How Good is Windows Live Photo Gallery’s Face Recognition?
So I work on Windows Live Photo Gallery and I have thousands upon thousands of photos at home. The latest release of Photo Gallery, 2011, adds Face Recognition to help you tag people in your photos. As you tag someone, it builds up enough confidence to start suggesting that person is in other photos. You can go into Batch Face Tagging and quickly confirm the correct suggestions and then be able to quickly find those pictures later by the person’s name.
The previous version had Face Detection, which is an important foundation to being able to do Face Recognition (you can’t attempt to recognize a face if you can’t detect that there’s a face there). But in that previous version, you had to go and manually, photo by photo, say who the person was. I did this. Over and over again. Until I got tired.
When I installed the latest version of Photo Gallery at home back in 2010, it used all those manually tagged faces as the basis of finding more matches. Below are the initial results. Dude, it found faces of me from when I was three and up, including those pre-beard adult days. It did the same finding pictures of my father, mother, and brother.
How good is Windows Live Photo Gallery’s face recognition? Crazy scary good.
A post from my WP7… In Starbucks
I just installed the WordPress app for WP7 to make my first and perhaps last post via my Samsung Focus. As of late I’ve felt that posting to my old blog felt better than Facebook or Twitter. My Twitter usage has really dropped and I use it more now to save interesting notes or URLs for myself to snarf up via RSS.
Posted from WordPress for Windows Phone
Baby: Swaddle Time! The Miracle Blanket Swaddle.
If you read Dr. Harvey Karp’s "Happiest Baby on the Block" I expect that you’re going to try to swaddle your baby. It certainly makes sense. Supposedly there are babies out there that once swaddled are relieved and comforted and appreciate it so much that they’d never try to break out of the comfort of the swaddle.
Kendell was not one of those babies. Harry Houdini all the way. We’d crank down the swaddle but still he’d break his arms free: "Ta-Da!" I felt bad having read the book and it commented how great Dad’s are as swaddlers.
Then came the Miracle Blanket. If you’re going to swaddle your baby then you should just go buy one. Maybe have a back-up, too, should your swaddle get soiled in the night (or be like me, up with an infant late into the night waiting for it to dry).
It’s a great design. It comes with three wings attached to the main blanket for the arms and body: one wing goes over each arm and then under the body to anchor the wing, and then a large wing wraps round the body before the main long arm wraps around several times to lock everything in place. For smaller babies, there’s a pocket to slip their legs into. When the baby is older, their legs can just stick out.
Given the flailing arms of an infant, along with their Moro reflex, the swaddle helps keep everything under control and the Miracle Blanket just makes it easy. There were quite a few times I’d see that Kendell had slipped an arm out of his plain blanket swaddle and then that arm would flail and hit the side of his bassinette and then he’d wake up out of surprise. Or worse, his arm would smack himself right in the face, causing him to wake up crying and looking around, wondering, ‘Hey, who hit the baby?’
I’m a swaddle believer and thank goodness for the Miracle Blanket.
Cannibal Zombie
Getting ready for work this morning, I remembered an email story I wrote to my Dad that I titled Cannibal Hillbillies. I was thinking, ‘What’s worse than Cannibal Hillbillies? … Zombie Cannibal Hillbillies!’
Then I thought that Cannibal and Zombie was redundant.
But then I realized, no, it’s not!
A Cannibal Zombie not only eats the flesh of the living, it friggin’ also eats the rotted flesh of the zombie dead! That’s one bad ass zombie man. Probably a pretty lonely zombie, too.
Hmm. Maybe it’s a good band name, too.