High Dynamic Range photography

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve just managed to produce my first HDR (high dynamic range) image the results of which I’m pleased with.  Once again, I have CHDK to thank for enabling this feature easily.

March of the Ants!

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem As bugs are normal around the house here in Malaysia, I have just gotten used to them for the most part.  Yes, the wall next to me is a veritable graveyard for mosquitoes, but most other insects don’t bother me much, alhamdulillaah. This includes ants.  Ants are usually very benign, they mind…

Reorganized blog categories

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I just finished re-reorganizing my blog categories after pondering the difference between tags & categories.  Incidentally, I will attempt to start using tags on my blog posts as well.  Subsequently, I will be recategorizing a lot of posts that are categorized in both a category as well as its parent, since that…

En route to Malaysia

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, my wife & I are en route to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, where we’ll be staying one night with her brother & his family before continuing on our way to home in Kuala Terengganu, in shaaʾ Allaah.  Right now we’re in the Kuwait International Airport, and, alhamdulillaah, they have free wifi throughout…

Alexandria one month in

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, we’ve had some good times this past month here in Alexandria.  The weather has been outstanding – the only other times I’ve been here I remember the weather being far warmer on the border of being uncomfortable.  This time we’ve hardly had a day that didn’t feel cool and fresh, alhamdulillaah.

From the South China to the Mediterranean Sea

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, my wife & I arrived safely in Alexandria, Egypt this past Friday to the welcoming arms of my parents, whom I haven’t seen since I left the US back in June.  If you’ll recall, I originally departed on this journey because I could not bring my wife to the US yet,…

Close Encounters of the Blurred Kind

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem While riding (on a scooter) to a nearby masjid with one of my brothers-in-law, I felt something flew straight into my eye despite the fact that I was wearing my glasses at the time.  I was unable to flush it out while on the bike, and I thought that, like most eye…

Naïve integer primality calculator in PHP

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, while reading about integers and, subsequently, prime numbers last night, I decided the time had come for me to write a primality calculator in PHP.  The test I use in my implementation is about as a naïve as one can possible get, but it was fun, nonetheless. Interestingly enough, I discovered…

Back home in Kuala Terengganu

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve returned “home” to Kuala Terengganu (KT), which is my wife’s hometown, and I’ve taken it to be my home-away-from home.  It’s a beautiful place, especially because we actually live in a kampung, or village, not to far away from the main part of KT.  Additionally, compared to Kuala Lumpur (KL),…

Message Mastery by Belal Khan

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, my good friend Belal Khan of Leechon Films fame has started (a while back, actually) a program called Message Mastery.  You should get the full explanation from the website, but the basic gist of it is that it is a training seminar focused on developing masterful messages through the medium of…

Time Lapse Barrage

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been able to take an enormous amount of pictures during my stay here in Malaysia until now.  And while the actual yield of shots with any value may be low, the sheer volume of photos means that I have plenty I would like to share. The sheer amount of work…

Panorama shots of Kuala Lumpur downtown

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulilllaah, there are some outstanding opportunities for views of the downtown Kuala Lumpur skyline from the roof of our apartment here.  Some of the shots are clearer than others due to the conditions at the time I took theme.  These are my first attempts, as well, so keep that in mind.  Click…

Blog now completely Creative Commons-licensed

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, after finding the wpLicense WordPress plugin on the Creative Commons website, I’ve been able to completely license all my work released through my blog under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license.  This means such world-changing works as my essay on Social Networking & online projects, my tirade against anti-userism,…

Back in Malaysia

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I am back in Malaysia, which means I am also back with my wife.  Words cannot express how much joy the two of us are experiencing being together once again.  More than six months have passed since we’d been together the last time.  In case it is not obvious, the reason…

More time-lapse fun

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Okay, so I have an addiction. Here are some more time-lapse sequences I took this past weekend and Monday. I’m now dabbling with alternative frame rates and sizes, including, by “popular” request, HD resolution videos. I’ve learned a few lessons from these sequences, and I’ll elaborate a bit more on each one.

Time-lapse photography with CHDK

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem As I’ve already alluded to in a previous post, I’ve been using the CHDK firmware supplement with my Canon PowerShot A550, which on it’s own is an outstanding camera, alhamdulillaah. This firmware add-on, though, really takes the cake! One of the features made possible by CHDK is the ability to run scripts…

CHDK – Unleash the POWER in your PowerShot

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Alhamdulillaah, I’ve been playing around with CHDK, which is a free firmware add-on (note: it does not require flashing your camera’s firmware) that enables a multitude of features on your ordinary, run-of-the-mill Canon PowerShot digital camera. In short, it’s amazing. I haven’t had enough time to truly “unleash the POWER” yet, but…

Fedora 9 – Why it’s so awesome

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Okay, I know that title is a pretty pretentious statement by itself, as much of Fedora 9’s awesomeness isn’t unique to it. So, I’ll grant that much of the coming awesomeness is related to Gnome 2.22, which is not limited to Fedora 9, nor is Pulseaudio, Upstart (props to the Ubuntuees for…

Tapeless HD camcorders

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem I’ve been keeping my eye out for tapeless (e.g., hard drive or flash memory instead of tapes) HD camcorders for a while, because of the obvious flexibility of being able to transfer the recorded video directly rather than “recording” it via IEEE 1394 (i.e., “FireWwire”) – while an IEEE 1394 link is…

Family blog

Bismillaahir Rahmaanir Raheem Last week my wife & I have decided to start our own family blog to track family’s Islamic development.  As a result, I will most-likely be posting my personal- and family-related musings over there rather than here, allowing HidayahTech to remain more tech-oriented.  That doesn’t mean there will be a complete dearth…