Last weekend I attended the rallyshow event in Hradec Kralove here in Czech Republic. I had a chance to take a pano of the interior of one of the racing cars of Hroch Rally Team (Chladek & Tintera):
Peugeot 207 S2000 Rally Car Interior in Czech Republic
And here’s the whole Hroch Rally Team 
Hroch Rally Team in Czech Republic
The answer? Fight for a good cause. Fight for what people are concerned about. Fight for what they want to change. I started two days ago and I’ve gathered 270 people already who “like” the idea on Facebook.
Here’s the Czech version of the video.
What is the cause all about? A couple of days ago, I discovered a strange thing on my May 2010 cell phone bill from the Czech T-Mobile. I’ve found they charged me for 800CZK for data (approximately $40) plus VAT. The actual amount they were supposed to charge me was 200CZK (approximately $10). Four times less! The data plan I’m using is called Surf&Mail and it’s not unlimited and FUP of the crappy 200MBs per month is applied. No complaints about the FUP, though, it’s fair for this price. At least when you compare it to the also crappy competition here in Czech. Whatever. What is not fair is that they started charging me 800 instead of 200. That is after 9 years of being their customer and after 18 months of using the data tariff with my iPhone and happily paying 200.
The thing is…. T-Mobile in Czech Republic thinks they can charge me whatever they want. They sold me the iPhone 3G back in 2008 with the data plan but since then they’ve started hating the iPhones probably. They’ve probably discovered that the data plans they were selling in 2008 cost them a lot of money so they did the sneakiest thing you could imagine. They just started to charge me more! I filed a complaint of course demanding my money back, but they just replied with a letter that everything is fine and that they can charge me this because the “not every type of traffic is included in the data plan”. What?? They were even unable to tell me what kind of apps I can and can’t use on my iPhone. They suggested me to turn off the internet. Which I did, having no other choice. My contract expires in 3 months and I’m currently taking steps to terminate it prematurely – due to change of terms – and I’ve also filled a complaint at some authorities and regulators about false advertising.
However, guess what? I’m not gonna stop here. I’m gonna fight back. And I’ve created this video to promote my new website and a page on Facebook where people who suffer the same can gather and coordinate next steps. My goal is not only to receive my money back but to actually make T-Mobile Czech to return the money to all people who’ve experienced the same and to change the data plan they are offering so that the 200CZK is the actual maximum amount paid by the customer. Anyway, here’s the box where you can see the current amount of fans on my page. The website’s address is 200misto800.cz (in Czech Only).
Here are some of my latest 360 panoramas from the city of Prague, Czech Republic.
"Obora" Lookout Tower in Prague Zoo
View a virtual tour of Prague
Welcome to the Czech Beer Fest: A selection of the best from Czech breweries, Czech chefs, butchers and bakers for you. Taste more than 70 brands of Czech beer, 200 girls and boys in Czech national costumes, unrepeatable atmosphere in one of three large-scale tents, specialties of top chefs of famous Czech restaurants.
Servers in Tent 2 (Czech Beer Festival 2010) in Czech Republic
Beer Taps in Tent 3 (Czech Beer Festival 2010) in Czech Republic
Click to open a virtual tour of the Czech Beer Festival.
I decided to express my growing concerns over the recent oil spill in Gulf of Mexico. As it turns out, this could lead to a disaster never seen before, threatening hundreds of species of wildlife, including birds, dolphins, crabs and oysters living on the Gulf Coast. What worries me the most is that it seems that BP didn’t have an emergency plan in place for a situation like this, that it can happen again and that it can have irreversive impact on the wildlife in the region.
source:BBC
Therefore, I’ve put an oil blob over my avatar icons on twitter and facebook (see below). I hope the spill will end soon, that the impact will be minimal and that we humans learn from the experience so it never happens again. If you feel the same and if the fate of wildlife, environment and our planet is a concern to you, just change your avatar icon the way I did and spread the word.
If you’ve got a similar similar activity or page let me know and might link it from here.
My facebook icon:
Before
After
My twitter icon:
Before
After
Make your own:
PNG (click on image to download)
Photoshop Version (click on image to download)
Bhautik Joshi, the crazy guy who put a 18-55mm SLR lens on his iphone, has created another awesome do-it-yourself device. He uses a fisheye peephole as the main lens element and a decapitated soda can as the lens body. You can attach the whole thing to a SLR camera. Amazing!!! The quality is of course still awful but the thing is that you now can make fisheye photos with a lens that costs virtually nothing. Just take your crappy old DSLR camera, attach this lens, take 4 images at a place and stitch them together. This is I believe another step closer to making spherical panoramic photography mainstream. Good job Bhautik!
You can read the whole guide how to build it and more screenshots in the author’s article: The fisheye tin cam
The fisheye tin cam sample images
The fisheye tin cam lens
(I found this article originally at PetaPixel, thanks!)
Here are some of the interesting panoramas I’ve taken in South Africa.
This accomodation is called Sani Top Challet, and inside there is actually the highest pub in Africa, or so they claim. The altitude is 2865m above sea level here. To the left of the building you can see the Lesotho border post (75% of tourists that come to Lesotho use this gate to enter the country).
Sani Top Chalet in South Africa
This was absolutely pleasant experience. Look at the landscape around … one of the best places in the world I’ve seen for riding a horse. The pano was taken during a short break we took to enjoy the landscape around. Make sure you go fullscreen…
Khotso Horse Ride Break in South Africa
a local football game in Himeville
Local Football Game in Himeville in South Africa
Sani Pass (a picturesque valley that stretches between Republic of South Africa and Lesotho)
Sani Pass in South Africa
I returned from South Africa on Saturday where I was working for two weeks on a part of the pilot phase of Project: Exposure – tourism business development program in which our company 360cities.net is a partner. Here are some videos from the trip (taken with my iphone).
Thousands of Amur Falcons are ready to leave South Africa where they spend south african winter
Driving in a 4×4 car down through a beautiful landscape of Cobham Nature Reserve around Sani Pass Road which connects Lesotho and South African border post.
I loved my iPhone 3G most of the time. Now I love my iPhone 3GS most of the time. It surely is a happy relationship. Sometimes, however, my iPhone really gets on my nerves. I definitely don’t want to replace my iPhone with Android because of what I’m going to write about. I’m definitely not buying a Nexus One just because of this. Yet, after more than a year of being an iphone user (yes, I joined late, I hire slow 
) let me recap what I think are the 10 absolutely unforgivable flaws of the iphone user interface. If you are an iPhone user too, you might have your own list. Please share your annoyances (or links to them) in the comments below the article.
Flaw 1: Search Button Too Small
So I finally tried to implement my own automatic way of stitching panos. Don’t expect some sophisticated system, it’s actually pretty easy. I still have to click my mouse going from one step into another, however the point is that this can be fully automated and it did not require any sophisticated input. A chimp monkey could do it instead of me . I spent about 30 seconds with creating this pano which is far less than the time it took me to put this this blog post online.
Here’s what I did:
- Take the pictures, there are two things that needs to be considered when taking pictures for automatic panos
- 1. Leveling: The horizon needs to be leveled as precise as possible because the automatic software cannot determine the correct leveling for you
- 2. Precission: The pano head parallax point needs to be precisely calibrated, any misaligned is more visible in auto mode
- Load the pictures into a computer
- Adjust chromatic aberation and via a predefined filter plus apply any other filter you wish
- Export them as tiffs
- Load them in PtGui and let them auto-stitch, there is one important point:
- 1. Lens settings in PtGui: I don’t have the numbers, I’m running completely on auto stitch, that’s why I need even better precision when taking panos
- Save the result as jpeg
That’s it. 30 seconds of manual input plus 2 minutes of my quad-core gaming machine time.
And here’s the result:
What do you think? I know the quality could be better, I saved it in a very low resolution to improve load time and like I mentioned above, it would help to have a lens profile set correctly in PtGui and/or calibrate the pano head more precisely.
Check out my Mexpedition Diaries photoblog!
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