Owen – Page 21 – Owen's Photolog

It never ends!

The Bush Administration has an amazing knack for finding foxes to guard henhouses. Coal regulatory body? Find a coal executive! Today, they hired spyware company employee to head up the Privacy Advisatory Committee.

I hate my computer

My computer periodically crashes hard, and it sucks. It looks like it’s an i810 video issue, based on similar reports of random flashing vertical lines. Here’s what I see (click for video!)

Firefox Extension Proposal

I propose a firefox extension that can provide selective web page redaction based on the user’s preferences. Specifically, it will remove all posts from Planet Gnome by John “Fuck the Precautionary Principle” Fleck.

Correcting color temperature in the Gimp

Peter mentions wanting to correct the color temperature of his snow photos, which came out blue.

The best way to do this is by using the Grey Point plugin for the Gimp. (Last time I installed this it was a little out of date, but the error messages explained how to update the API calls).

Once that’s installed, this is what you do:

Pick a color that should be white in the image (in this case, snow)
Copy that color to the background
Doubleclick the background color to open up the Change Background Color dialog box
Click the “S” radio box (for saturation)
Reduce the saturation to near zero, but not quite all the way
Close the box
Do Script-fu / Grey Point, and use the Background option

I find this script gets much better results than the grey point item in the levels tool:

Original

Levels tool (note blown-out areas)

Grey point script

Dear Media

STOP USING WORDS BUSH CHOOSES
Thank you.

great moments in typos

It just goes to show that you shouldn’t think about one thing while typing about something else. In a recent email, I meant to type “Between” but my fingers got as far as “Networ” before I realized I was way off.

I could write for salon

Me, on 1/11/05:

(14:02:03) Owen:http://www.apple.com/macmini/
(14:02:06) Owen: on the site now
(14:02:42) Owen: so the ipod is revealed as a "gateway apple product" which leads to harder products like this
(14:02:50) Owen: and then of course people will buy the dual g5
(14:03:21) Ryan: what do you mean by harder?
(14:03:31) Owen: sorry I was making a drug analog
(14:03:31) Owen: y

Salon, 1/31/05:

“What if the iPod’s just a gateway drug?”

I’m glad other people also thought of this — and expressed it better.

This Just In: Daily Show uses Google

ok, so everyone got excited about the Daily Show using gnome — well they don’t, they use google. Try googling “minesweeper”, then take a look at the third link. look familiar?

Free Software on TV

Char noticed this on the Daily Show:

Note the upper left corner of the window — it’s gnome minesweeper on redhat, not Windows minesweeper! Char suspects it’s for copyright reasons, because it’s free to use a screenie from gnome, whereas with a Microsoft product they’d probably have to jump through a bunch of hoops.

Anyway, I thought it was cute.