns out, I ended up with a fairly decent macro lens for the iPhone.

The macro lens on the iPhone

Obviously this thing isn’t built for the road, but it works in a pinch. I just took some double-sided tape, wrapped the lens from the camera’s eye-piece in it, then used a paper clip to fasten it to the iPhone. Yeah, I know, prize winning engineering indeed.

I am not sure how I’ll end up using this, but I’m glad that I know have it in my bag should a reason to use it arise. It does a fairly good job and I’m happy with the outcome. I’m looking forward to finding a way to build a fish-eye lens now – and I’m open to suggestions on how exactly to pull that off.

The obnoxiously large light

The iPhone doesn’t have a built-in flash. Some mobile phones with cameras built-in actually have a pretty bright flash, but the iPhone has none, zip, zilch. I’ve never really cared about that, but I can see why when people switch from a phone that has it would complain.

Last year at SXSW’s keynote featuring Will Wright’s demonstration of SPORE (which has a release date of September 7, 2008 that I’m excited about) Adobe graciously gave away some odd little lights. Each light has a small handle on the side that lets you crank it up to power the light. Pretty neat little gizmo, so I fastened it to a mount that came with my old iSight and voila, instant light for the iPhone. Here is a photo of it.

This isn’t anything special, of course, and the results are a bit meh. But I thought it good enough to use when I might need it. The iPhone is terrible in low-light conditions so anything helps.

Conclusion? The lens is going in my laptop bag and the light will probably stay home.

Update March 21, 2008 — I’ve now recorded a video demonstration of the macro lens in action.

This is the 500th post to cdevroe.com.