Anaglyph

Disclaimer: to properly read the following article, you need to have a pair of red-cyan 3D glasses, otherwise the images won't display as intended. The cheapest one should do it, perhaps even home made. Lacking such glasses, you can generate your own 3D images for different types of glasses.

A few weeks ago I stumbled upon an old article about how James Cameron is/was remaking Titanic in 3D and somewhere in the technical explanation it was mentioned you can do 2D to 3D conversion with Free Software tools, namely the G'MIC plugin for GIMP.

In the late '90ies I received a computer magazine which came with a pair of paper 3D glasses and a CD containing the usual software demos AND a few 3D pictures, it was my first contact with anaglyphs. I still have the glasses, but I use them maybe once every few years, when I remember to search some such images.

Along the time I learned how to properly make such images: two cameras, filters, combine the two images in one. Way too much effort for me. It looks like way too much effort even for some commercial filmmakers...

When I saw the Titanic article, I said to myself 'what the heck, let give G'MIC a try'. AFAIK it is not available in any official Fedora repo, but you can download a binary from the upstream, drop it in the proper folder and go with it. It will survive even a distro update/reinstall. Not a big fan of the 'application inside another application' approach of G'MIC, nor of its duplication of existing GIMP features, that's why didn't have it already installed, but playing is fun.

I don't have the time and patience to learn how to fine-tune the parameters (with hand crafted depth maps you should be able to reach high quality results), nor do I plan to return to anaglyphs any time soon, so I used pretty much the automatic settings. Below are a few pictures I think came decently with no fiddling and automatic settings:

Mist wallpapers

When I took pictures of the overwhelming mist, it became obvious such minimalist image have a great potential for effective wallpapers: they are simple and won't stand on your way. So here are some for anyone want to use them. Enjoy and don't let their mod depress you :)

Programatica

At first, I received the invitation for the Programatica - Open Source conference for the Fedora community, but since I don't have much to say on this matter, I passed it (I am a Linux desktop user these days and Fedora does not shine there). When the invitation arrived at ProLinux and was difficult to find a speaker, I offered myself for the task.

The conference was mixed, it had 3 tracks: open source projects, open source communities and celebration of 20 years of internet in Romania. The first part, the projects, was about an Arduino clone from Intel (and a Linux distro to match), a Microsoft Azure sales pitch from a local distributor and a F-Droid for FirefoxOS from Ceata. The communities included Ceata (again), "Informatica la castel" summer school, ROSEdu, ProLinux and YATE, which is not quite a community. The last track brought panels and talks with some of the internet pioneers in the country.

My talk was a short one and quite generic (slides here): in an age when so much money are invested in Linux and Open Source and so much money are drawn from them, there is still a need for the community? We believe so.

Get 'em while they are young

A relaxed post as for a lazy Sunday afternoon: the little one is "hacking" graphics with Inkscape on a Fedora Linux laptop.

In case the VIDEO tag does not work for you, here's a YouTube version.

Romanian winners for Wiki Loves Monuments 2013

After the jury did its work, we announced the winners for the national Wiki Loves Monuments contest in Romania. The top 10 images will go in the international contest, along with winning images from the other 52 participating countries. Best of luck there!

Autumn wallpapers

It's the season for autumn themed wallpaper backgrounds to bring their warm colors to a desktop nearby, so here are a few of my recent pictures which may fit the bill (freely licensed as CC-BY-SA, of course):

And a bonus one for the braves to laugh in the face of a vertigo-inducting image:

Hackathon

I may not be thrilled advertising Facebook, but they do were the sponsor of a big hackathon organized by ROSEdu last week-end at Politehnica University in Bucharest. For about 24 hours 15 teams of 2 to 4 hackers coded on various projects for fun, glory, learning and prizes. They were assisted by a bunch of ROSEdu volunteers and some Facebook engineers from London and Dublin. The goal was for each team to have at the end of the coding day a piece of software ready to ship.

Unfortunately, not everything was perfect: after many successful events, this time the weakest link was the University, which kind of screwed a big multinational sponsor, an enthusiastic NGO and a lot of volunteers when the power went off for several hours. Of course, the internet connection was down too, so the organizers had to sent the teams to work from home for this interval. And this was not all: the University rented some rooms on Saturday for some exams at the Fiscal Administration, so due to that the hackathon had to be cut 2 hours. The teams were diverse: most of them were university students, but there was a team with all its members being high schoolers and there was an all-girls team. Hackers were running an assortment of systems: Linux, Windows, OS X. In my empirical observation (I didn't count), Linux was a plurality and as distros I noticed Mint, Ubuntu, Fedora, Debian, Gentoo. Projects targeted Android, iOS, the web or a combinations of those and were developed with a lot of mixed technologies, I saw Java, PHP, Node.js, ObjectiveC, Ruby and more. The power was still down at the finale, so instead of presentations on the big screen for everyone to see, the jury had to move to each table and watch presentation made on laptop batteries and mobile data connections. Less than ideal, but in the end they managed to get the job done. I followed the jury and learned more about every project: some were warm-fuzzy feel-good about recycling, some may seem useful for students newly arrived in the big city and trying to figure its transportation system and other really creepy from a privacy point of view, but all of them had or "planned" to have some "notify your friends" or "see shit your friends do" features to palate the sponsor.
PS: incidentally, the winning team was the one who asked at some point the roaming photographer for some ideas on their interface design :)

On Linux Install Fest 2013

Today was that time of the year again when ROSEdu organized the traditional Linux Install Fest. I managed to be there only a couple of hours, enough to get a grasp of the event and do a few things.
Being a Sunday, there were no electrician available at the university, so the light was less than perfect. Not a problem for the hackers but a challenge for the photographer.
The event surpassed in size the previous year, with an increase from 118 to to 139 participants (preliminary data). Also, compared with the previous year, the Fedora presence increased: thanks to Iosif who sent me a package just in time, I had enough Fedora 19 DVDs to cover the event and some handy stickers. Gabriel also joined, armed with a bunch of Fedora 18 DVDs and more swag he saved from a past event this winter. And actually there were some people installing Fedora! Looking at the numbers some changes are noticeable: after the last years most of the installs were Ubuntu, closely followed by Debian, this year the situation is dramatically different: no Debian install registered, the most installs are MINT with Ubuntu in a distant second place.
There are some possible explanations:

• the Ubuntu install discs arrived 1 hour late, so early in the morning the girl at the registration desk had to reply to Unbuntu inquiries: "don't you want Mint instead? it comes in both 32 and 64 bit versions";
• the computers in the university lab moved from Ubuntu to Mint to get away from Unity;
• Mint was available on USB sticks, which AFAIK were for the students to keep, while the other distros were available on optical media (also for the students to keep).

From my point of view, there is also noticeable the Fedora increase: from zero to 8 students this year. Worth mentioning, almost all of them happened early in the morning (in the first hour).

Enjoy below a few more pictures from the install fest:

Ready for carving?

Today I felt like drawing some clipart images, now is the time to share

PS: this post may not display correctly on bad browsers

Nostalgia

Yesterday evening I was at the university for a meeting when I noticed in a window a HC 85 computer, which was in the 80'ies a Romanian clone of the popular Sinclair ZX Spectrum (at the time, it was state of the art for the local IT industry along with the PDP-11 clones). For me, it was nostalgia: one of its brothers was the first computer I ever put my hands on (as a high school student), it was the first computer I programmed on, it was the first computer I dreamed making games for (in assembly language, no less).

Linux Install Fest in Politehnica

This Sunday, October 13, ROSEdu will organize in Universitatea Politehnica Bucharest its yearly Linux Install Fest, the biggest event of such type I am aware of in the country (last year there were 118 participants). Its main purpose is to help first year CS university students putting a Linux install on their systems, but LIF is open to everyone. So if you have troubles with your Linux install, no matter if your machine is a laptop or a desktop, Politehnica is the place to be this Sunday.

Myself, I will try to get there for at least a couple of hours, even if I know from the experience the interest on Fedora and Fedora-based systems is low around there.

On stock images

As a business, when you are in need for some pictures, the cost effective solution is to use stock image services, that's definitely less expensive than custom work, you won't get something exclusive but chances are it will be good enough and cheap beats all (of course, I didn't consider the too often encountered case of scumbags simply picking images from the internet and when questioned answering "it was on Google, is free").

Having some recent photos that may fit the bill, I uploaded one of them on a stock images website as an experiment. For the experiment purpose, I also uploaded an illustration (nothing spectacular, just a collage from my already free clipart images). A first finding was a confirmation of what I already knew: while saturated with photos, they are more actively looking for illustrations. Uploaded at the same time, the illustration is already live on the site, while the photo still have an estimated 120 hours until review by an editor.

But my point here is not about photos versus illustrations, is about what they do with your images. The procedure for an illustration is to upload a JPEG preview and after approval you can add another format, AI, PNG, CDR or EPS (yes, you read it correctly, PNG is in there). Since I use Inkscape, my sources are in SVG and some features can't be exported in their supported formats, so I had to go with PNG. Still no major problem. But look at the image below, is a capture from their website:

Allow me a moment to explain: I uploaded at first a 2480x3508px JPEG and later a 2480x3508px PNG. While I am not sure all those resolutions are generated from the JPEG or PNG, I am sure about the image size. So the "premium" TIFF version, costing 50% more than the next one is just an upscale version (from 2480x3508px to 3507x4961px) of a raster image! Wasted money! There is also a "maximum" option, with a slightly higher price over my original size, which is an odd upscale (from 2480x3508px to 2912x4119px) of the raster original.
I think this is an useful hint for the potential buyers: on stock image services, maximum price or maximum resolution may not mean maximum quality.

G+ and RAW photos from the eyes of a FOSS photographer

I use GIMP for almost all my photography editing by choice, so when reading today a couple of articles about the new RAW photo editing capabilities in Google Plus and how those put Google in a fight with Adobe, as its only worthy competitor, I noticed in both a similar (your probably know how those articles are usually written) expression, along the lines of "don't mention GIMP, while nice it doesn't count". I knew about the RAW import for a few days, but it was not news for me, I don't plan to move my photography storage and editing to the cloud, but now the GIMP comparison made me genuinely curious what is it about.

So away we go! I have handy some RAWs from a recent shooting, it was a matter of uploading one and doing a few clicks, right? Not so fast! The first try, the first FAIL: while the RAW image uploaded properly and it was shown correctly as a JPEG in browser, editing does not work with Firefox, Chrome is needed.

Normally at this step I would give up, I won't change browsers any time soon, but it caught me in the proper mood for that, so I downloaded Chromium. No luck either, this time for an undisclosed reason. No luck with Chrome either. It should be because I am running Linux or they don't like my video driver (according to the troubleshooting page on G+). Clearly, they don't want me as a user. I was so close to call it a failure and make a funny gesture towards Google... but I was already mounted, gave it another try, this time with Chrome under Windows, fully proprietary. Of course it worked. I can write a bit more than two paragraphs cursing Google for their useless effort.

At the first look, it is a simple interface: next to your picture there are some buttons for various adjustment operations, grouped in two categories "basic" and "Creative" (as you will see later, "Creative" is just a feel-good name, there is little creativity in applying a series of predefined filters).
In the "basic" area are some tools which are a must for any image to be published: tune image is doing exposure/color adjustments, details is for sharpening and crop & rotate to correct image framing. Everything with an easy to use interface. Still under the "basic" category, there is a not so basic feature: selective adjust. I found it cute and original (still, no match for selective adjustment from a proper image editing software), you drop adjustments points in the image and tune it around them. In the "creative" category a first tool is black and white conversion (in my opinion, also the single really useful from the category). It is simple still powerful, allowing to adjust the conversion based on specific colors and fine-tune it. If about "drama" and "center focus" I am quite neutral (I can see how they may be useful for some, but with a lot of fine-tuning to prevent excess), starting with "frames" I heard a shout in my head "Instagram!". We are on the edge of the bad taste realm. Use everything with extra-care. "Tilt-shift" is again some cute toy you use on your pictures and pretend it was made with a dedicated lens. The interface is simple and effective, the final result not so much. "Vintage" and "retrolux" will damage your picture, but they are the wet dream of the ordinary Instagram user, will make the image hip, damaged but hip. Do not use.
As a conclusion, I can say this is no threat to Photoshop and will not replace it ever, is no treat to GIMP either, even it will be more used than probably any of them, is a tool with a different purpose, for a different audience. It may be some competition for tools like Lightroom and Darktable, when they are used for simple "RAW development", but only for simple use cases (no perspective correction? no noise removal? indeed, simple cases). Talking about real competition, it is real competition for Instagram/Facebook, but this probably makes for less sensationalist titles.
I will end my conclusion with a RAW image, first in its initial unedited state and with what I consider good and bad editing.