Chris Hannah


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Something I’ve noticed since entering my thirties a little over a year ago, is that I’ve become a lot less interested in both keeping up with everyone elses lives, and presenting my life for others.

My younger self would definitely not understand.

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Just about to board the flight back to London. Looking forward to normal temperatures.

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I took a ton of photos at this natural pool, I’ll have to spend some time refining them and building a collection. Which may be a task for the flight back home tomorrowow. But for now, I’ve got one shot that I’m really happy with. Shot with an iPhone 15 Pro Max using Halide.

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Just arrived at a natural pool. The waves are much stronger than I thought, but at least the view looks good!

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Just visited another town in Gran Canaria called Firgas. Not that high up in the mountains, but it’s still up in the hills. The centre had a nice plaza, and also murals of each island in the Canary Islands, and also a rather large water feature.

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Last full day in Gran Canaria today. Driving up the east coast again to hopefully find some more villages/towns and some natural pools. I’ll likely be posting more updates throughout the day.

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It’s just hit golden hour, so it’s time to go back down the mountain. But in the mean time, I did snap a few more photos of the view.

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Found a little village called Tejeda in the mountains. Some very nice views as usual.

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Stopped at a little restaurant on the side of a mountain in Gran Canaria for a quick beer and ice cream. Now on to the next town!

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As much as I enjoy using Mastodon, it feels better posting my travel updates/photos here.

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Day #5 in Gran Canaria and I’m finally up a mountain. Found a strange metal basket that seems to provide a pretty nice frame.

Using the Clips app to make small holiday videos

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Instead of just posting a bunch of stories while I’ve been away in Gran Canaria, I’ve been using the Clips app to put together daily summary videos where it’s just short 0.5 to 2 second clips of what I’m up to throughout the day. It’s more fun, and I think the results are a lot better.

So far I’ve still been posting the final video to my Instagram, but at the end of the week I think I’ll either post each video on my blog, or maybe even combine them together into a single video.

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Not a bad place to sit…

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My main blog now supports micro posts!

Took a bit of tinkering, but I’ve now got them appearing on the website correctly, excluded from the main RSS feed, and also being syndicated here on Micro.blog.

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One day I need to go through the 1500 posts on my blog, and delete all the rubbish that has built up from various migrations and periods of cross-posting. But it doesn’t seem very easy from Ghost. If only I could interact directly with the db 🤔.

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Working from home really messes with my brain. At various points of today I’ve thought it was a different day of the week. Then I remember it’s actually friday, and I don’t need to think about work for a few days.

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I didn’t realise Rings of Power was out alreeady! I wonder if I can manage to watch both episodes tonight. 🤔

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I must say, I’m very much enjoying House of the Dragon. It reminds me of how it felt watching the first series of Game of Thrones. 📺

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Countle looks like it may become one of my daily mini games. Even though I still haven’t worked out todays sum.

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My mini blog refresh is complete. A tad more minimal, with a plain colour background again, and no more serif font. However, I added some different visual layers with the content, with featured images also getting a bit of love.

chrishannah.me

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God damn it. I’ve now got it in my head that I need to (partially) redesign my blog.

I wonder what I can get done before the football starts in 50 minutes.

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On a bit of a wild book hunt at the moment. My Bookshop.org wishlist is growing quite a bit. 📚

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Currently reading: Natives by Akala 📚

Turning DALL-E images into photos

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After playing with DALL-E recently, I wondered if I could use it to create wallpapers. I still haven’t totally succeeded yet, but I did think of an interesting image pipeline.

  1. Start with an image description.
  2. Pass that into DALL-E and choose an image.
  3. Run it through Pixelmator Pro’s ML Super Resolution.
  4. Treat it like a photo and do any usual edits/crops.
  5. Voila.

Here’s what each step looks like on one of my recent generations. (Note: all images have been scaled down to a maximum size of 1024px x 1024px).

The image description:

“a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour”

(Yep, handing should be hanging, I’ll blame autocorrect for that).

Here is the outputted image:

DALL E 2022 08 23 22 30 09  a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour

This is it after running it through the ML Super Resolution a few times. (And then resampling down to 1024px):

DALL E 2022 08 23 22 30 09  a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour  super res

After some edits:

DALL E 2022 08 23 22 30 09  a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour  super res  edited

Finally, cropped to a vertical 3:4 ratio:

DALL E 2022 08 23 22 30 09  a photo of a large tree with handing branches in the center of a dense jungle with a small tropical river nearby during golden hour  super res  edited  crop

I think I’ll play around with the process a bit. But I do find it very interesting, and fun, to see how far you can take DALL-E images. The next thing I want to figure out is to make the images look like real photos, not like weird pieces of art.

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The Music app being the default application to open mp3 files on a Mac seems pretty stupid to me.