Jacken's Blog » Life and times of Jacken

Prepare images for blogging on iPad

Jacken — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 10:36:21 +0000

Image editing for blogging on iPad

When I first got my iPad I thought it was great for consuming media, but not for creating it. But after a year I do most of my writing and blogging from my iPad. With a connected Bluetooth keyboard it’s an excellent tool for writing. No spinning hard drive, no fan, just comfortable silence. And with apps like Writing Kit and Blogsy, I can do all the things I need for blogging. But handling images isn’t that easy. Here’s my tips on getting your images in shape directly on your iPad.

Color correction

My favorite image editor is Snapseed, who got Apples iPad app of the year award 2011. I’m not so interested in the filters, but the image editing features. To adjust brightness, ambience, contrast, saturation and color balance, you use the Tune Image feature. You select what you want to adjust by dragging up and down, then you set the amount to adjust with a left and right swipe.

Crop

Snapseed has a crop feature that is equally easy to use. There’s also an excellent sharpening feature.

Change size

Here’s the snag. There is no resize function in Snapseed. So you need to save your corrected image to the photo library and use another app for that. There are some free apps available, but I like to use Photoforge2 for that task. It also have some great features for advanced image editing, but I think that for most of the editing, Snapseed is faster and easier to use. The apps aren’t expensive, and you do remember what you paid for Photoshop, don’t you?

Upload the image to the blog

When the image is finished, I use Blogsy to upload the image. I then export my markdown file to HTML from Writing Kit and paste it into Blogsy.Now all you have to do is to post it, and feel happy about doing it all on your iPad.

So the blog is back in business.

Jacken — Wed, 21 Dec 2011 02:21:35 +0000

My blog has been down for almost a year. But now I’ve moved it to a new hosting service that looks good so far. The blogs theme is plain vanilla until I have the time to fix it up. But all old information should be here.

iPad, useless expensive toy?

Jacken — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 01:13:54 +0000

After buying my 32G 3G iPad I was a bit worried that it would become yet another victim of my impulsiveness. The first day with it, I was convinced that I’d get bored within the week and having it ending up on my mountain of cool but never used electronics. But during the weeks I’ve used it, it’s becoming indispensable. Checking out Twitter with Twitter for iPad. Reading news on FlipBoard (which has the most beautiful design of all news readers), answering mails, making plans with OmniFocus for iPad, chatting with IM+ and using the calendar (naturally synced to Google Calendar) for booking appointments. It’s now an essential part of my daily life. I’m also starting to hate the noise of my Macbook. With the iPad, it’s really quiet.

Problem with flickering screen on iPad fixed in iOS 4.2 beta 2

Jacken — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 22:23:07 +0000

I’ve had problems with my new iPad, where the screen would flicker when the brightness was set to a low setting. Very irritating. My first fear was hardware problems but after upgrading to the latest beta version of iOS, 4.2 beta 2 the problem is fixed! Yay! No need to replace my beloved iPad.

Update A bit too fast, the problem remains.

Terratec H7 and EyeTV on Macintosh

Jacken — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 21:20:25 +0000

I just wanted to be able to record some TV shows from my DVB-C (ComHem) so I got myself a TerraTec H7 USB DVB-C/T receiver that supposedly works with EyeTV. I already had EyeTV, and the box contains a CI module so I could receive coded channels as well. But talk about a flaky product. The picture pauses every 10 seconds, both in DVB-T and DVB-C mode. When changing channels in DVB-C mode the program info shows up, but when checking the listings, no EPG info is available. I tried to reinstall (and delete all preference files), but the problem persists. I tried it on two different machines, so it’s not the machine. So now I have an expensive USB paper weight.

Should have checked for MythTV support before I bought it. But no…

Update

I’ve just booted my machine in Windows 7 and used Terratec’s own software. Works without a problem, so the fault is ElGato’s EyeTV software.

Trying out an iPad and liking it

Jacken — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 17:53:07 +0000

My first try to write on an iPad and I’m smitten. Hopefully I’ll get one next week.

Why oh why no Skype through Fring on iPhone

Jacken — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 16:36:42 +0000

How very irritating. Fring used to work well with iPhones push notification. Now that they dumped Skype functionallity, I have to use Skype. And you need to start the program and hope that it’s not pushed out of memory, because then your offline. Very crappy…

XEN Server

Jacken — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 11:55:31 +0000

I’ve just finished setting up a XEN server. I moved this blog to ipage.com, but it was horribly slow so I might as well host it myself. Thank god for 100mb internet line from bredbandsbolaget. Next step, trying to setup a MythTV backend. I tried to set up a DOMU with Smoothwall firewall but failed miserably.

No migration for Google Apps Gmail

Jacken — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 20:02:43 +0000

Just wasted a good half hour trying to find a migration tool in Google Apps Standard Edition. After a lot of searching, I found out that there is none. Tip to Google. Write this in your guide!

So back to proven trusted tools like IMAPSync

DNS problems with Snow Leopard 10.6

Jacken — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 22:49:28 +0000

I’ve had some bizarre problems with my DNS today. I checked /etc/resolv.conf but everything looked ok. Checked the settings dialog for my network and at first glance, that one seemed ok as well.

But normally there should be a dimmed version of the DHCP assigned values there.

Just select the empty one and press the minus sign. Sneaky little bug there!

Save your settings and you should be good to go.