After years of blocking all blogspot.com blogs, China recently lifted the ban on these blogs. And now Google has announced new features in beta for these same blogs. Coincidence? Did Google manage to convince China to allow them to launch the new Blogger.com in China as well? If they did, what did they give China in return?

Personally I don’t see China allowing Google’s free blog platform to be freely available here for long. They’d have a hard time controlling so many free blogs, plus they’d rather allow Chinese created blog platforms, rather than american ones. This really puzzles me. I stopped using Blogger.com last year, but I will try out the new features, now that I can have access to them…

Update: I created a new blog with Blogger.com, and you can check out my review of the new features here.

Google has satellite images from all over the world, and their Google Earth program makes it very easy to find places. One day I sat down and looked for all the places I’ve lived in during my life. This is the result:

This is where we live now, in Shanghai. Click on the image to check out many previous places I’ve lived in, and make sure to read my descriptions. Unfortunately not all places are available on Google, most notably the following are missing:

- My family’s current home in Cernusco, Milano.
- Taiwan, where my mom lives.

If you want to have fun in looking at your past, download Google Earth.

One Logan is hard to take care of. But 5 of them!! Help us!!

Click on image for a larger version

This one was created in a slightly different way. I cut out each Logan, and then merged all the shapes with the background. Thanks to Tommy for the link to the tutorial.

You can see the blur around the cut out shapes this time. I am still trying it out, so I haven’t refined the edges yet. I need time to work on this. Time that I don’t have. For the moment this will do.

Oh, and I also added captions, just for fun. I used a website called Captioner. It is a very simple captioner tool, you can add up to 5 captions (just right for this photo), all the same type. However it does not allow for the captioned image to be saved, so I had to do a screen capture. If you know of a better site let me know.

I am having waaay too much fun!

This is my first attempt at cloning:

This was just a test to try it for the first time. I did not put any thought on the composition, I just took two shots last night and hoped to be able to create a clone.

For the record, I used the open source image editor Gimp. It took me a while to get it, but now that I’ve found the way, it’s actually very easy to do.

I was inspired by Stephanie’s photos, in particular this one. Study this photo for a while, and be blown away. Hint: there is no mirror.

I really like this kind of photo. I plan to get a tripod and start making these. Expect many of them in the future.

Here is a screenshot of my PC desktop:

No, it’s not a Mac, this is Windows XP made look like it is OS X. And it was damn easy. Just go here, download the package and install it. Reboot and voila’.

The look is almost perfect, the sounds are mimicked as well, there is even an Expose’ for Windows, but obviously it’s not as fast and smooth as the Mac version. For the moment I will use this, unless it crashes my system. Right now I love it!!