A couple of weeks ago, my laptop (Dell Inspiron 8200), which is my primary PC, started mis-behaving. It runs fine for ten to twenty minutes or maybe more then the CPU races to 100% utilization and the twin fans roars and the GUI becomes very sluggish. Trouble shooting the problem is frustrating. On occasion the laptop will run for several hours without any problem. I then feel like I got it fixed. Reboot and come back later and the problem is back. When the problem is occurring, if I reboot without powering off the laptop, the problem persists. I’ve tried many things to rectify this but I’m getting nowhere. I can’t even tell if this is a hardware or software problem. Because my /home is on a separate partition I was able to reinstall Ubuntu but even this did not help. I’ve rebuilt the kernel to be sure SMP was not enabled and to specify support for my Pentium M processor. There must be some desktop/user configuration that is the culprit. Wish me luck.
Matthew East of the Ubuntu Documentation Team pointed me to a great series of screen casts. Alan Pope of Ubuntu-UK has created some cool introductory videos/screencasts. There a quite a few screencasts and look for new ones coming in the future. The sound quality is great and Alan has a great way of pacing the action. I highly recommend these and I’ve learned a nugget or two watching them. I’ve just got to figure out how to do this as I really feel these screencasts are the wave of the future.
I think the grand daddy of the screencast in this format is Jon Udell. Formally of Infoworld, Jon continues to evangelize the practicality of screencasting. Screencasting on Ubuntu has been difficult but the challenges have been overcome.
Dr. Drang over at ‘And now it’s all this’ pointed me to a pair of command-line program call pcal (for regular calendars) and lcal (for lunar calendars) that creates neat little calendars. As a photographer, having some knowledge of the lunar cycle is helpful. I was able to convert this to a OpenOffice Draw document and size it of my HipsterPDA. Here is a copy for you! lunar-2007.odg
gnome-open
gnome-open: Open Anything from the Command Line — Carthik Sharma posted this on Ubuntu-Planet and wow is this ever cool. Here is a simple way to open files in their associated GUI application right from command line. All this without having to remember which application opens which file. Let gnome handle the details. Carthik has samples and tips for adding this gem to your aliases. Thanks for sharing Carthik.
Working with the Inkscape. Found a tutorial show how to do this logo with photoshop and it only took about 42 nanoseconds to convert what I saw to Inkscape action. This is where I work and I’m going to slip this into the next presentation I have to do. Let the coolness flow.
Here is a link to the original photoshopit post.
“The Code Lunix”
I found an entertaining linux documentary called “The Code Linux” on Google viedo. Viewing it will help you understand more about Linux, free software, open source software and the development environment.
It is in several languages. Thankfully it is mostly (but not exclusively) Engish. Languages include Swedish & Swedish subtitles, Finnish, some form of Chinese and others I could not identify.
Google Video has some good stuff. Here is a link to the classic short “The Man Who Planted Trees”.
Above is my “Quicky Glass Globe” as I learned from Richard in Beeton, Ontario. Richard lives about 45 minutes South of my birth place Barrie, Ontario. My dad was stationed at Canadian Forces Base Borden back then. We migrated West to Calgary when I was only a few months old so I have no recollection of it.
Enough biographical drivel! Richard has blessed us with a great screencast using the Inkscape to produce the above graphic. He’s done the MacGyver and creates a mic stand out of tape, camera tripod, coat hanger and a pair of nylons. I had heard the there were lots of issues synchronizing sound with screencast in Linux but those problems must have been overcome. Richard has inspired me to give it a try. Now, I’ll have to come up with something to screencast.
Thanks Richard, I found it useful and the sound was just fine.
Kitchen Photography
Magic Mint Tea
There were a couple of ideas that came my way this week that lead to this image. I’ve been following The Strobist (David) who is sharing his knowledge and skills with small flash devices. The above was cross lit – flash on the left and window on the right. Should have tried this with hard light rather then diffuser on the flash.
-Canon Speedlite 430ex set to -1 stop (with white Omni-Bounce attached)
-Attached with Canon off-shoe cord
-Flash handheld left of subject…maybe 1 ft away.
The other part of the inspiration for this image came from a photographer I found on Flickr. Nigel (at least I think that is his name, fun how the internet is) is from England and is a great photographer. I plan on doing more of this kitchen photography, it is real fun.
Imagemagick
Lewiston, Idaho & Clarkston, Washington
Confluence of the Snake and Clearwater Rivers
This is my first post to Planet #photogeeks. I’ve come across some pretty interesting little imagemagick commands that I’ve applied to the above photo. Dr Drang at “And now it’s all this” got me started with all this.
I’ve always wanted to be able to add a 1px black border to my images. On the web I’ve been able to do that with the “border=1″ html tag. Sometimes that was a little messy for whatever reason so adding the border to the image is neater. Here is the simple command to add a 1 px border to an image.
convert -bordercolor black -border 1x1 input.jpg output.jpg
I also added the little watermark and I’m going to work on something a little more elagent. Here is how I did it.
convert -size 100x25 xc:none -gravity center -stroke black -strokewidth 2 -annotate 0 'willsimpson.org' -channel RGBA -blur 0x3 -stroke none -fill white -annotate 0 'willsimpson.org' +size input.jpg +swap -gravity south -geometry +0-2 -composite output.jpg
Merry Cellars
A couple of my open source images are being used by Merry Cellars on the labels of their 2004 Merlot and 2004 Cabernet.
Here is a link to a nice articale by Abby Anderson of the University of Idaho’s Argonaut titled Cellar handles wine with care. Here is a link to the original images used by the winery.