Seb Przd is blowing my mind! He's doing a lot with panoramas, HDR, and reprojection-- lovely collections.

The blue LED's are invading my life. I hate them.

It would be difficult to replace blue LED's with "regular" (read: red, green, yellow, or white) ones-- for surface-mount LED's and RGB ones, I'd more likely damage the circuit board... though outright removing one would be almost as good as replacing one, with the added spiteful element of having gouged its eye out for irritating mine...

Blue LED's are alienating to many people, especially those over a certain age; they seem alien and "wrong" somehow, and it's not a result of growing up with LED's of colors other than blue, but the fact that we simply do not see blue glowing things in nature. Red, yellow, orange and white are colors we know from fire and the stars-- light sources in nature-- and these have been the colors of electronic light elements until a few years ago.

We should have learned in chemistry lab to fear blue flames since they're so hard to see, and blue-lit electronics are successors to customized cars' blue neon undercarriage lighting. These are menacing associations for me, and they also evoke cheapness and cheesy after-market design.

The blue LED has invaded consumer-level electronics and is starting to make it into higher-end electronics as well, and I think it will have an overall cheapening effect on the brand images of those companies who choose to use them. It's a high-tech artifact motif like the raw polygon and aliased pixel, and I hope it will go away after we get over its novelty.

"The Military Industrial Light and Magic Complex: Avoiding Ender’s Folly"?

Just heard about this "little planets" method for inverting panoramas into a stereographic projection, which is not what I'd expect it to be called. Of course there's a stereographic projection Flickr group-- very cool to browse.

Seems like all you need to do is:

• Shoot and stitch a complete spherical panorama to get an image with an aspect ratio of 2,
• Rotate the image 180 degrees,
• Stretch the image so it's square (aspect ratio 1),
• Run Filters > Distort > Polar Coordinates..., with the "Rectangular to Polar" option.