Ladder

Jacobs Ladder at Sidmouth

It was windy and bitterly cold at Sidmouth Beach today.   Jacobs ladder leads down to the beach from the Gardens at the top – the actual wooden ladder is quite impressive being at a guess a good 60 foot, perhaps even more.

The beach is about 1km and the cliffs look like they are made of mud rather than rock.  At the far end there looks like there has been a collapse of the cliff and there is a possible risk of being cut off by the tide.   It’s mainly rock pools at the far end rather than beach.

I’m starting to get the hang of using the Samsung G600 camera – it seems to work better when using the shutter button on the side of the phone rather than the round shutter button the keypad, but it’s quite fiddly to use.

Photo taken with Samsung G600 mobile phone.   Edited using GThumb editor (lossless rotate then risize only) under Ubuntu Intrepid.

Self Portrait

Self portrait at the Bristol Planetarium

This is a bit of a cliche’d shot and it’s been done by so many people, but it’s hard to resist!

Shot with a Holga Medium Format Camera.   Scanned from a 5×5 inch print on a Canon Lide60 scanner using GIMP and Xsane under Ubuntu Intrepid.

Mind’s Eye

Mind's Eye at Cardiff University

This is quite an interesting bit of art on the wall of one of the buildings at Cardiff University.   The spots were a sort of terracotta, but all slightly different shades, so perhaps I should have shot this with colour film.

(Shot with a Holga medium format camera and scanned from a 5×5 inch print with the Canon Lide60 scanner using the Xsane plugin for Gimp)

Playing DVD movies with Ubuntu Intrepid

Intrepid comes with Totem as the default player but so far I have not had much luck getting it working (playing DVD movies) on Intrepid, but I think it worked on Hardy.   Totem comes with gstreamer by default and works with xine as well, but neither seemed to play the main movie, just the copyright bit at the start!

I seem to have had better luck with VLC and MPlayer.   I installed these using the add/remove menu.

This guide seems to have a solution that got both VLC and MPlayer working with DVD movies:

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/RestrictedFormats/PlayingDVDs

Commands used were as follows:

sudo apt-get install libdvdread3

then…

sudo /usr/share/doc/libdvdread3/install-css.sh

one thing that seemed to get things running ok after running these commands was to reboot the system before trying to play a DVD

Highest Point on Quantocks

Will's Neck

It was certainly very windy this afternoon on the Quantock Hills.
This is the triangulation point at the top of “will’s neck” which is 384 metres above sea level.

As I approached I had difficulty keeping upright as the wind was so strong so i was amazed to see that someone was actually standing on top of the triangulation post!

This shot was taken looking south with the Blackdown Hills on the left and the Brendon Hills on the right.

Taken with a Samsung G600 camera Phone

Record from Last FM with Wireshark

I have recently started using the excellent rhythmbox player to listen to last FM but I have noticed that it does not seem to have an easy way to actually record music.   It will play music, but once a favorite track has finished there is no easy way to play it again which is quite frustrating!

I have tried to find where they are cached on the hard disk, but there does not seem to be an obvious location so I thought I’d capture the tcp stream using wireshark.

What I have found works quite well is to set up the a live capture with name resolution active and then play a song you want to capture.   Once the song has started playing you then right click on the live capture and hit “follow tcp stream”

You will then see a box showing text like this:

GET /user/xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx.mp3 HTTP/1.1
Host: kingpin5.last.fm
Connection: close
icy-metadata: 1
User-Agent: GStreamer souphttpsrc libsoup/2.24.1
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: audio/mpeg
Content-Length: 3884093
Cache-Control: no-cache, must-revalidate

You then hit the “save as” button and save it as a “*****.mp3″ name of your choice.

East Berlin Apartments

condemned apartment block

This block was just off Alexanderplatz and it had obviously been condemned but I noticed that these interesting decorative bits has been added.

From a 5×5 print – Scanned with a Canon Lide60 scanner and imported into Gimp via the XSane plugin (os Ubuntu Intrepid)

Misty

Misty - Seven Sisters at Cothelstone

There was a surprising amount of mist at the top of Cothelstone Hill on Thursday.

This group of trees is called “Seven Sisters” but there are only 3 large trees so I assume the other 4 must have died or got blown down at some stage as this bit of hill is really open to the elements.

There is a group of smaller trees behind that must have been planted more recently.

The trees were only visible when I was within about 25 metres if that.

(Photo taken with the Samsung G600 Mobile Phone)

Importing emails from Outlook to Evolution (Ubuntu 8.10)

About a week ago I accidently managed to zap my windows XP partition but I was not too worried because I did not really have any reason to need windows XP anymore.

The only trouble was that I had carefully backed up my Outlook 2003 data file (outlook.pst) but I did not have a copy of Outlook to read the file!     I could have probably installed Outlook under WINE, but I did not really want to have to do this.

A bit of searching led me to this thread http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=894633 where “Cheesehead” suggested the package readpst.

The command to install the package is:

sudo apt-get install readpst

and once installed to run the command:

readpst -r Desktop/outlook.pst

(as my data file is called “outlook.pst” and is located in the folder called “Desktop”)

There were a few error messages in the console output, but the end result was that my messages were sucessfully extracted to my home folder.   The actual data files were called “mbox” and it is these “mbox” files that Evolution can then import.

File > Import > Import a single file

There are quite a few “mbox” files that will have been created but the trick is to look at the ones with a large file size.   I had several hundred email messages in Outlook to the mbox files were about 50MB or so.    Evolution recognised the mbox file as “berkeley mailbox (mbox) format” and then I was asked to select a folder within evolution where the messages were to be imported.   I created a new folder as I did not want these imported emails mixed up with my current mail!

The odd thing was that my original inbox and outbox all seemed to be mixed up together, but it was simple enough to sort them by sender and separate them into separate folders again.

World Clock

Weltzeituhr, Berlin

This is the Weltzeituhr in Berlin which is a world clock.

It has a moving model of the solar system on top.   In the background is the Park Inn hotel which I think is the tallest hotel in Berlin.

Taken with a Holga medium format film camera.