Archive for the 'Vertical Desktop Backgrounds' Category

Photos appropriate for a vertically-oriented screen (a screen that’s taller than it is wide)

Holy Cow, iOS 7 Has Some Really Horrible Design

The user-interface (UI) design of iOS 7 seems to be of the radical variety. Not quite as radical as the initial iPhone was to the cell-phone world at the time, but also not as universally lauded. A lot of people really hate iOS 7.

(Except the first, the photos on this page have nothing to do with the text; they're just random photos I've taken recently.)

Until recently I'd never actually used iOS 7, but from seeing it in news and advertisements over the last few months, I knew I didn't like the new look. The same aesthetic that [...]


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Thank You Skype for Not Sucking, and For Saving my Afternoon

I've been feeling remarkably lazy about writing lately, sorry.

My wife and I were in a travel agency the other day (here in Kyoto, Japan) to purchase some pricey tickets for some upcoming family travel, and since it was a lot to put on the credit card at once, I had called ahead to my US-based credit card to let them know the charge was coming so that it would go through smoothly.

Of course, while standing there at the travel agency office, the transaction was denied. Sigh.

I couldn't call The States with the travel agent's phone, so we [...]


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Geometric Views from the Miho Museum

I've spent the weekend since having posted "Visiting the Miho Museum" trying (and failing) to fight off a cold, but I seem to be slowly recovering today, so today we have a simple post, of a bunch of geometric-ish images from my visit to the museum, presented in the order I took them (with the exception of the first two images being swapped).

These first two from the tunnel leading to the museum have been processed with differing white-balance settings for dramatic effect. The one above is processed so that the sunlight streaming in is white, turning the incandescent lights [...]


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Fall Foliage at Kyoto Arashiyama’s Hokyo-in Temple (with a wigglegram)

My first outing this season to partake of Kyoto's fall-foliage delights was on Friday, as I wrote about yesterday. The first stop was my first visit to the Hokyo-in Temple (宝筐院) in the Arashiyama area of western Kyoto.

The long path into the garden was quite photogenic, though it was difficult to get a shot that both avoided people in the photo and avoided annoying people while taking the photo, but within those constraints I did okay...

Yet, despite all the work to avoid people in the shots, I tend to like ones with people better, like the one at [...]


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This Season’s First Fall-Foliage Outing in Kyoto: Northern Arahiyama

Fall-foliage season, long over with in most of the Northern Hemisphere, is just getting into full swing in Kyoto. Throwing common sense to the wind, I dared to venture to the Arashiyama area of Kyoto yesterday (Friday), where the density of tourists during this season threatens to form a singularity. Adding to the mass of folks, I went with Paul Barr and Damien Douxchamps.

We limited ourselves to a few temples on the northern fringes of Arashiyama, and so we avoided the most oppressive crowds.

The first stop was my first visit to the Hokyo-in Temple (宝筐院), which includes a [...]


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