On Sunday, June 14th, Team Peen will be participating in NSTAR's Walk for Children's Hospital. It's our fourth year and we need your support!

Our son Aaron was born with Transposition of the Great Arteries and saved when he was just three days old. Almost four years have past, but time hasn't diminished the deep gratitude we feel towards the heroes at Children's - the most compassionate, competent, and professional group of people we have ever met. Please help us support the good work they do at Children's by sponsoring us with a donation or joining Team Peen for the walk.






Thank You!
Lyssa, Dave, Aaron, and Adrian LaPorte

Since I apparently don't have anything better to do, I wrote a tutorial on how to quickly get an Asus WL-520gU running as a Linux filer. If you've got nothing better to, check it out here.

Now this is scary...

Back in early 2005, Mike Matas blogged on how to create a life poster, a 20x30 collage of ~100 images. His instructions were specific to iPhoto (which I don't use), so I was forced to come up with my own. I've been using this method to create posters of my son since 2005. Each year I have to remember how I did it the year before, so this is more for my benefit than yours!

The first thing you'll need to do is find 98 landscape photos to use. You'll need to crop every image to a 4:3 aspect ratio. This needs to be exact...it seems that the Photoshop Elements crop tool prefers to work in inches and the rounding leaves things slightly less than precise. I worked around this by cropping each image 4in x 3in and then bulk resizing the images (File->Process Multiple Files) to 2048x1536.

The next step will use the image filenames to order them in the collage, so its worth randomizing them to spice things up. The following Perl script will do just that:

#!/usr/bin/perl

opendir(DIR, ".");
@files = grep { /\.jpg$/i } readdir(DIR);
closedir(DIR);

foreach my $file (@files) {
 $new = int(rand(10000000)) . ".jpg";
 print "renaming $file to $new\n";
 rename($file, $new) || die "Unable to rename $file to $new: $!\n";
}

Once you have the images aspect normalized and names randomized, you can assemble the collage. Select File->Contact Sheet II and choose the folder containing your images. Select "Pixels" as the units, specify "8000" as the width, and "11955" as the height (the height should be 12000, but that left extra whitespace in the collage...YMMV). Uncheck "Use Auto-Spacing" and set vertical and horizontal spacing to 0. Specify 7 columns and 14 rows. It'll take a few minutes to build, so click OK and walk away.

When you return, the collage should be built. You should probably zoom in and check all the borders to make sure there's no extra whitespace. If there is, you'll need to tweak the height setting in the contact sheet settings and re-run. If you don't like the ordering of the images, just re-run the Perl script until you find a better one. If you've needed to tweak the height setting, be sure to resize to 8000x12000 pixels when you're done.

Once you're satisfied, you can upload your poster to your preferred photo processor. I like Shutterfly, and they offer 20x30 prints for $23. It's worth mentioning that Posterino, a utility built specifically for creating these type of posters, is available for only $25. I'll probably be going that route next year - it's well worth the time saved.