This was really bugging me!
Youtube has “share on facebook” button, but it would only post on my profile but NOT on the homepage which means nobody ever sees my links but me…..ie POINTLESS!
Here is a screenshot showing the checkbox which needs to be ticked to share youtube videos on facebook
“Publish to Streams” MUST be ticked to work.
Thanks to Teresa Brusuelas Coburn on the facebook forums for posting the solution http://www.facebook.com/topic.php?uid=2309869772&topic=9131&post=52259
Most scanning software will allow you to do all of this using “auto” settings, but that is quite boring and I prefer to do things “manually” as it gives a greater level of control over the final result.
The first step is to scan the negative.
Most people will select “scan as a negative” as that is logical, but I’m going to select “scan as a slide” as this means the scanner will not make any atempt to adjust the colours and I will do all the colour correction in GIMP instead.
Here is a screenshot of the scan window, and the result is basically very orange, as a negative has a “mask” which causes it to be so orange. It’s something to do with the dyes being “impure” and the orange mask has annoyed me till I figured out how to correct the colours!
I have got my scanner software set up to import the image into GIMP directly, as this is simpler than having to save as a tiff first.
The next stage is to “invert” the colours in gimp to give this:
It is of course very blue, and this is the result of that annoying orange mask, as orange inverts to blue!
What we now need to do is to “tweak” the levels of each colour channel.
For each channel (red, green and blue) we are going to make 3 adjustments:
1) Black Point
2) White Point
3) Grey Point
The black and white points are done by looking at the histogram, as it’s obvious that the picture information is contained in a fairly narrow part of the colour channel, so lets move the settings so that the black and white points are where the picture data is:
First the red channel:
Then the green channel:
And finally the blue channel:
Remember that you want to set the black and white points for all 3 channels FIRST and only when you have done this should you adjust each grey point.
The reason is that adjusting a grey point is a “fine” adjustment so you don’t even want to think about adjusting grey points till you have set the black & white points.
The final setting of grey points is where the “artistic” part comes in as you are tweaking the final look and “mood” of the image at this stage.
OK I have set black, white and finally grey points and this is what I get:
Gone are those nasty colour casts, and the image looks quite “normal” in fact.
Remember this can all be done automatically so if you have loads of pictures to process then auto is the way to go, but it’s sometimes nice to know what the software is doing “under the hood” by doing everything manually.
Laptops these days seem to mainly have glossy shiny screens, unlike the original laptops of a few years ago which were mainly matt.
The trouble with glossy screens is that smears & smudges seem to be far more obvious and annoying.
Cleaning a glossy screen and ending up without any smudges is not that easy, but by chance I discovered a cleaner called “Caloclean” made by Calotherm.
I originally purchased the Caloclean with the intention of cleaning my glasses with it, but it was not very good at cleaning glasses (I much prefer “Calocoat” for this job!).
It does however work a treat for cleaning a glossy laptop screen as it generates a very fine mist, so there is less risk of getting liquid where it should not be.
Calotherm also do a “Calocloth” microfibre cloth which is ideal for cleaning the screen after spraying on the Caloclean.
These products can be got from www.calotherm.co.uk
This film certainly gives some interesting colours.
The slides look very red as shown here and when the colours are “inverted” to produce a positive image the result is a nice green shade!
here is a link to the image after the colours have been inverted in GIMP to turn a negative into a positive
It’s now about 7 months since I got rid of winXP from my laptop and I thought I’d never need windows again.
I have just brought a new scanner, the Epson 4490 which is supposed to be Ubuntu compatible, but setting it up has proved to be less than straightforward so I have decided to add a small windows partition to my laptop which will get used for the sole purpose of scanning my negatives.
According to gparted my system looks like this:
There is a very helpful guide which I used to enable this at:
http://knowledge76.com/index.php/Windows_-_Add_MS_Windows_to_Your_System76_Machine
I was a bit worried that it would stop me getting back into Ubuntu as what Windows does is to kill off the master boot record so this means that once windows has been added it’s then necessary to install GRUB.
Once windows is installed on my newly created 15mb partition I then booted from the ubuntu live CD and opened the terminal and typed:
sudo grub
root (hd0,0)
setup (hd0)
quit
I then rebooted and to my relief ubuntu loaded instead of windows!
The final step is to edit the grub file so that it will allow windows to be selected.
I typed:
sudo gedit /boot/grub/menu.lst
and then added the following 3 lines to the end of the file:
title windows
root (hd0,1)
chainloader +1
then saved the file and rebooted.
when I saw grub load I pressed ESC and the menu will come up allowing windows to be selected.
Behind the friendly facade lurks a hidden menace
Yesterday the friendly sky installer turned up to install a Sky HD box which has a lot of benefits such as HD (obviously!) and being able to record one channel whilst watching another one.
What he did not mention however was the effect that it would have on my broadband connection (ADSL).
When the box was ordered I found out from other websites that people had been having some problems with Sky boxes interfering with ADSL so I told the order clerk that I did not have a land line so they would not be able to connect the box in this way.
The result of this was that the charge was inflated by £25 to a whopping £105!
They are already charging £30 for installation plus £50 for the box itself, so there was no way I was going to pay another £25 on top of this so I said that I did have a landline, but that it was only being used for ADSL and “not as a BT line”. There is an element of truth in this as the line is supplied by my ISP specifically for ADSL and not for voice calls, although it will allow outgoing 0800 & emergency calls as well as inbound calls.
I said that it could be used by the engineer to set up the box, but that I would not be leaving it connected as it inteferes with my ADSL. The order clerk did not seem to want to argue over this point and even said that I did not have to leave the box connected. The “smallprint” on the sky website however said that the line needs to be left connected for 12 months.
Anyway, once the engineer had finished installing the box I thought I’d check out my connection speed and sure enough it had dropped from 7616 to 7104. Not much you might think, but more sinister was the fact that the signal to noise ratio had dropped from a healthy 10db to just 4db!
Up until now I have had a 6500 “bras rate” on my ADSL line which means that although I have a “line speed” on 7616, the actual maximum data download rate is 6.5 MB/s.
As soon as the engineer left at about 6pm I had already been robbed of half a meg per second, a speed reduction of almost 10%:
Note BRAS rate 6000000/-000, Auto, 2009-03-14 18:00:24
Unfortunately this was not the end of the matter, as later in the evening I noticed that my ADSL lost connectivity for a couple of minutes and the reason for this was that the BRAS rate had again been cut but a further half meg to just 5.5mb/s
Note BRAS rate 5500000/-000, Auto, 2009-03-14 22:47:33
I suspect the reason for this further cut was that the DSLAM equipment at the exchange had deemed my line “unstable” due to the very low s/n ratio of just 4db.
The end result is that having the Sky box connected to my phone line has cost me a speed reduction of over 15%.
I think that Sky should have a duty to make customers aware of this fact. I’m sure that if a car accessory were to reduce the performance of a car by over 15% then the manufacturers of the device would be in hot water if they did not advise potential customers of this fact, so how do Sky get away with this so easily?
I suspect that the problem is sometimes “masked” by the fact that a lot of the mass market consumer ISPs like BT, Orange, Tiscali etc often overload and throttle connections anyway so a 15% speed drop might go unnoticed.
Anyway, the Sky box has now been disconnected from the phone line and my line speed has returned to 7616 (at a healthy 10db s/n ratio), but the BRAS rate is “stuck” at 5.5MB/s as BT are very quick to drop the BRAS rate, but take much longer to restore the BRAS rate again.
A Swan Sculpture next to the Turf Hotel
This is quite an intresting “Swan” sculpture that seems to have recently appeared at the Turf Locks, just next to the Turf Hotel.
This hotel is really a pub, but a very good pub which has the advantage of only allowing access via foot or bicycle. The nearest main car park is about 2 miles walk from the pub, although there is a very small car park about a mile away.
I can recommend the steak & kidney pudding and a good pint of Otter Ale.
There is a nice view out over the Exe estuary as you sit drinking your well earnt pint.
From my previous post you will see that I have tried using Skype for VOIP phone calls but I got a bit fed up with Skype for a number of reasons so I have now unsubscribed from it.
Skype is probabaly one of the best known names that people associate with VOIP but I’m not so keen on being locked into a “closed” system where you have to use Skype software rather than a normal VOIP client. Also I don’t like the way that Skype force you to pay for calls before you have actually made them! They also charge quite a lot for the for an inbound phone number to receive voip calls on (about £3 per month).
Luckily my own ISP have a VOIP service http://call.me.uk/ which only charge £1 per month for a phone number which is quite a bit less than Skype and I then just pay for calls actually made at the end of each month. I have now got an 03333 STD code rather than a “boring” 01823 Taunton STD code – an advantage with an 03 prefix is that it is not linked to any specific geographic UK location, and costs exactly the same amount to call as a regular 01 or 02 landline number.
They also sell “voip hardware phones” like the Snom 300, but I’m not really a “power user” of phones so I thought I’d go for a software VOIP solution rather than a hardware phone for the time being.
There a a number of software phones (“Softphones”) and I tried out a few of them. First I tried Ekiga, but this did not seem to run at all on Ubuntu Intrepid so I gave up on it and tried Linphone, which I got working but it seemed very basic. By far the best VOIP software I have tried so far has been Twinkle which has loads of handy features and will run nicely minimised on the task bar. Installing it is very simple via the “add/remove” menu.
Once you have filled in your SIP account details (username, domain password & realm) you are pretty much set to make and recieve VOIP calls.
These setting seem to give good sound quality
It took a bit of trial & error to get my audio settings just right, and at first the sound did not sound very good, but I have now got it so that its just as good as using any regular non-voip phone.
This shows how I have entered the “Sound Card” settings. I tried some of the other settings first but I seemed to get poor sound quality. Read More
I have reinstalled Xubuntu from the Xubuntu iso and it seems to be working fine.
The thing that bugged me the most though was that the touchpad on my vaio laptop was set up for “tapping” by default.
Tapping is something that people either love or hate, and I am in the latter category.
Gnome seems to have the ability to control the touchpad installed by default but Xubuntu uses Xfce rather than Gnome so there are a few tweaks needed to control the touchpad.
A good link is at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SynapticsTouchpad
I followed the instructions to enable SHMConfig by typing:
gksudo mousepad /etc/hal/fdi/policy/shmconfig.fdi
I then pasted the following text into the file:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?> <deviceinfo version="0.2"> <device> <match key="input.x11_driver" string="synaptics"> <merge key="input.x11_options.SHMConfig" type="string">True</merge> </match> </device> </deviceinfo> Then I installed the qsynaptics package using the following command: sudo aptitude install qsynaptics After doing this I got a new icon showing in the xfce settings manager that gave me control of the touchpad settings.
