Claudio Santambrogio

filmtagger

Sunday, 14. December 2008, 13:56:04

…is a simple, cross-platform tool to add EXIF information to pictures taken with a film camera. One (possibly the only?…) disadvantage with non-digital photographic work is that the images produced from scanning the films do not contain relevant meta data - which camera the shot was taken with, which lens, which film, etc…

Filmtagger (available for Windows, Mac and Linux), developed by Sverrir Valgeirsson, is a simple GUI tool to tag an entire directory at once.

4 comments

lolo and helga

Thursday, 16. October 2008, 07:05:23

holga, photography, lomo, about

Lomography is the big rage. The Lomographic Society has brought back into life the wonderful russian Lomo cameras.

On the same wave runs the success of the Holga, a cheap medium-format Chinese toy-camera which takes pictures with a wonderful "surrealistic, impressionistic"^{[citation needed]} touch. I love my Holga. I am not a lomographer.

And of course, there are others that want to ride the big wave as well - but they are chique, and buy a iPhone instead. With a little bit of extra money, you can even "take a typically crappy photo with the iPhone's camera" and make it look as if it was taken with one of these lo-fi toy-cameras. The true snob's lo-fi. Fake.

Meet Lolo and Helga [sic!].

2 comments

google browser

Wednesday, 3. September 2008, 13:51:01

download, browser, opera

Google recently released their own browser. So lots of people want to download it, search for "google browser" (on google, where else?), click on hit #1, and click download. That's all fine and good.

Except that since Google decided to release their browser, my own server got severely DoS'sed. Upon inspection, it turns out that the search hit #1 points to...

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2006/03/google-browser.html

And since the target of that (Windows) download is my own server... Well, you see, I don't like being DoS'sed

But people obviously are looking for a better browsing experience - so I am just helping them

5 comments

svalbarðs fundur

Sunday, 31. August 2008, 13:38:04

svalbard, life, world

Icelandic annals report for the year 1194 "svalbarðs fundur", or "svalbarði fundinn" - the discovery of "the cold edge", or, more poetically, "the cold coast". In two Icelandic chronicles from the 13^th century we find more details on this "svalbarð":

en frá lánganesi á norðanverðu íslandi er IIII dægra haf til svalbarð a norð í hafsbotn

As of today, it is unclear what this "svalbarð" really is: unlikely to be Jan Mayen, since far too small and insignificant to be mentioned, certainly not the already known Greenland, possibly today's Svalbard (the navigation distance of 4 days from the North coast of Iceland is correct) - if not just the edge of the ice shelf, which would match the name incredibly well… The discovery of Svalbard this early is just a possibility, not a factum.

The presence of the Pomors on Svalbard during the 16^th century is also not proven, and the first certain discovery of the archipelago is Willem Barentsz's third trip to the North, 1596. He named the place "Spitsbergen", the "jagged country" because of the jagged mountains on the West coast, but it was prosaically renamed to "Het nieuwe land", "the new country", on maps published soon thereafter.

I have discovered the jagged cold coast for myself this year.

2 comments

which is which - part two

Tuesday, 20. May 2008, 13:48:50

desktop, opera, about

A while ago I published a guide through our jungle of UNIX package names - numbering packages based on gcc and qt versions simply wasn't too intuitive...

Today things changed: we have moved to a more self-explanatory naming scheme. The old scheme is now discontinued - in the new scheme those obscure numbers have been replaced by gcc and qt versions.

As an example, here is the mapping for intel-linux packages:

intel-linux

.1 = gcc295-static-qt3
.5 = gcc3-shared-qt3
.6 = gcc4-shared-qt3
.9 = gcc4-qt4

You got the spin?

31 comments

*nix i18n

Tuesday, 20. May 2008, 13:41:54

i18n, desktop, opera

Rejoyce! No more fetching the Opera language file to have Opera running in your environment's language - localized builds are now coming to Linux/UNIX too!

New Opera 9.5 packages are now bundled with all languages that Windows and Mac have been shipping with already for a while. At startup, Opera should detect your environment's language and switch to it. If the language is not available, it will fall back to English.

Please note that translations are still incomplete, so if you are running non-English locale you might have some strings missing, etc. Feedback is welcome!

1 comment

ion3

Thursday, 7. February 2008, 07:22:07

ion3, linux, usability, unix

2002-02-07 - Last release of Ion1 (it never had ds/rc/stable)
2004-02-07 - First "stable" release of Ion2
2008-02-07 - First "stable" release of Ion3
2016-02-07 - ?

Tuomo today laconically announced the release of the stable version of the tabbed tiling window manager ion3. Congrats!

3 comments

keyboard friendly google searches

Thursday, 6. December 2007, 19:02:35

query, keyboard, about

Google is running, among its experiments, a keyboard friendly Google search.

Key     Action
J       Selects the next result.
K       Selects the previous result.
O       Opens the selected result.
<Enter> Opens the selected result.
/       Puts the cursor in the search box.
<Esc>   Removes the cursor from the search box.

A really sweet feature - just too bad you cannot configure your own key bindings…

Edit: Ohh, jorunnix, thanks for pointing it out: just add &esrch=BetaShortcuts at the end of the GET URL for your Google search

11 comments

linux: opera, flash and plugins

Tuesday, 4. December 2007, 23:36:50

flash, opera, linux, plug-ins

Adobe released a new version of Flash Player - and triumphantly announces that "this new XEmbed-enabled plugin should work with Opera now."

We achieved great things in tight work with the Flash team - but here they seem to have mixed something up

The new Flash version, as mentioned already earlier, does not require XEmbed to run, but a GTK browser - there unfortunately still seems to be confusion about XEmbed and the XEmbed Mozilla extension "spec", which actually has little to do with XEmbed. So much about "standards"…

Obviously, a plugin expecting to run in a GTK browser does not work out-of-the-box in non-GTK browsers… The new Flash plugin is not compatible with the current Opera and Konqueror versions. This means, to put it in simple terms, that Adobe leaves at least 26% of the Linux users (just summing up Konqueror and Opera users) in the dark, forcing them to stick to the old version.

We just released a UNIX plugin milestone snapshot of the upcoming Opera version, allowing not only to run a GTK plugin in a Qt browser, but even going as far as using GTK "to draw directly on the webpage of a Qt browser": Opera and Mozilla are now ready for windowless plugins. Only the plugins are missing now

The new GTK Flash Plugin does run out-of-the-box in the latest 9.50 snapshot.

4 comments

songza

Wednesday, 14. November 2007, 12:33:00

world, usability, ui, about

Songza got released just a few days ago.

Not only this is an excellent, really cool search engine that allows you to find and play all the music you want - but I really love the nice, very usable interface based on very few elements: