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I’ve taken the occasional set of panoramic photos, but I’ve never bothered stitching them together in Photoshop.  The reason?  I’m lazy.  I can’t even imagine the hours that must go into doing such a thing and doing it well.

Yesterday, that all changed.  I stumbled upon a little, free app called Autostitch, which promised to do all that difficult work for me.  I doubted it’d work, but I had nothing to lose, seeing as though it was free.  I tossed a set of 24 photos together that I took from the top level of a downtown parking garage, then let it render for 10 minutes or so.  When it was finished, I was astonished at the results.

After a little manual cropping and level adjustments in Photoshop, I grabbed my camera and headed out to take a few more sets of photos.  I’ve been kind of bored taking photos since it got cold out, but I was so excited about finally being able to render full panoramic shots, that I ignored the sub-freezing cold and snapped away.  I have a feeling I’ll be doing a whole lot more of this over time.

Here’s a link to what I have so far (continually updated):  http://www.flickr.com/photos/one9us/sets/72157612444342150/

If you’ve ever considered making your own panoramic photos, give Autostitch a try and go take photos in a whole new way.

Link:  http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~mbrown/autostitch/autostitch.html

p.s.  By the way… a good tripod isn’t a must, but it’ll definitely make for better photos.

This week at CES, a new memory card specification was announced.  Called SD eXtended Capacity, or SDXC, it takes even the awesome 32GB (and anticipated 64GB) SDHC beyond what most thought would ever be possible in a form factor that small… all the way to 2-terabytes!!

This got me thinking.  Although it’ll start out at a comparatively measly 64GB, it has so far been the practice that the microSD standard holds about half the memory capacity of SD.  They haven’t yet announced a microSDXC spec, but assuming they eventually do, does that mean we can look forward to storing an entire terabyte of data on a card smaller than the average human thumbnail???

I guess we’ll know in a couple years, but for now, keep your fingers crossed.

So, I got my new Centro and an unlimited data plan, which means I’m sitting at my computer, but surfing the web on my phone’s 2.5" screen.  Makes a lot of sense, I know.  Eventually, I made my way to my blog, and suddenly remembered that it’s extremely unfriendly to the bandwidth-challenged out there.  I ended up getting errors from the Centro’s browser because it took too long to render the page.  That’s when I started looking for a WordPress plugin that would render an alternate layout for mobile devices.

I found some real crap out there, but one that worked absolutely great is made by Alex King (http://alexking.org).  My pages download extremely quickly to my Centro, and it also displays photos that I import via my Flickr-tag plugin (which another mobile plug did not).

If you have a WordPress website, I wouldn’t hesitate for a minute installing this plugin.  Considering how much time people spend surfing the web on mobile devices, you don’t want them avoiding you site simply because they can’t get it to load.

I installed a sweet GUI for my Palm Centro, called TouchLauncher.  It’s basically a skin that makes your Palm device look a whole lot better than OEM, and allows some convenient reorganizing, as well.  Originally, I’d been using the developer’s icon set (see here), but I got bored and decided to make some icons of my own.

In the screenshot below, which I took with the freeware application, Snap, you can see just a few of the 38 icons I made, namely the Firefox icon for the Blazer browser, and the camcorder, Facebook, and Twitter icons.  The rest you see are from the developer and some other guys.  Through TouchLauncher, I was able to set the Facebook icon to launch the Facebook app that Sprint included on the phone; the Twitter icon launches the browser and goes straight to Twitter Mobile.

If you want the icon set, I uploaded it here:  http://drop.io/tlauncher  There’s also a screen capture in the .RAR file so you know which icon is which.  If you don’t already use TouchLauncher, I’d suggest you get a copy and play with it.  At less than $7, it’s some of the best money you’ll put into apps for your Palm.