...and the winners are:

The results of the Romanian Wiki loves Monuments 2012 photo contest are in, 10 pictures were selected by the national jury and they will go forward in the international contest, together with pictures from the other 35 participating countries. The winners are:


For now the winners are urged, if they didn't do it already, to make sure they entered provided an email address in the Wikipedia preferences, so they can be contacted for prizes.

Custom grids with GIMP

A few days ago on #fedora-art a photographer friend of mine showed a picture on some site and asked " how to make fine grid like this using various layers". The image was similar with:

My quick reply was:

• one idea would be to use some guides and then align your selection to guides
• other idea: you know the image size, so you can adjust the selection at pixel-level by coordinates
• another idea would be to generate masks automatically with some program, as images, and then import them
• yet another idea, use the slice plugin to cut the image in distinct parts

Then I added: "using guides is the easiest, i believe". Since my reply was brief and expecting some pre-existing editing knowledge and since such custom grids can be used for various purposes, like interface and layout design, I will expand here in a full tutorial the use of GIMP guides.

So, fire-up GIMP and open the image to want to edit:

You can add guides from the menu: Image > Guides > New Guide. I know the majority of my readers are geeks and they won't settle for anything less than perfection, so they will use "by percent" only when they know the percents will align perfectly to pixels and they are perfectly capable to do the math, divide to whatever is needed (3 here) and use pixel alignment.

A kind of Stockholm syndrome

I have at home a tube of tooth paste with a horrible taste, I totally dislike it. However, on its back is an inscription, it is supposed to take some familiarization time, in the first week of use you don't like it "Salty/Acquired taste", then in the second week you are expected to get used to it "Positive Familiarization Effect" and after that "Very Refreshing/Good Taste". This made me wonder is is a kind of Stockholm syndrome, you stay with the bad taste, hopping to finally like it and continue using it, despite hating it. I'm in the first week, so each time while washing my teeth, I eagerly await the final part, to rinse my mouth with clean water and escape the tooth paste taste.

This made me think about some desktop software which I hate and some people tell me to use it anyway, until it will grow on me and I will start to like it. That's probably another, but similar, type of Stockholm syndrome. You force yourself in a suboptimal situation, until your brain fives up and lies to itself into "liking" it. I actually did myself a few times too, forced myself into using the "spatial" Nautilus mode because it was the default and people saying it is supposed to be good, got used to it and then missed it when the fad moved to "browser" mode again.

The two cases above may be similar, but only up to a point: the tooth paste will be emptied soon (I wonder if before or after the date I am supposed to "love" it) and guaranteed the next one will be a different brand, while desktop software is something you use years and years. Also, a bad taste in the tooth paste is lasting a few minutes a day and then disappear, leaving you with the benefit of healthier gum, while a horrible software will make your life worse all day long while using it and will also make you unproductive, no benefit in sight.

Update: the tube lasted until day 34, much beyond the time I was supposed to start loving it, I hated it until the last day. Now, back to a "regular" toothpaste, it feels kind of sweet, too sweet, but I don't have the impulse to cut out my tongue and throw it to the trash can.

Wikipedia images: remove watermarks with GIMP

During the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 photgraphy contest we received quite a few of photos containing watermarks or signatures, which is pretty dumb considering the images are licensed freely (Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike) and they are intended for Wikipedia use, such a watermark will make them less usefull and the free license will allow editors do clean them. Let me quote from Wikimedia Commons why is a bad idea to watermark your uploads:

• Watermarks can be unfree, if they feature a logo or any copyrighted image.
• They may contain copyright statements, which affect the reuseability of the image.
• They detract from the quality of images
• They can negatively influence the neutrality of images, or be considered advertising, and cannot be used on certain projects
• Images with watermarks are far less likely to be used
• Watermarks will be, in most cases, removed anyway by image editors - uploading a watermarked version only creates a lot of extra work for other volunteers

But Wikipedia is an inclusive project, your contributions are accepted, even if defective, with watermarks making them less useful. Of course, you do it on your own risk, they won't be nominated as quality images and won't receive any prize. You may get contacted by an editor, asking for a clean verion, you can help or not.

If you are an editor wanting to clean such pictures, Wikipedia also has some help for you, but this help is geared more to Photoshop users, with the GIMP part focusing more on loseless JPEG editing than watermark cleaning. If the cleaning is bad, the loseless part is less important, methinks, so this is why I will show here a few GIMP techniques. I am using for demonstration real files, submitted by a participant, Antonius Plaian in the Romanian Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 contest.

Crop

The easiest way to remove an unwanted part of the image is by cropping it, of course, this will work only if the watermark/signature does not cover an important part of the image, like this Raibow over Timișoara:

There are downsizes to cropping, some (hopefully unimportant) data is lost and the composition is afected, the image won't look as intended any more. Is simple and sometime may work.

However, if cropping does not work, we can use more advanced techniques.

From G+ with love

The Fedora community is very active on Google Plus, with many community members being active there and sharing interesting things (generally on g+ you will find quality stuff about technology, photography, politics and such). I thought about sharing a recent one.

It starts with a humorous picture about the repeated F18 release delay:

by D.J. Walker-Morgan on g+

Then it get shared by various people, leading to interesting conversation where high Fedora contributors talk about the feature process, Anaconda new UI, testing plans, development cycles, FESCo and such. Worth a read, is public.

Appreciating the humour, I share it myself only to get another humorous reply "next fedora should be called Fedora Nukem Forever"... yeah, I know the naming process for the next Fedora started, but the anal geek in me shouts: that's the next Fedora, the delayed one is the current F18, Spherical Cow, too late to change that without adding another delay... oh wait! that would be priceless!

LIF by numbers

A couple of days ago I wrote my impressions after the Linux Install Fest, but didn't have exact numbers to back my impressions. Now the organizers published the stats, I can see the numbers and play with them.

How successful it was? 118 people participated, 117 solved their problems, one failed (AFAIK the had the hard drive filled with 4 Windows primary partitions, not enough free space to resize any of them, no external storage to move the data out). From the 117 successful installs, 116 were on real hardware, one in a virtual machine. There is no data on how many went with a Windows/Linux dual boot, but empirically I can say a large majority.

What people wanted? From the 118 participants, 48 asked for Debian, 65 for Ubuntu, 3 for Mint and 2 for openSUSE. Other distros were available (including Fedora), but people didn't request them. Here's a graph for easy view:

What people got? A number of Debian installs failed, due to lack of drivers or other unmentioned causes, so 8 people moved to Ubuntu instead. Other user was persuaded to go from Debian to Trisquel. Final installs by distro are as this: 72 Ubuntu installs, 39 Debian installs, 3 Mint installs, 2 openSUSE installs, 1 Trisquel install, 1 failure. Graphed below:

As mentioned in the previous post, the university is very Debian centric, so is expected for the students to prefer Debian or derivatives, but this is not very unlike the general usage stats in Romania.

How to beat yourself

It took a while, but finally the last year edition of the Wiki Loves Monuments free photography contest was officially recognized as a Guinness World Record for the world’s largest photography competition, with 168,208 from over 5,400 participants.

All nice and fine, but this record is not poised to last long, it will be broken by this year's edition of the same Wiki Loves Monuments, with more than double number of photos and almost triple number of participants. That's is, beating our own record by a large margin. Hopefully, this time it will be officially recognized faster, since the procedures started much eariler. And remember, it is a free culture project, run entirely by volunteers, yay for community!

Linux Install Fest 2012: checked!

My week-end was full, but between shooting at a 3 nights long metal festival, a marathon and a traditional food festival, I managed to find the time and attend this year edition of the Linux Install Fest in Bucharest. organized by ROSEdu.

I didn't stay until the end, but it was, as expected, quite big: attendants, helpers and staff at something around 100 people, not bad at all. An opportunity to see a lot of first year students from the Politehnica University but also old friends from various local communities. The most installed distro there was Debian (with a classic GNOME 2 interface), that's what is installed in the university labs and that's what the most students want on their machines. The second choice was Ubuntu, because is popular and close to Debian. Other distros like openSUSE or Fedora are seen like something students can play with later, when they have more experience. Old Linux people have the tendency to say "install fests are not needed any more, you can install a distro now with a series of mouse clicks", however this is not entirely true, many of them had problems, the top two ones i saw was lack of available partitions and space (all the hard drive filled with 4 primary Windows partitions) and a broken post-install GRUB, which does not list the old Windows install any more (everyone is dual-booting). On a side of the hall there was a series of "demo" machines, I noticed there a Debian, a MINT, a Fedora, an openSUSE and, for the laughs, a Hanna Montana Linux (a couple of guys moved to replace that with Trisquel). I saw nobody playing with the MINT, HM or Fedora machines. On the Fedora side, Răzvan Sandu offered himself to man the demo station, but with the lack of activity there, he roamed the place and used his charm with Debian users, giving talks on general FOSS issues. The machine itself was total boring: a bland Desktop install with only GNOME Shell and no application to show, it was sitting there and displaying the desktop wallpaper. Actually I saw one of the helpers showing a student the demo station and when getting to the Fedora one he said "this is Fedora, it has an unusual interface, unlike you know from the lab" and then, probably after noticing me, he added "but is still a Linux, with the same working". Myself, I took pictures, trolled a little and helped a bit with a couple of Ubuntu installs and an openSUSE, but didn't stay until the final parts with beer and such. Also, I used the opportunity to play a bit with MINT and Cinnamon, still looking forward for MATE. Overall, the event was useful and well organized, waiting for the next year edition.

Hipsterize your photos with a IPhone 5-like purple haze

The web is stormed by a wave of purple hazed photos, poised to quickly become the hip trend. Not having any defectiveiPhone 5 camera nearby, I will try to make somehow my photos cooler, having only some pictures and an installation of GIMP on my old Fedora desktop.

What I need is a picture with a bit of back light, the light may come from the sun, from a window or even from a lamp, the important part it seems it have to be opposed to my camera. Open that picture with The GIMP.

Then some additional lens flare has to be put into place (my picture had a bit of lens flare, the lens hood on my ultra-wide lens is... not perfect), I use for that the Supernova filter: Filters > Light and Shadow > Supernova

A few parameters have to be adjusted

Change the color to a light pink/purple, move the center of nova in the desired place, increase the radius (64 for me) and decrease the number of spokes (12 for me)

Apply the filter and feel superior.

On a second thought, I could have applied the filter on a new empty layer and have the optional advantage of adjusting the effect strength with the layer opacity, but I am too lazy to re-take the screenshots, it was close enough and my photo is already tremendously better. Yours can be to.

Install Fest

Next week-end, October 6, ROSEdu in partnership with the Romanian Ubuntu community organizes the traditional Linux Install Fest in the Politehnica University of Bucharest. Is quite a big event, at the 6th edition, targeted mostly at new CS students and the last time I participated, in 2010, it was attended by over 100 people, most of them interested in Ubuntu and Debian. (then I saw a couple of openSUSE requests and no one for Fedora, do the math)

Our communities are friendly and working together, so the Romanian Fedora community was invited too. Myself, I am not sure if I will be available, but anyway relied the news item, maybe there is someone interested to offer installation help (there is NO active Fedora Ambassador left in Bucharest) or maybe someone wanting to get help.

This year they will have some stations to demo various distros, so if there is someone interested in demoing things like GNOME Shitell, feel free to take the offer, I am passing it. Too bad F18 is in Alpha stage with MATE support still incomplete, I may have demoed that.

image from the 2010 Linux Install Fest

Last week of WLM

Now is the last week of the Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 photo competition and while the global competition already surpassed the last year numbers (it happened during the last week), on the national level we are still a bit behind in Romania, with still around 800 more pictures needed to match the last year. I have myself a batch of newly taken photos to upload, but we can do it only with the help of the larger community (the number of Romanian photographers participating is about half compared with a year ago), so is time for a last push. Below are the banners and posters we used in the campaign so far, feel free to share and re-use:

Web is down. Who cares?

Earlier today I prepared a set with a few pictures to upload to Commons forWiki Loves Monuments when I noticed the Romanian language upload wizard is not working, it is the default we use and promote. The bad part: nobody complained, even if it was not functional for almost a day. And we were wondering why the contributions slowed down!

Once the problem was found and reported, it was fixed and now everything works again (it affected other languages too, at least French and Polish (languages with plural forms for words), which also took important upload hits yesterday.

The conclusion I draw from there: we are too used with websites not working, we say "I'll try later" and go on with our lives. Nobody bothered to write a few words in the contact page, even "you suck, upload is borked" would have been very useful.

Heroes

For a community project (and not only) you need a solid base: a good infrastructure, good processes and clear goals. With this base built, people are enabled to come and make it shine, acting themselves like heroes. But people come and go, a solid base will make heroes appear continuously, a healthy project will have both.

The incontestable hero this year on Wiki Loves Monuments is Pere López, a long-time wikipedian who uploaded by himself over 5700 pictures so far and continues to do it. He is returning to the contest, after he was a top contributor in the previous year too. And his close "competitor" (they help each other) is another Catalan contributor, Enfo, now at over 3800 pictures.

In the Romanian contest, we have our own hero too, Andrei Kokelburg is the top contributor, closing to 1100 pictures so far, and he will continue uploading too. Currently, Andrei is ranked the 6-th in the global uploaders (5-th if we don't count a robot doing automatic flickr imports). He is passionate about this (as a museum painting restorer in his "real life") and will continue contributing historical monuments photos even after the contest ends.

And they are not the only ones, in Romania we have over 120 people participating so far, 5 of them with over 100 pictures each. The total number of peoples in the contest? 5612 and we still have a couple of days until the half of its duration (more stats on the dedicated page, which keeps into account only activity on Commons, there are other sources too).

There is time for more heroes to step up and I am looking at YOU :D

picture by Andrei Kokelburg contributed under a CC-BY-SA license to Wikimedia Commons.

One week of Wiki Loves Monuments

Almost one week passed from the start of the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest (there are still a few hours until the end of the day) and people are submitting photos with historical monuments from their countries to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and more. So far it looks good.

On the world level, the stats are good, the uploads as I write are over 47,000 images (my guesstimate: they will close to 50.000 by the end of the day/first week), poised to reach a total of the month that will set the contest as the world's biggest (passing the last year numbers, which made Wiki Loves Monuments 2011 the biggest photography contest so far). Of course, is not all roses: unfortunately a few countries backed-down at the last minute, so WLM happens in *only* 32 countries (still not bad).

On a national level Romania is not doing bad either, we reached 1000 pictures in less than one week and joined this select club (there are countries that reached this milestone after the first weekend, hats off to them!), a performance which took almost two weeks next year. The number of people contributing is 65, which is also not bad, unfortunately most of them are still at under 5 images. They may grow.

On a personal level, even if as an organizer I won't qualify for any prize, I still want to add my photos. My strategy was different this year: I uploaded my bulk of images, standing in the queue for a while, from the first days, to kickstart the contributions. And there were quite a few of them, at 365 images giving my "15 minutes of glory", for a short while I was one of the top dozen contributors worldwide. Also at the moment my pictures are one third of the Romanian uploads, but my uploads slowed-down (if I want to post more pics, I have to shoot them first), other people will have to step up. I am confident this will happen.

Wiki Loves Monuments in 3, 2, 1...

We are just one day away from the start of what will be the biggest photo competition ever: Wiki Loves Monuments will open on September 1st and will stay open until September 30, during this whole month you are invited to take photos of historical monuments from your country and upload them to Wikimedia Commons (technically, the upload has to happen this month, the photos can be taken before). And it is no joke, while the 2011 edition is a steps away from being declared the largest competition ever (stay tuned) with about 168,000 pictures from 18 countries, now 36 countries announced participation, most likely we will beat our own record.

There are also good incentives to participate beyond the greater good of enriching Wikipedia with data about your country's culture and history, there are prizes: first on the national level, where they vary from country to country, and then international prizes which have at the top a photo trip (and Wikimania 2013 attendance) to Hong Kong.

From my part, I am again a member of the organizing team in Romania. I have no specific goals in this endeavour, I want it just to be fun and fair and also get some quality pictures in Wikipedia, the jury focus will be more on usefulness of the images, more than the art side. As numbers, the only one I have in mind is my personal contribution: I want to upload myself at least 200 pictures to the campaign (being an organizer and jury member, they won't run for any prize). I would also be thrilled to see some of my photographer friends from the community getting involved in this contest yes, it will happen also in India, in North America, in South America... almost everywhere).

Let the fun begin!

IRC session on CC licenses and sharing

Kushal invited me to give an IRC talk to the Linux Users' Group of Durgapur (don't be thrown back about their website, is recovering after an "incident") on Creative Commons licenses, sharing, free culture and free art. It happened yesterday evening on #dgplug, taking until late in the night - I suspect some of the audience felt asleep, they were not as interactive as I hoped. They had only very brief knowledge about software licensing (considering it was a LUG) and even briefer on cultural licenses, so I had to start with the basics. For the curious, the full session log is available at my website (it should appear also on dgplug's website - update: here).

Mountain wallpapers

As I said yesterday I was a little back with posting wallpaper stuff, today I get up do date, so won't stress people with them again at least for a few days (still, don't promise it will take longer than a week, things may happen)

As a couple of the pics above featured cows, is probably an interesting idea with something more abstract, even if not mountains-related, a detail from a spherical water fountain.

Summer wallpapers

I was busy lately with some photography projects (including a couple of photo exibitions and a new edition for Wiki Loves Monuments) so I am late with one of the tasks I try to follow: publishing some Free wallpapers from sceneries I encountered: