While browsing some photos on Flickr the other day I came across an interesting artistic photography technique. It is known as the “Orton Effect” after a guy called Michael Orton, and involves superimposing a focussed image and blurred image (both overexposed) of the same scene. The effect is a mixture of sharp detail and blended colour that produces somewhat ethereal and emotionally engaging images. Orton developed the technique using slide film and physically mounting 2 images in a single slide frame, but it is easy to reproduce the effect with digital post-processing. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for category Hacks and Tricks
The Orton Effect
May 22
Backing up data to DVD
Mar 6
In preparation for my trip to Europe, I needded to free up some space on my hard disk. It was a great opportunity to find out how to burn data DVDs.
I found this DVD creation article on the Gentoo wiki, and the following command worked brilliantly for me:
growisofs -dvd-compat -Z /dev/sr0 -joliet-long -R -V "<volume_name>" dvd/
where /dev/sr0 is my device and dvd/ the directory containing the desired contents of the DVD.
I am an avid user of bash, the standard command line environment (technically “shell”) for GNU/Linux. In today’s graphical-rich computing culture, many people notice my command terminal and assume I must be a stubborn nostalgist of the digital dark ages. The truth is that the command line allows many regular tasks to be performed more efficiently, and makes some things possible that are simply not available any other way.
The extra power of the command line comes at the cost of learning its ways, which are not always obvious or self-explanatory. Today I found a very good guide to increasing bash productivity using vi editing commands, and leveraging the command line history to save time and effort. Both of these articles have very good downloadable cheat-sheets.
On my ThinkPad, I scroll by holding down the middle mouse button and moving the little trackpoint joystick. This means that it is easy to couple a little bit of sideways scroll with vertical scroll, which is not usually a problem. In Firefox, however, the default settings are for a left/right mouse scroll to go back/forward a page. This is most unsatisfying.
The solution has been published online in a multitude of places, but to save me needing to search for it again I’ll mention it here. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the things that frustrated me last year as I edited my honours thesis was text elements in inserted graphs. Axis and tick labels were unavoidable, but making them look consistent with the document text was not easy. I wish that I had found this article about making plots using Octave, gnuplot, and LaTeX, because the psfrag package provides a perfect solution.
It replaces text in an eps file with its own LaTeX formatted text. This allows, for instance, elaborate mathematical formulae to be displayed anywhere on the graph. It also allows axis and tick labels to be replaced with text that exactly matches the font and size used throughout the document – even if document wide settings are changed after the graph has been created. Read the rest of this entry »
For a while now I’ve been giving all my digital photos filenames that are meaningful to browse, useful to organise and easy (automated) to implement. The date is used to facilitate easy sorting, a few keywords are added to ease browsing, and the timestamp is added to ensure uniqueness. Thus, I end up with filenames like 20070731_a_great_photo_1425-39.jpg. Read the rest of this entry »
Today I have used my recently acquired Lenovo USB 2.0 Super Multi-Burner Drive to burn a CD from Gentoo GNU/Linux. I used the following command,
cdrecord -v -v -tao fs=16m dev=/dev/sr0 -data FILENAME.iso
and tested it by adding a -dummy option before the -tao. The drive shows up as /dev/sr0 on my X60s system.
A lot of people suggest turning the Caps Lock key into a Control key. The more I’ve thought about it, the more it does actually make sense. The Caps Lock key enjoys prime real estate on the keyboard, typically right next to the home row, while its function is only rarely (if ever) required. For many applications (such as my favourite editor Vim) the Control key is a regularly used and vital element of, well, control. Read the rest of this entry »
In LyX it is easy to make a theorem with multiple parts. It involves using the enumerate environment nested in a Theorem environment. But the resulting parts are numbered (1), (2), et c. To get alphabetically numbered parts, use the following LaTeX inserted code.
\begin{itemize}
\item[(a)] < PART ONE >
\item[(b)] < PART TWO >
\end{itemize}
Roman numerals can be used also, by replacing the “a”, “b” and so on.
I wanted to upload a sound track to my Sony Ericsson phone just so that I could use it in the video editor on the phone. It turned out that sounds must be in amr format, and that ffmpeg could convert from ogg.
ffmpeg -i 12-Danny\ Boy.ogg -ar 8000 -ab 12.8 -ac 1 dannyboy.amr
I like this post. and your painted eggs are awesome! maybe when Jasper is...
