‘Day of Delights” in Pafos, Cyprus

LoukoumiaAccording to Cyprus New Association, the Municipality of Geroskipou (Pafos area) is organizing an event around cooking the biggest loukoumia (also known as Greek delight) in the world and getting on the pages of the Guiness Book of Records. The event starts today with the preparations and cooking this huge thing and will continue until Sunday 17th of October, 2004.

As usual, the information is very limited, so if you know anything, please share via comments or email.

If you want to know more about this loukoumia thing, a couple of encyclopedia entries are here and here.

A Time to Kill

I stood in the DVD club and looked at the cover of “A Time to Kill“. It sounded awfully familiar. It looked even more familiar with Matthew McConaughey, Samuel Jackson, and Sandra Bullock on the cover. It even had a description, but I couldn’t remember it. So I rented the film.

Within a few first shots I recognized it. It is one of my favourite films on two subjects: court and rasism. It is kind of linear and one-sided, but it does deliver the point in a thought provoking manner. It has one of the best casts ever too. Basically, just about every face on the foreground you see in the film is familiar.

This is a good choice of a family movie for educating kids and adults about how all people are born equal, but some are more equal than the others. 10 out of 10 goes to the rating tables from me for the outstanding job.

Picture of the day

Hitachi

I’ve almost paniced when I remembered that I haven’t made a picture today. It was just a few minutes into the new day, and I was all relaxed and resting while watching a movie. I had to find something fast and photograph it without loosing too much time over it.

My quick look around got stuck on the Hitachi label of my fridge. That turned out to be much more fun than I originally expected it to. Firstly, I don’t have any studio lights to play with, so all there is available are one tungsten ugly yellow light from the ceiling of the kitchen and my on-camera flash. With sparkling grey fridge shot set as a measure for camera white balancing and a flash over it, I got an interesting blue light effect. This is totally not how it appears in the kitchen, but it does look pretty cool. The 3D shape of the label and letters on top of it provided for a nice macro subject.

I wanted to postprocess it a bit, but I was so in love with this image that my hands didn’t dare to touch the editor. There are just a couple of things to improve though and maybe I will do it one day. There is an edge of the fridge visible in the upper right corner and there are few dust and reflection particles on the label. I also wanted to slightly sharp the ‘HIT’ part of the brand and slightly blur the ‘ACHI’ letters.

Preview thumbnails in KDE

One of the excellent programs that comes with KDE is Konqueror. Konqueror is a file manager and a web browser. One of the nicest features of Konqueror is autogeneration of preview thumbnails. This helps a lot when dealing with image repositories and photo albums.

When working with a lot of images, one can notice that Konqueror does not generate preview thumbnails for all of them. This is because it hits the limit on the file size set by default. That is easy to correct though. To fix this, start kcontrol, go to KDE Components where you need to select File Manager in which choose the tab marked as Previews & Meta-Data, where you will find a bar marked Maximum file size. For the images coming out of my Digital Rebel I set a 6.5 MBytes limit and it seems to work nicely.