Example Photo Stitch - Click to Enlarge

Recently I wanted to stitch some photos together to make a composite panoramic picture of an radio controlled race track.

I had half-a-dozen or so photos, and wanted an easy way of stitching them together into one photo, to display a large area all at once, and as a future aide-memoire so we knew what done so we could reproduce it.

I dig some Googling and was somewhat amazed to find that a Microsoft product offered the solution. Windows Live Photo Gallery has a stitching function!

I tried it and was really pleased with the results. I liked how it stretched and bent the photos to fit them together.

One tip when you want to do this is to take lots of photos, take way more than you need, and of a much larger area than you need. That way when you stitch the photo you can crop it afterwards to remove the black boundary.

This video from Microsoft is a nice tutorial of how it works.

Tamiya Durga Toy Car

I’ve played with, and raced, Radio Controlled model cars for years, since I was 11 or 12 or so.

Back when I was a teenager, I used to race off-road buggies all over the North East of England, at club meetings, and at BRCA Regionals.

I gave up to go to University.

As an adult I started racing again, touring cars mainly, as that seemed to be the fashion in the South of England where I now live.

I don’t normally post about my model car racing hobby on this blog, as I blog about it a lot on rcLazy.com, but this post is more about me, than about the cars.

The reason I’m posting? I’ve just built an off-road buggy again. It’s been about 17 years since I last had one. And I’m terribly excited about getting it running, and driving it around a field.

I think it’s totally true that we never really grow up, and inside we are still children. Every weekend I see grown men, of all ages, playing with toy cars. And it fills me with delight that we can still have fun when we’re grown up.

And yes, they are toy cars! Some of the more serious racers (some are even professional, literally doing it for a living) insist that they are NOT called toy cars.

But come on!  Let’s face it, they may be superbly engineering pieces of expensive equipment – a race car with all it’s electronics can easily be around a thousand pounds, add on another couple of thousand for tyres, spares, travel etc for a years racing – but essentially we’re playing with toys!

We were at the track this week, making improvements and repairs.  And a fellow racer pointed out that none of what we were doing really mattered.  And he made me think, we’re grown men, and we build proper race tracks to play with toy cars on!  Incredible!

So, anyway, I’ve gone full circle, I’ve bought a Tamiya plastic buggy, and I’m gonna race it around old car tyres on a bit of grass, just like I did over 20 years ago.