Bearded Tit

Bearded Tit

Originally uploaded by gavomatic57 / Gavin Lewis

The birdwatchers around here have been going nuts over the arrival of a Beared Tit at the local nature reserve. After a few largely unsuccessful visits I’ve managed to get a couple of decent shots of it. It has been hiding in a bed of tall grasses and is rarely in a good position to pose for a photo.

As luck would have it, it climbed to the top of a particularly sturdy reed and sat there so I could take it’s picture!

It was taken with a Nikon D80, a 70-300mm Sigma AP0 DG Macro lens. The camera was on “manual” mode, aperature of f5.6, shutter speed of 1/250.

View from the penthouse floor

View from the penthouse floor

Originally uploaded by Salsavaders

I love this photo. I wish I had taken it – for a number of reasons…

a: I’d be in Canada now and
b: It is stunning.

…oh well.

Robin

Robin

Originally uploaded by gavomatic57 / Gavin Lewis

It’s Christmas, so here’s a robin! What could be more “Christmas” than that!?

Rose

Rose

Originally uploaded by gavomatic57 / Gavin Lewis

This is what happens when I get one of those rare flashes of inspiration. It was originally in colour, but I thought it looked better in monochrome. I think it came out ok, but I can’t help feeling it has been done before, probably better.

Oh well, I’ll keep trying.

CD burning in Amarok

If you are running Amarok in Ubuntu (Gnome) you probably will have found the “burn this album” option greyed out.

This is because Amarok is a KDE application and by using gnome in Ubuntu you won’t have all of the required libraries installed.

This is easily fixed as you just need the K3B libs installed. Open a terminal and type:

sudo apt-get install k3b libk3b2-mp3

or you can open the synaptic package manager and install them from there.

Restart Amarok and it should be working.

RSS feed reader – Liferea

Great little RSS feed reader for you here. I don’t know about you but I’ve so far found the RSS support in Ubuntu a little haphazard. In Windows Vista you can

subscribe to a feed and if you have Outlook 2007 installed it’ll appear in there under your inbox, but with Ubuntu you can subscribe to feeds through Firefox but you then find them in drop-down boxes under the address bar – not hugely convenient.

Liferea is an RSS feed reader that works much like an email client – it is available through the repository (Add/Remove programs) or by typing:

sudo apt-get install liferea

…into the terminal. It doesn’t cost anything and it works, so give it a go.

Collection managers

If you’ve ever had the desire to catalogue all of your gear, whether they be DVD’s, games, books or CD’s I can heartily recommend GCstar.

The app Ceemedia was suggested in last month’s Linux Format magazine so I tried it, only to find that many users on its Sourceforge page were complaining of error messages when searching for content – same thing happened to me and the project seems to have gone stale, but never fear, there is always something else.

GCstar fits the bill perfectly. You can create a number of pre-set collections, whether it be books, movies, games, wines or board games or you can create a new collection type.

The “movie collection”, will allow you to type the name of the movie into the search bar – it’ll then scan a pre-defined website like IMDB and populate the other fields with the artwork, cast, release date etc.

You can then sort the movies on year, cast or any other detail supplied.

The games collection is an absolute treat. It’ll search gamespot or Amazon for your games and fetch a couple of screenshots and even game tips & cheats.

When you’re done you can export your collection as a CSV or HTML file (among others…).

To round it off, if like me you have trouble deciding what game to play or movie to watch, it’ll randomly select movies for you.

Best thing is, its available from the apt repository. Simply type:

sudo apt-get install gcstar

Enjoy!

Embed a terminal on your desktop

Great little guide to get a terminal embedded onto your desktop. I don’t know about you, but its always handy to have a terminal session open and ready.

Shell on your desktop – Ubuntu Unleashed

Lyrics in Amarok

I’ve stumbled upon a great little tool that you can download from within Amarok called “wiki-lyrics”.

While you are playing one of your tracks, it’ll search wikipedia for the lyrics and the artist’s info. It’ll also then update the ID3 tag of the track – great for budding bedroom singers.

When running it in gnome I was greeted with a “needs RubyGTK to run”. This is easy to sort out if you have the command line….

sudo apt-get install libgtk2-ruby

If you don’t get any luck with that, you may need to do:

sudo apt-get update

sudo apt-get upgrade

…before the libgtk2 line.

Enjoy.

Enemy Territory Quake Wars – losing focus

Here’s a tip for anyone trying to play games on Ubuntu. If you’re ever finding your game losing focus – as in, your menu bars keep appearing from behind the game – turn your Compiz effects off.

System/Preferences/Appearance…