Deskthority wiki photography competition

[Daniel Beardsmore]

OK, here we go: Category:Pages requiring diagrams implemented via {{TODO diagram}}. I'm thinking a similar tag for audio could be interesting … the difficulty there is that, if you tried to do that for keyboards, you'd have recording level issues and we'd need an audio engineer to master all the recordings.

FWIW, back on topic, we have one competitor already. And two more pages marked TODO photo. (Just created a page for Cherry M9. At least with that page, I have been promised at least one M9 switch sometime in the near future so I should be able to do that one myself.)

[Muirium]

Actually, I made audio recordings (controlled for level and acoustic environment) of most my keyboards just the other day. My microphone's pretty competent and doesn't screw around with volume tracking, so they are direct like for like comparisons.

Examples:

IBM Model F PC/XT
https://www.dropbox.com/s/oti9tzkkr5hn3 ... C%3AXT.m4a

Topre Realforce
https://www.dropbox.com/s/mv8f7g7fete8p ... lforce.m4a

Where do I upload? (Rather than my ever overfilling Dropbox.)

[Daniel Beardsmore]

The problem is that your recordings won't be consistent with anyone else's unless someone masters everyone's work collectively. Audio is evil, and way outside of my understanding.

According to Special:Upload, no audio types are supported at the moment — I don't even know whether webwit has installed any audio playback support at this point. I'd suggest a separate topic if we wish to consider keyboard recordings. Originally I was just thinking of [wiki]ping[/wiki], but that itself would open a can of worms as to what "ping" is and is not :P Also, [wiki]click[/wiki] vs [wiki]clack[/wiki] vs [wiki]silent[/wiki] …

[Muirium]

Indeed. Audio is highly coloured by the microphone and the environment where it's made. Like white balance in photography only far more intense. As far as I know, the only hope we have is if everyone brings me their keyboards for me to type the quick brown fox on! That or we all rent our local anechoic recording chambers…

Still a recording is better than no recording, I think. Audio types meanwhile… oy. Just look at Wikipedia! God damn Oggs!

[Daniel Beardsmore]

From the brief conversations I've had, it sounds like the consensus is on first prize being a keyboard. I imagine I'll have to let the winner choose, so that they can pick something interesting instead of something they hate/already have. Probably something from the Keyboard Company range, or EK/MK if they're in the US.

Second/third prize, probably keycaps from the likes of TechKeys/QWERKeys/Fentek.

Thoughts?

[kps]

Two more people need to post; I'm hoping to get second runner-up.

(I still have pictures of an ALPS Glidepoint keyboard to crop and upload, which I may or may not get around to soon (especially since there's no wiki entry yet) but I definitely won't have time for any more shoots before the deadline.)

[BimboBB]

Oh boy....lots of photos missing. i would like to help, but i simply dont have 99% of the stuff.

[Muirium]

Expect my entries a few minutes before the deadline, that's never my intention but what always happens.

Prize is a (choice of new) keyboard, you say? Wow. I'd do this for a keypuller and bragging rights.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

If I said it was a keypuller, most people would wonder what I was smoking (who needs another keypuller anyway? not unless you want one of those knurled ones, and that's presumably a possibility); however, aim too high and the men in white coats will come knocking.

Everyone has different expectations, and different ideas of what differentiates something useful/novel, value relative to effort, and what they consider junk. I never claimed my wingnut ClickClack from last year — I have no use for any keycap I can't type on. (Apparently it never existed, which is why I can't now use it for this award, except that it did exist last year … It would not be the only sign that I took a wrong turning into the Twiglet Zone at some point this year.)

[Daniel Beardsmore]

PS You don't need to put your real name down for the licence in the image description — forum/wiki username is fine. It just happens that, in my case, there's no difference aside from the wiki miscapitalising it.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Two more people need to post; I'm hoping to get second runner-up.

Particularly with the Amiga keyboard, an application of a soft brush to remove all the dust would help ;-)

[kps]

Particularly with the Amiga keyboard, an application of a soft brush to remove all the dust would help

Wait 'til you see the ALPS. I actually did give these things a brush between the keys, but most of them need more than that to be actually clean.

[7bit]

Maybe you should call it a cleaning contest. Photographing is trivial. It is the cleaning which makes the dificulty!

[Muirium]

Just the thought of uncleaned keyboards sends a shiver down my obsessive compulsive spine. Whenever I get one, straight apart it comes: not for keyboard science so much as a good scrub.

[M'er Forever]

[Account and posts deleted on request]

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I was going to say that this is the one thing we're not short of photos of, but actually we are short on Model M photos. [wiki]Bolt mod[/wiki] needs photos, and as far as disassembly goes, [wiki]IBM Enhanced Keyboard[/wiki] only has a handful of scrotty photos from me showing keycaps removed. There's actually a lot left to illustrate (even discounting replacing my photos with better ones).

Second and third prizes decided; just leaves deciding on first prize — I'm actually quite surprised how little interest there seems to be in that, and that people aren't all chipping in with what they'd like or expect to win! (I'm also concerned that people might be put off by having no idea what the prize is or even its approximate value, and I'm terminally indecisive!)

[M'er Forever]

[Account and posts deleted on request]

[Daniel Beardsmore]

I can't upload competitor's photos for them! =P

[M'er Forever]

[Account and posts deleted on request]

[kps]

Oops...I better read the details about how to upload in the right place with the requisite details. I posted this one hastily, as I'm kinda busy today, but will read up and try again.

It took me a while to get the process, as one not intimately familiar with wiki workings. In case this is an obstacle to others, here is (I think) what to do:

From any wiki page, click Upload file in the sidebar under Toolbox. Alternatively go straight to http://deskthority.net/wiki/Special:Upload.

On the upload page, click the Browse… button and select your image. It should be uploaded immediately and display as a thumbnail, and also automatically fill in the Destination filename below. Daniel can probably give guidelines on choosing a suitable Destination filename; I mostly tried to use the form company_model_photo.jpg. In any case, copy and record the Destination filename for later.

In the Summary box, paste the following, with appropriate changes:

Code: Select all

{{imagedesc
| description = [[IBM Enhanced Keyboard]] showing blah blah blah
| source      = Own work
| date        = yyyy-mm-dd
| author      = [[User:wiki username|]]
| licence     = blah blah blah
}}

[[Category:Photography competition 2013]]

Several people use

Code: Select all

| licence = Public domain or nearest equivalent

I've been using

Code: Select all

| licence = [http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0]

Tick Watch this file if you want to be notified if somebody modifies your upload.

Once you've done this for each of a group of photos that belong together, go to the wiki page you want to place them on (e.g. [wiki]IBM Enhanced Keyboard[/wiki]), and click Edit for the appropriate section. Add something like this, using the Destination filenames from before:

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<gallery widths=250 heights=167>
File:Destination_filename_1.jpg|Your caption for photo 1
File:Destination_filename_2.jpg|Your caption for photo 2
File:Destination_filename_3.jpg|Your caption for photo 3
</gallery>

Don't forget the File: before each and the bar between filename and caption.

[Muirium]

Thanks. I struggled with this too. The make your own gallery bit could prove very useful.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

Thanks kps!

I tend to use filenames of the form "Product -- view.jpg" — spaces = yes, Unicode = no. My only genuine expectation is that the name is not something like "IMGP1234.JPG" or "Keyboard1.jpg" as that's not terribly useful. The filename should briefly describe what the image depicts.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

First prize set. Not sure what I am letting myself in for …

[Daniel Beardsmore]

OK, we're coming to the end of the weekend in Europe (North America still has some time to go) — this leaves one more weekend before the competition deadline. One full week, and one partial week left for you to have your go at winning a brand new keyboard or a selection of keycaps.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

As a follow-up to kps's post, I thought I'd write up my own uploading process. The most tedious part for me is picking the least sucky photos and sucking out some of the suck. For anyone who can actually take good photos, they should just roll off the camera. I name all the images as I go, saving them to the desktop (I re-save them all to bring down the JPEG quality to a more sensible level).

So now I have a stack of JPEGs on the desktop, cropped, colour-corrected, retouched occasionally if some dirt ended up on it, etc.

I'll count the images, and middle-click the Upload file link once for each image, giving me a background tab (my default in Firefox) ready for every image.

I have the imagedesc template pinned in Clipboard Manager, so I place this into the clipboard:

Clipboard Manager.png (86.84 KiB) Viewed 5707 times

I then paste this into the description field of the first tab, enter the date that the images were taken, and the key aspect of the description (i.e. the page that all the images are going onto) followed by ", " or "—" ready for the specific part of the description:

imagedesc.png (13.87 KiB) Viewed 5707 times

I then copy and paste this block into each tab. Then, for each tab, I select the image, complete the description, then move to the next tab while the previous tab is uploading.

The whole process only takes a few minutes. Hours of photography, painful image processing, and a few minutes of wiki code. Working with MediaWiki is the easy bit.

Finally, the target page needs a gallery. You'll see that I have the gallery outline as the second pinned clipboard item. On the target page, I paste this piece of stock code. I add a blank line in the gallery for each image. I then switch to each tab, select the complete image name ("File:Something -- some view.jpg") and drag that text into the corresponding blank line of the new gallery code:

Dragging in image text.png (32.05 KiB) Viewed 5702 times

Finally, after each of those lines, I'll add a brief description, i.e. a pipe ("|") followed by some text, giving: File:Something -- some view.jpg|Some view of something.

Preview, double-check, enter an edit description, and save.

In reality, chances are it will take a lot longer as I'll be creating the whole page at the same time (including the full write-up, infobox etc), and possibly also various corresponding categories along with it. If you're only adding a gallery, that's not of any concern.

In other words, worry about the photography, and don't fret about the wiki — it really isn't that scary, and it's neither hard nor time-consuming to get it right. Honest!

[7bit]

Code: Select all

#!/bin/bash
# BeardsLESS 0.1 2013-10-04

# Usage:
# ./bless.sh "enter image description here"

# edit these 2 variables and forget about the rest!
MYUSER="7bit"
LICENCE="GPL"

MYSRC=$MYUSER"'s work"
MYDESC="$@"
MYDATE=$(date --utc --rfc-3339=date)

echo "{{imagedesc"
echo "| description = [["$MYDESC"]] -"
echo "| source      = "$MYSRC
echo "| date        = "$MYDATE
echo "| author      = [[User:"$MYUSER"|]]"
echo "| licence     = "$LICENCE
echo "}}"

./bless.sh "Switch sample"

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{{imagedesc
| description = [[Switch sample]] -
| source      = 7bit's work
| date        = 2013-10-04
| author      = [[User:7bit|]]
| licence     = GPL
}}

[webwit]

GPL sucks. Are you gonna post the entire viral license with each use of an image?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia: ... e_licenses

GNU's Not Unix!
GNU

NB: These licenses require reprinting the entire license text with any reuse of the image. If you created the image yourself, please consider using a different license. If one include any of the content, the entire book/section goes under GFDL, unlike CC-BY-SA

Public domain, BSD or Creative Commons are a better choice for a wiki and not viral.

[Daniel Beardsmore]

"bless", eh? (That's the Perl built-in that converts any scalar to an object. Perl's native OO is TRWTF.)

PS — this is the final weekend within the competition timeframe!

[7bit]

In the spirit of good programming practice, we should always use the DTL (Desk Thority License) by default, which should be defined somewhere else, so we don't get any unwanted mishmash.


BTW, what should be the nearest equivalent of public domain?

"bless", eh? (That's the Perl built-in that converts any scalar to an object. Perl's native OO is TRWTF.)

PS — this is the final weekend within the competition timeframe!

I hate over-complicated tools, so I use bless.sh instead of [arial]daniel_beardsmore.exe[/arial].

ps: My 105mm lens is on its way to me. Same for the Swedish girls from tinlong's group buy, so I should be able to do the winning shots in time!

[kps]

BTW, what should be the nearest equivalent of public domain?

I like WTFPL.