set ImageMagickHome to “/Users/cknight/ImageMagick-6.6.3″
tell application “iPhoto”
set curPhotos to selection
if (count of curPhotos) ≤ 1 then
display alert “You need to select the photos you want me to process.”
else
set similarityLimit to text returned of (display dialog “Enter similarity limit (0-65,536, similar pictures have low similarity metrics), and click GO” buttons {“GO”} default answer “10000″ default button 1)
repeat while length of curPhotos > 0
set thisPhoto to item 1 in curPhotos
repeat with thatPhoto in rest of curPhotos
set thisWidth to width of thisPhoto
set thisHeight to height of thisPhoto
set thatWidth to width of thatPhoto
set thatHeight to height of thatPhoto
if thisWidth < thatWidth + 5 and thisWidth > thatWidth – 5 and thisHeight < thatHeight + 5 and thisHeight > thatHeight – 5 then
set diffstr to (do shell script “DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH=’” & ImageMagickHome & “/lib’&& export DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH && ” & ImageMagickHome & “/bin/compare -dissimilarity-threshold 1 -metric mae ‘” & thumbnail path of thisPhoto & “‘ ‘” & thumbnail path of thatPhoto & “‘ /dev/null 2>&1 | cut -f 1 -d ‘ ‘”) as text
set diff to diffstr as number
if diff < similarityLimit then
set comment of thisPhoto to comment of thisPhoto & ” duplicate of ” & name of thatPhoto
set comment of thatPhoto to comment of thatPhoto & ” duplicate of ” & name of thisPhoto
– set keywords of thisPhoto to keywords of thisPhoto & {“duplicate”}
–display alert “this: ” & image filename of thisPhoto & ” and that: ” & image filename of thatPhoto
end if
end if

end repeat
set curPhotos to rest of curPhotos
end repeat
display alert “All done!”
end if
end tell

Oh, and had a blast on Saturday night going to the opening of Amicvs Monstrvm. Meeting Scott C. (and Nathan Stapley) in person was great fun, and their boss-man Tim is totally totally a cool guy. Oh and picked out one of Nathan’s space-themed paintings. I love his style (as I obviously love Scott’s.)

Anyways, back to my photos. Hosting of this blog from home over DSL means loading large photos on the blog is a bad idea, and will suck much of my uplink speed (which is supposed to be like .7Mbps but we all know how that is.) I’ve uploaded a bunch to facebook (or as I term it, photodump. I am not fond of facebook but their unlimited photo hosting + iPhoto plugin makes it easy to share. Maybe I’ll bite the bullet and do Mobile Me so’s I can host full-rez photos.)

Here’s a crop of one of my photos from yesterday morning’s excursion. I caught wind of the NYTimes “A Moment in Time” call, wherein photographers around the world are to take a photo as close to 13:00GMT on May 2 and upload their photo to their blog. This is not the photo I uploaded; but I like it as much and it’s more artsy.

First we hit Circus Circus to kill some time before the hotel checkin, played a couple slots, noted that the acts weren’t performing ’til that night, and generally noticed how quiet it was for a Friday afternoon. So much nicer than the Circus Circus in Vegas.

We stayed at the Peppermill in the Tuscany Tower, which was a bit pricey but the room was huge as well was the bath. (We counted 10 light switches.) The casino and lobby is kitschy, which it’s known for, and we had trouble defining what style it could be called, best we could come up with was Florida Keys. Dinner in the Bimini steakhouse was lovely, and the food was very good. Bonus for having a rye whiskey, which seems to finally be catching on. Then on to the show for the evening, the Grand Sierra is definitely targeted at the younger crowd and was busy busy busy. The show was amazing, bonus for arriving early enough to get the best seats at our table. The Grand Theater layout is kinda odd; the tables are regular tables with 6 chairs; 3 of which have a terrible view of the stage unless you end up at one of the central tables. There were circular booths as well, just strange to have regular tables mixed in. Acoustics were very good but not great.

Saturday spent doing the casino crawl after a lovely early lunch at the Wild River Grille, fine dining lunch menu of high-end sandwiches and appetizers. Yum! Boy howdy how the downtown is in a sad shape, though, with a number of casinos being closed. Surprising, as Reno is a low-cost getaway spot, but I’ve found that local getaway spots (like San Luis Obispo) seem to be taking the downturn the hardest. Which surprises me greatly!

Trip back was punctuated with a stop at the Emigrant Gap vista, as well as the Benicia vista to see the sun set and the ship graveyard.

Next trip will try to see more sights and more local flavor; but this was an excellent first trip and I look forward to returning.

And no, I am not signing up for your “pay us $15 in perpetuity whether we have artists you like this month or not” plan is not an acceptable alternative.

I think I’ll spend my $ supporting (cc) artists on Jamendo.com more where I can support an artist at any level (often to the tune of $8/album) and seriously consider whether to buy albums from Magnatune any longer. Hopefully they’ll realize that increasing prices 50% (from their previous “suggested” $8 buy price; I always paid that or more for music I liked) will result in a more than 33% drop in sales (where artists will not break even). And for artists out there currently releasing or planning to release through Magnatune, seriously talk to them about their currently broken pricing model.

Magnatune does have positive aspects; music is free for podcasters (and at least one podcast I listen to uses music regularly from Magnatune and gives’ em a mention), and sure they do support open source and independent music. Buckman @ Magnatune does clarify the average prices folks pay for music on the site, but that assumes the same folks who buy albums off his site also buy new CD’s. And as someone who has bought probably 50 albums off the site, you’d think they’d at least ask whether this was a good idea, rather than shove it down our throats. Sad.

So one-line summaries of F2P MMO’s I’ve played recently, in some semblance of order from best to worst:

D&D Online – probably captures the D&D experience the most accurately, and has some nice FPS-like elements to the way the combat works. More than once I’ve shouted out loud at some really neat surprises and dungeon design.

Mobinogi – Interesting Korean MMO, deep crafting, almost turn-based combat, deep skill system, mediocre graphics and no pathfinding (in a game where it’s only click to move). Would almost be appropriate for the kids except for Nao’s bouncing knockers.

Dofus – Love the art, great turn-based combat, nice class designs. Bonus for being Flash. Minus for the harsh F2P limits and for not releasing their really nice Wakfu animated series with English subs (yet?) Oh and troublesome release cycles. Oh and annoying navigation in the world; why they couldn’t do scrolling rather than individual screens with hard-to-see “navigate to the next screen” waypoints is beyond me. While 2.0 improves graphics, the gameplay is identical (ok, that’s not necessarily bad). At least they make it a bit easier to move around.

Pirates of the Caribbean Online – Interesting, I hadn’t heard of this one until massively.com noted updates. Lacks gathering and crafting, which I see as a positive generally. Graphics are very dated, seems like early 3DFX graphics or something, but they run fast on my laptop. Voice-acted cut scenes are decent and infrequent (a positive, although you can skip them if you wish.) Combat is melee-oriented, with a nice “click the LMB at the right time to do combo attacks” mechanic. Ranged combat is standard, although they have a “pirate’s code” so no shooting Navy or other humans. Ship combat is awesome if a bit simplistic, with the ability to have multiple crew; usually the captain piloting the ship with others manning guns and everyone gets in on short boarding actions when fighting flag ships. (Guns are allowed there, thankfully…which allows lower-level players to stay out of the melee.) I’d subscribe, if it weren’t $10/mo ($80/yr, decent discount…) Oh, and streaming downloading and MacOSX support are bonuses. Tempting…

4Story – A Korean WoW-alike MMO that has me hooked right now…Small download (~1GB), nice graphics, fast framerate, fairly simple/linear quests, fast leveling. I’m playing a human summoner, which is probably why I’m playing this so much at the moment…When you kill a creature, you can summon that creature. You can only have one summoned creature at a time, but the mechanics work quite well…I direct my creature to attack an enemy, and it leaps forward while I DPS it from the back. Let’s see if it has staying power. Seems they designed the quests to all be done solo, with bosses that are just barely do-able so far. Oh and their screenshot gallery is hi-lar-ious.

Warhammer Online – yeah, it’s only the first 10 levels for free, and lots of nagging, and they canned half their team, but they have their streaming client and support Mac now too. Good time for me to play a bit of destro, which I never did when I subbed. Huh, I really like D&DO’s “fps mode”, I spend most my time in WAR with the RMB held down for mouse control of facing. Distinct gothic fantasy world, yes.

Maple Story – Side scroller MMO, nice controls, limited graphics (duh), exponential difficulty curve. Oh, and for 2-d, it’s easy to get lost.

Combat Arms – Since the two above are Nexon, I’ll throw in that Combat Arms is a great FPS game, very nice graphics, nice controls. Best $0.00 I’ve ever spent on an online FPS.

Ether Saga Online – Wow amazing graphics and world design, creative creature design, BORING combat and lots of grind. Too bad. Wonderful path finding. ‘course, I haven’t made it past lvl 10, and I am guessing the good stuff comes later, but can I survive booooooooring? Oh and I dig the theme (being a bit of a Sinophile.) One reviewer complained about making to lvl 15 without a single fight; I ran out of quests by lvl 8 (and only quest I had was “get to level 10 then go talk to …”) Wrong way to address criticism.

Perfect World International – By the same guys as Ether Saga, more adult-oriented MMO. Equally nice graphics but same grind problems. But cool that they have at least one race that starts with the ability to fly. Combat is overly simplistic and most enemies are non-reactive slugs that do nothing until you smack ‘em. Ether Saga has better pathfinding, too. But I put in well over 20 hours, but the leveling is sooo slow and repetitive I’ve given up. The graphics are so well done, amazing stuff. (Almost as good as Warhammer Online for atmospherics.)

Free Realms – Whoa, way to kiddy and “here’s an excuse for some lame-o minigames.” Yikes, PASS. Guess the kiddies love it?

Dragonica Online – Kiddie 2.5d fighter game, pass.

Neo Steam – Huh, unique world, frustrating controls.

Flyff – Also suffers from frustrating controls and lack of ability to change those controls.

Or reverse, everyone pays for everything (or a high percentage) out of pocket, and is reimbursed based on their individual outcome. Think your test is worth taking? Pony up the $ and let’s see.