RSS feed, take three.
01:37

Or... maybe not?

RSS feed, take two.
01:06

Yeah. That seemed to fix it.

RSS feed.
01:05

Each new blog post was causing all the previous posts to appear as new in Google Reader and in Vienna. Looking into it, I found that the pubDate elements were all just ":00", because loathsxome wasn't setting the variables the RSS template uses. So I added them to my customized fulldate plugin.

Notably, ams's blog doesn't have this problem. I assume he's using the default template, which doesn't include pubDate at all, and thus sidesteps the problem - so maybe I should just rip it out.

NewsFire and why you shouldn't use it.
14:34

It looks like Loathsxome's RSS flavour has a bug - new posts cause Google Reader to show all the posts as new (is there some UUID stuff missing?). So I thought I'd try the blog in another feed reader. NewsFire was the first Google hit, and so I downloaded it and fired it up.

The first thing NewsFire did was nag me to upgrade to Snow Leopard (no thanks). It comes helpfully preloaded with a bunch of feeds - e.g. the BBC seemed to be in there. Not wanting any of those I deleted them all - except the newsfirex.com blog. Delete wouldn't work.

Nonplussed, I quit the app, edited ~/Library/Preferences/org.xlife.NewsFire.plist, and removed the entry from the Feeds array. But NewsFire helpfully readded it.

plonk Into the trash it goes. I'm won't use software which displays such arrogance. Nobody should.

Creativity and doing something new.
02:09

Jedrek and I are talking about creativity, and I'm wondering about people who do the same thing over and over. It seems quite boring, though I understand it's important in practice for artists if they want to sell. I remembered this quote from Edward Weston:

Wednesday the exhibit opened. I have had — as last year - applause; real homage - yes, even more than last year — and as before, the men far outnumber the women in attendance and interest. I am pleased, not satisfied, with my prints as they display themselves to me on the wall. No question but that I have gone ahead. And then comes the question, what next? An exhibit is always a climax to a certan period: Once shown, a print becomes definitively a part of one's past; if not actually discarded, it is relegated to a portfolio of old loves, to be referred to at times with perhaps no more than tender memories.

— The Daybooks of Edward Weston

Back to the mines.
01:33

So. A couple of weeks ago (before some travel) I went and bought some 13"x19" Ultra Premium Photo Paper Luster. Epson claims "Highest color gamut available for vivid color reproduction" - examining the profile shows it has the same gamut as the ultra premium special edition photo paper glossy (who invents these names?). In fact I kind of think these are the same profiles, just renamed.

In any case, it's reasonably close to the results of soft proofing. So I've been doing some work with it - first with my Russian Hill pic,

and now with a recent shot of the Golden Gate Bridge (which Kendra and I shot last night):

And they've come out fairly well - in particular the first one has given me a really lovely blue for the sky. They're not perfect, but good. A lot of the colors wind up out of gamut, though. There are a few ways to deal with that.

You can mess around with saturation, but that's going to suck, because you might have to desaturate a lot. Blah.

You can also lighten the image - this seems to bring the color back into gamut. It seems like it'd be useful to have some program which actually compares image and output gamuts and thus could suggest specific things to do to bring the colors all back in-gamut.

Futzing around with the hue could maybe work, but... yeah, dunno about that.

Note that select by color range offers "out of gamut colors", which I spent some time looking for (elsewhere of course), which is enormously convenient. If they're all mostly the same color, anyway. If that gives you two different colors then you probably don't want to process them the same way...

I've been sharpening with PS's Smart Sharpen filer, and printing test strips or sections with different amounts of sharpening. Note that it helps to make your test sheet image the same resolution as your actual image when doing that. I have to say that learning how to sharpen effectively sounds really tedious and uninteresting. I'm tempted to shell out for PhotoKit sharpener just to avoid learning the half-dozen sharpening options in PS and the near-infinitude of behaviors in each.

Anyway, more later (of course). But I'm back.

Porting to Loathsxome.
23:42

So Abhijit Menon-Sen has done some work on Blosxom, and the result is new software called Loathsxome, which I've decided to start using.

I like Blosxom's basic idea: it uses the filesystem rather than a database, and it's small and thus not awfully complicated. But the original author has abandoned it, and I wasn't too keen on the community-supported version (after finding a couple of bugs in it almost immediately after upgrading). ams overhauled the code, and I find the result very approachable. For example, the plugin interface is nicely-defined, though it will likely need some work: Loathsxome runs plugins in alphabetical order, and plugins work directly on the data that interests them, so I expect the resulting dependencies will be kind of a pain in the butt. On the other hand the plugins are generally simple enough that it's easy to see what order things need to run in. Some conventions for where they store data in Loathsxome's run-time state, and for declaring what they'll do, are probably 85% of what's needed.

As an aside, Rael's current blog is entirely Twitter-driven (apparently he is a user experience engineer at Twitter) and is a great example of how medium shapes message: With only 140 characters available, Twitter tends to vacuity and trivia. Or slower IRC.

Christmas day four.
13:10

Finally I have received the Y and LC replacement carts. Now I should have a new set of color inks to try out... Time to get some big paper and play with that.

The next steps.
18:57

First, using up my color inks - Once I receive the replacement Y and LC carts (sigh) I'll rustle up some larger paper and try that out - 13"x19", wooo. That probably won't take too long to finish, I guess.

Then... To the UT14 inks! Finally. Which leads to asking - what papers? Ideally I'd buy a couple of samplers from say B&H and try them out, but I don't have any convenient way to make profiles for them, and Paul's profiles cover only a few papers. I guess I'll ask the guys on Yahoo for some advice.

Printer number two.
02:06

The carts included in my new Stylus Photo 1400 didn't work (I think the yellow and light cyan carts are flaky). So I had to pull my (nearly-empty) old carts out of the old printer and use them instead. I guess given enough tries Epson will get it all right...

A head alignment looks ok, though there are horizontal lines in the boxes. Let's see about another nozzle check... Also looks fine. "Hello again world" is good. Now for Bill Atkinson's Lab test image...

...Which is a wee bit dark, but otherwise on. No excess ink. Oh, what a relief!

And a test print of Duellists came out well - the color's on, and while it's a bit dark, that's almost certainly reflective vs. transmissive display.

So, I decided I wanted to work on my Russian Hill photo after all. The deep blue doesn't soft-proof well; it prints much darker than the screen display. Other colors are very close, though. So I had to make a number of test prints before I got something fairly good - and that has a faint light streak up one side, which concerns me a bit.

On-screen, the print version is a lot lighter than the image in my portfolio. I edited it with adjustment layers - curves, brightness/contrast - and some masking to apply them selectively. It worked pretty well.

So, next step: Ping Epson about the carts, then pack the old printer up and ship it back.