Spend Your SSIA!

Here in Ireland, the government set up a savings scheme called the SSIA a few years ago. The SSIAs will be windfall for everyone who has them as they are being topped up by 25% by the Government.
For every 4 Euro I save, the Government adds 1 Euro!
The first SSIAs mature in less than a year and Spend Your SSIA is a website that wants you to spend your hard saved money! 🙂

Converting RAW to Jpeg in Linux

Dcraw is an amazing open source app that decodes many RAW formats to a more usable format for computer manipulation. It’s used by many commercial programs including Google’s Picassa!
It outputs pnm files, but with a little command line magic it can be used to convert a directory of RAW files to Jpeg.
Canon cameras produce RAW files with the extension “.cr2” so:

for i in *.cr2; do dcraw -c -a -n -h $i | ppmtojpeg > `basename $i cr2`jpg; echo $i done; done

This produces low quality jpeg images alongside your RAW images which makes it useful when browsing the directory with a file manager that doesn’t understand RAW.
You could have the camera produce the low quality jpeg images but why sacrifice the space on your media card?
It goes without saying that this will work on any UNIX platform that Dcraw supports!