Author: Owen

link of the day: NEF plugin for gimp 2.0

I’m thinking about getting a new digital camera, and one of the modes many of the better cameras have is RAW mode. The camera records data in 12-bit-per-channel or even greater color space, and also saves data like white-balance adjustment.

When brought into a photo editor, there’s much more room in the color space to adjust levels and color, reducing the grain and corruption that stems from pushing the curves too much.

I was worried that linux wouldn’t have up-to-date support for RAW mode files, but I was wrong! A little googling, and I found the RawPhoto GIMP-2.0 plug-in which puts a nice face on David Craw’s raw photo decoder. All I had to do was compile David’s program (he provides the gcc line on his site) and run gimptool-2.1 –install on the rawphoto program.

Now I can open up raw photos and play with the brightness and contrast in 48-bit colorspace before I bring it into the 24-bit land of the gimp.

Mass MoCA

Char and I went to Mass MoCA on Saturday, and although it’s in Massachusetts, it’s a somewhat unbelievable 4 hours drive from Boston to North Adams where it’s located. It was worth the trip, though. The museum is housed in an old textile printing mill, so it’s got a lot of cubic footage to work with. The floors are wide, and the ceilings are high. As such they tend to attract installation-style art rather than basic paintings or drawings. Right now they only have three exhibits — one artist occupies the bottom floor, a group show takes the second and third, and a final artist uses an entire building in the complex.

I liked the museum a lot. They turn over their exhibits very slowly, so I can go once a year and not miss anything. I’d go more often if I had to, but the drive is so long it’s difficult to justify getting a membership or just dropping by whenever.

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Ann Hamilton‘s build-size installation resembles the movie Brazil, a newly fallen snow, a cathedral, and a whole host of other associations.

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Matthew Ritchie is probably insane

making metacity a little more like sawfish — but in a good way!

Sawfish is dead. I know, I love the million keybinding options, and the cool regexp-based window matching, but as the xorg server moves forward, sawfish stays maddeningly still. So here are some things I’ve figured out to make metacity a little more like home for us sawfish people.
Continue reading “making metacity a little more like sawfish — but in a good way!”

mythtv: tv-out

A footnote to my work on my mythtv machine: Newer nvidia cards have amazingly well-supported tv output, so you can safely ditch crappy VGA to NTSC scan converters. Check the nvidia readme for the supported cards, and use the nvidia-settings tool to fine tune the picture. You can drag a slider bar and change the overscan as you watch!

speeding up yum a little

problem: Yum is incredibly slow
solution: run yum -C, which bypasses updating all of the headers and goes with whatever is already in your cache. Obviously you’ll have to update your cache once in a while, but for day-to-day installing of packages you can safely skip the update.

iriver firmware!

Iriver finally released updated firmware! It’s about four months late, but it’s here. It says they’ve added gapless playback, but the way they describe it doesn’t sound right.

Oh well, too bad mine was stolen or I’d report on the improvements.

edit: After checking the iriver forums, it appears that after all this time the iriver people didn’t understand what people meant by gapless playback! While everyone was talking about the gap heard between tracks in a mix cd (which should be seamless, or gapless), they have added a feature to take out silence at the end of a track. There are still pauses between tracks. So they haven’t fixed anything. Oops!