Month: February 2005

Fixed laptop?

I’ve been browsing the Freedesktop.org bugzilla site trying to find some answer about my Annoying crashing laptop, and I came across a bug with a link to a video driver for my laptop. The web page is tiny and the driver doesn’t even come with source code. It’s like it emerged fully formed from the internet itself. So far it has succeeded where others have failed. I no longer have weird artifacts when playing videos. OpenGL seems to work. And so far, it hasn’t crashed. So for now I recommend trying out this i810 driver and see if it works. I’ll post again if my laptop crashes again, of course.

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!)

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 (Last time I installed this it was a little out of date, but the error messages explained how to update the API calls).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:

  1. Pick a color that should be white in the image (in this case, snow)
  2. Copy that color to the background
  3. Doubleclick the background color to open up the Change Background Color dialog box
  4. Click the “S” radio box (for saturation)
  5. Reduce the saturation to near zero, but not quite all the way
  6. Close the box
  7. 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