Pogging, Photo processing and sorting, pano websiting

This morning I started cutting out pogs in Photoshop, then went to church.

When I got home I continued to cut out pogs in Photoshop, and finished in the afternoon.

After updating my Pog website I sorted and processed some more photos I'd taken recently. I also bought some spider books since I only have insect books at the moment.

In the evening I downloaded Pano2VR, which (unlike Pano2QTVR) allows you to set the level of JPEG compression when converting to cube faces. I also downloaded Hugin and the perl Panotools script package, which includes a equirectangular to cube face conversion script for use with Hugin. However, the Panotools-Script-0.25 package looked difficult to install/use, so I didn't bother trying that. I checked the Hugin GUI and it didn't seem to have any facility for converting to cube faces.

I tested cube faces generated by Pano2VR against cube faces generated by PTGUI, using the same settings in both. I wanted to see if Pano2VR would generate sharper cube faces, as the QTVR I had previously produced in Pano2QTVR (Pano2VR is the sucessor of Pano2QTVR) seemed much sharper than cube faces generated in PTGUI.

However, I found that the 2000px cube faces generated by Pano2VR and PTGUI were virtually identical (the Pano2VR ones were a few KB larger in total, I didn't notice any quality difference).

So next I tried converting to a QTVR in Pano2VR, Pano2QTVR and PTGUI, all with the same settings - 460px cubefaces 1 subtile (i.e. not subtiled), and 70% quality. The Pano2VR QTVR was slightly softer (and had a smaller filesize) than the PTGUI QTVR. Then the Pano2QTVR QTVR was much sharper (but also with many more artifacts and a larger filesize) than both the Pano2VR and PTGUI QTVRs.

So at least I now know it is not that PTGUI is producing 'soft' cubefaces, it is just something to do with Pano2QTVR that it is producing excessively sharpened cubefaces. Possibly its is down to the stitching interpolater used - Pano2QTVR uses spline36 while Pano2VR uses Mitchell. PTGUI doesn't seem to specify a default interpolater or allow you to choose one when converting to cube faces.

After this I did some work on my pano website. Unfortunately someone on the jQuery website gave incorrect information about what was returned by a function, so I spent quite a while trying to debug why my code wasn't working.

I also had an email from an Amazon seller saying that the book I ordered, they don't actually have. So I ordered it from another website instead (which was more expensive, but cheaper than the now cheapest one on Amazon). I also saw that the seller of the book I was now purchasing from them had a website, so I went on their website to see if it would be cheaper to purchase directly from their website instead of through abeBooks.

But they didn't have the book on their website, so I just bought it from them through abeBooks. I did find a photography book on their website though, so I bought that as well.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Toast Sandwich; Cup o' Tea.
Dinner: Chicken and Rice Stirfry; Noodles; Soy Sauce. Pudding was a slice of Apple Strudel with Custard and Squirty Cream.
Tea: Breaded Ham with sliced Raddish, Mustard, Mustard Cress, and Iceberg Lettuce Sandwich; Banana; Home-made biscuit (actually tasted like swiss roll crust); Rocky; Cup o' Tea.