Picnic and ballpark plastic

I'm testing out this compostable picnic flatware. The Ultra Home package came in its own tray made of the same material. I don't know what the cellophane is made of, and I'd like to know.

I can understand why they serve beer in plastic bottles at the ball park - glass is breakable and can be a more effective weapon - but I was nonetheless shocked. I didn't realize they were plastic until after I bought them. On the plus side, they're recyclable plastic, and the open beer cups aren't.

Reminder: Undo key

In my last post about photo editing, I talked about cropping.  I often try cropping a photo several different ways.  The Reset function on Picnik is great for this.  Crop, reset, crop, reset, crop – oh yeah, this one looks good.

And that led me to add this reminder:  The best keystroke combination in Windows is Ctrl-z, or Undo.  I believe on the Mac it’s Option-z. You can pick it off the toolbar or menu of most programs, but once you get in the habit of using the keys you’re much more likely to take advantage of the command. You will love it.

Alas, Undo generally doesn’t work in web browsers (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox, etc.). It does work in email programs, but generally not webmail. (If you use webmail – gmail and Yahoo, for example – you should experiment to see if it works.)

Photos for the web (warning: geekiness)

I’ve been playing around with Picnik, a web-based photo editor, at picnik.com. There’s no download or installation required, it’s free, and it’s really easy to use.  You can pay more for some fancy stuff, but for basic photo editing the free version is dandy.  I used it while we were on vacation because I didn’t have all my software with me, and it was very slick.

First, a little general information for photo editing:

1. Cropping photos almost always makes them look better.  When you crop people pictures, go close.  You may not need the person’s shoulders, for example, and you can crop almost to the top of a person’s head.  Women often look better cropped above breast level, unless they’re quite slender.  Ditto for men above pot bellies.
2. Don’t use photos that are wider than the column you’re placing them in on the web page.  For this blog, I make my photos no wider than 500px.
3. File size is important.  You should try to keep the file size under about 40KB, less if possible.   Note that dimensions in pixels and file size are different!  Often an uploaded photo will be resized to fit in the browser window, but it will retain the original file size.  That’s the reason you sometimes see online photos taking for…ev…er to load.

The three main things you’ll do are cropping, resizing, and saving compressed versions (in that order).

Cropping

1. Upload the photo by following the instructions on the Picnik site.
2. Select Crop from the top menu.  A crop box appears over the photo.
3. Drag the edges of the crop box as needed.
4. Click OK.

Resizing

1. After cropping, select Resize from the top menu.
2. Enter the width you want to resize to, and make sure the Keep Proportions box is checked.
3. Click OK.

Compressing and saving

1. Click the Save and Share tab.
2. Enter a file name.
3. Leave the dimensions and format alone.
4. Move the slider on JPG Compression Quality so that the file size shown under the slider changes.  Smaller than about 40 KB is better, and because these are displayed on the very low-resolution web, don’t worry too much about the description under the slider.  If you were saving these to print it would be important, but here it isn’t so much.
5. Save the photo on your hard drive.  Now it’s ready to be uploaded (for example, to a blog page).

A sickening piece of news and a request for action

I just learned that searchers looking for Air France flight 447 off the coast of Brazil kept finding what they thought was debris from the plane but was instead plastic garbage.   Read the CNN article.

The 24th International Coastal Cleanup is set for September 19, 2009.  It’s sponsored by the Ocean Conservancy.  Sign up! It doesn’ t matter if you don’t live near an ocean.  Here in Kansas I can go to Clinton Lake, about 5 miles away, and work on shoreline cleanup there so that trash doesn’t go out the spillway and into the Wakarusa River, and ultimately into the ocean.

From the Ocean Conservancy site:

How You Can Help

Marine debris doesn’t just fall from the sky, it falls from human hands. From urban trash to abandoned fishing gear, marine debris is one of the world’s most pervasive marine pollution problems. We can all make a difference.

• Volunteer for the International Coastal Cleanup every year on the third Saturday in September.
• Join Ocean Conservancy’s online community to learn more and stay up-to-date on ocean issues.
• Take your commitment year-round: don’t litter, and pick up litter you see. Keep the ocean clean, and save the life of a marine mammal or bird.
• Use reusable cloth bags for groceries and shopping instead of disposable plastic bags (including mesh bags for produce).
• Use reusable beverage containers.
• Bring reusable or biodegradable food packaging to work or on day trips rather than using styrofoam or plastic containers.

Hawaiian beach strewn with trash, Kamilo, HI. Photo courtesy of Ocean Conservancy.

Pig pile

At Shelburne Farms, this pile of pigs kept reforming itself over and over. Some of the pics are blurry, but the formation was too good to resist posting.

Plastic update

Amazing. We haven’t acquired any new plastic in at least four days.

Plastic collection

I’ve been taking pictures of any plastic I’m acquiring each day.  Some gets reused, some has to be thrown away.  We’re on a road trip at the moment, which skews this experiment slightly.  If I were home, I’d be acquiring fewer plastic lids and water bottles, but more packaging.

I’m starting to carry small paper bags with me to the grocery store so I can get mushrooms and other small vegetables without plastic packaging.  Most grocery stores don’t have paper bags in the produce section any more.

At the Dairy Queen somewhere west of Cleveland. I might reuse these items, at least the spoon, if we were at home.

At the Hampton Inn in Lorain, Ohio. They don't provide glass water glasses any more. We threw these away.

McDonald's on the New York State Thruway. B's coffee came in a paper cup. Thrown away.

We ate lunch at Subway. I didn't think ahead of time to tell them we didn't want the plastic bag. Also, there was no water spigot on the soda machine, so we had to buy water. I'm still using the water bottle, and the plastic bag is now the car trash bag.

I bought cookies for the trip. Is cellophane plastic? Not reusable, at least not as a travel item.

At the Pawtucket Red Sox ball park, you can't take in your own water bottle. I'll reuse this.

Walterpalooza

On Sunday we’re going to a fundraiser for the ALS Society called Walterpalooza. It’s to raise money for a van, to be owned by a trust and used by whoever needs it.  The first recipient is a man well known and well liked in Lawrence.  (I don’t know if I can use his name.)

The fundraiser will be a big fun party, with bingo, a fashion show of t-shirts through the years, a potluck, and a silent auction to which people have donated many wonderful items.

I’m mentioning this for the benefit of readers who live in Lawrence and who might not know about it.  Come if you can, and if you can’t, consider making a donation anyway.  See the website for details.

Coyotes in the yard

We’ve seen two coyotes hunting in the field south of the house quite a bit lately.  This morning they were hunting along the west row of hedge trees, where many pack rats live among the tree roots.  Then they got interested in the area around the woodpile, where Buster has also been after something – bunnies, snakes, who knows?  These photos are in the order I took them.

You can just barely see one here.

 

This is the coolest shot I took. It looks like he's jumping off the woodpile, but he's actually behind it.

 

He looked right at me! He was about 20 feet away from the deck.

 

This isn't the same coyote as in the previous picture. That one had gone around behind the pile.

 

 

They saw us and decided to leave, not terribly hastily.

 

Here the coyotes are barely visible in the long grass. A moment later they were gone.

Using the browser to search the web

This post is related to my previous post about chrome.

Every browser has an address bar.

(Wait, what’s a browser?  It’s the software you use for viewing pages on the internet.  It’s not the internet itself, but the way in.  Internet Explorer, Safari, and Firefox are popular browsers.)

The address bar is located at the top of the browser chrome. You’ll notice right now that it contains this address:  http://wonkywheel.wordpress.com/2009/05/05/searching-the-web.  That’s where we are.

Here are things you can type into the address bar:

• A full web address, like the one in the previous paragraph. This takes you directly to that page.
• A partial web address, like google.com.  This takes you to the home page of whatever site you typed in.  Some browsers, like Firefox, don’t require the use of the extension .com (or .org, or .net).  Once you get to that site, you’ll notice that the address in the bar changes to the full address, e.g., http://google.com
• Search terms, like “wonky wheel”.  These open a page in Google or Yahoo (or perhaps another search engine) that shows the results of the search.

Very handy.

You may be in the habit of entering a web address into a Yahoo, Google, etc. search box.  Quit it!  Search engines are not designed to find web addresses from web addresses.  They are designed to find web addresses from search terms.  If you have the address, use the box in the chrome.

Many modern browsers have a Yahoo or Google search box built into the chrome.  It’s still a search box, not a place to put a web address.  It’s essentially a link to Yahoo or Google.

One more thing.  Search engines like Google, Yahoo, MSN Search, etc. are web sites.  They are not the internet.  They are not the browser.  They’re just a special kind of web site.

Whoo, that’s the end of this bossy post.