Aww, this cat is so cute! I had to view the swf file itself because Firefox only displayed a small portion of the movie so try that if the same happens to you!
EDIT: urls updated!
Author Archives: Donncha
ATI Cards and Corrupted Text
This is new to me, but according to these setup tips my “Fixed Frequency Monitor” can’t handle the frequencies bandied about by my new ATI graphics card. It’s mildly annoying and sounds like a bit of a cop out as I haven’t seen anything similar on lower end cards!
When you’re in DOS mode or text mode and If you notice slight flickering around some characters, particularly “r”, then this could be the problem. The only solution is to upgrade your monitor or shut your eyes until you boot into a graphical GUI!
I wonder if that explains the following strange character corruption that appears during bootup:
Oh, Debian testing detects SATA drives without a hitch. 🙂
Later… Even in the GUI there’s corruption. Does this happen to other Radeon 9×00 users? The multi-colour lines in the image below appear randomly but seems to be worse when high-contrast web pages are displayed. This happens when using either the proprietary driver from ATI or the open source one in XFree86. Time to get on to Elara again.
Later Still… Opinion on #linux on irc.linux.ie is that the graphics card is damaged as 6 others who have ATI Radeon 9000 series cards have had no problems. I faxed them a return form 20 minutes ago and am waiting a response now.
Where Is Your Home?
Why don’t almost all the blogspot hosted blogs I’ve come across have a clear “Home” link or have the blog name linked to the root address of the site? It must be something to do with the default template at blogger.com is it?
The Sports Mad Guy
What if sports is your life but local facilities are somewhat lacking? Watch this animation to see what one enterprising French man did.. boxing in a butcher’s, running at the grocers, “cycling” on the road.. hehe
My Life In Film
From BBC3 comes My Life in Film, a great little comedy that will hopefully go beyond the 6 episodes already shot. Here’s a review of it. You can watch clips on the BBC website linked above.
It looks like there’s one more episode so make sure to set it up in your Sky personal planner, or set all your alarm clocks to go off at 9.30pm next Sunday night and tune in to BBC2!
Oops!
This is the “oops” list! A series of photographs of unfortunate aviation events. Here’s a dramatic example!
Work it out – Office politics
In this article Jenni Russell “uncovers the hidden rules of the workplace”.
How is your office environment?
And if you want to annoy your collegues.. Follow some of these instructions!
A9.com -Yellow Pages – Copyrighted Buildings?
Nice, the Yellow Pages on a9.com have photos of the places you’re looking for, as long as you live in the good ol’ US of A!
I wonder if they got the permission of all building owners to take their photos. The images of all buildings built after 19xx are proteced by copyright.
Ah, here’s the details. It’s all buildings built after December 1st, 1990. In general any building viewable from a public place is ok to photograph.
The a9 search engine is nice too!
Can I run Windows viruses in Linux?
It’s almost possible, but the results in this article on running Windows viruses with Wine are disappointing. There are problems but things are improving so Linux users can enjoy all the benefits of Windows!
It just isn’t fair that Windows users get all the viruses. I mean really, shouldn’t Linux users be in on the fun as well? Well… thanks to the folks running the Wine project, Linux users can “catch the virus bug” too — sort of.
Creating Panoramic Photos with the GIMP
Caoimhe asked me to elaborate on how I created the panoramic photo that currently appears at the top of this page. Here’s how. You can download all the images I used (although they’re much smaller than the originals!) but the techniques described will be useful for other photos too.
- Load dsc06627.jpg, dsc06628.jpg and dsc06629.jpg into the GIMP.
- Create a new 1920×640 RGB image.
- Copy/paste dsc06629.jpg into the new image and move it to the left of the frame.
- Look at the layers dialog and right click on “Pasted Layer” and select “New layer”.
- Do the same for dsc06628.jpg and dsc06627.jpg moving them over to the right before making them into new layers. No need to line them up right away.
- Now line up “Pasted Layer#1” with “Pasted Layer” as best you can. It helps if you select “Pasted Layer#1” and move the Opacity slider to about 50%. Concentrate on getting the right side of the layer lined up with the bottom layer. The left side is always overlapped by the layer above.
- Now set the opacity to 100% again! You’ll hopefully see the mountains in the background join up nicely!
- You’ll have to adjust the colour of “Pasted Layer#1” – Use Layers->Colours->Colour Balance, and Hue-Saturation. Don’t worry if the colours don’t match exactly.
- Do the same with “Pasted Layer#2”. Getting the trees lined up is a bit of a pain because of the branches, but if you clone out the branch tops after aligning it helps.
- When that’s done, you need to match up the layers using a layer mask and a gradient: select “Pasted Layer#1”, right click, and click “Add Layer Mask”, and click “OK”. Select the gradient tool (press “L” if you can’t find it) and draw a gradient from the top-left corner to the center of the layer. Click on the layers dialog again and “Apply Layer Mask” and then use another gradient on “Pasted Layer#1” to match up the right of that layer with “Pasted Layer#2”.
- Crop the image, remove the white background and get rid of the rough edges!
You can look at sneem-panorama.xcf to see the layers and effects I used.
As part of your digital workflow you should also use the Layers->Colours->Curves, Hue-Saturation and Levels tools, and Filters->Enhance->Unsharp Mask plugin to improve the final image.