Like many linux applications Qtpfsgui has a stupid name – it isn’t catchy or memorable for any other reason than being daft. It seems like a bit of a waste because Qtpfsgui is a great little app for creating HDR images. It is completely free, available from the Ubuntu repositories and will accept most image files.

Results are a bit hit & miss and I must admit, I should get around to reading the manual (here -

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

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

Originally uploaded by gavomatic57 / Gavin Lewis

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

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.

I have to admit, I do have quite a short attention span. I don’t suddenly stop liking things after a short time, but I do get side-tracked by other things. I’ve always had a bit of a camera thing running in the back of my mind and after seeing a Nikon D80 in Jessops for a bargain price, I suddenly felt a renewed surge of interest.

Inspiration
The problem I have is now is inspiration. I often look at other people’s pictures on Flickr and wonder how it crossed the photographers mind to take a picture of that, or where they got the inspiration from to take it that way. Birds make it easy for you in a way – you rarely have enough time to think about how you are going to take the shot, so as long as it is close enough you shoot and go. Unfortunately the hard part is finding the bird, getting close enough, focussing and shooting in a way that avoids camera shake.

I’ve also been living in the same city for most of my life now and it is hard to see any of my surroundings as interesting enough to be worth pointing a camera at. I forget that where I post – Flickr – a lot of the locations may be new and interesting to the people looking at them. Still its a psychological hump I’m going to have to get over…

Still, at least the camera is awesome and the lens that inspired the upgrade from the D40 is pretty good too, although the same lens with VR would be nice! Would be cheaper to buy a monopod though!

I still love linux though and will keep blogging it – although possibly with a more photographic theme. There are countless free apps that aid your image editing.

Later!

As a line is drawn under October 2008, a new chapter in the life of Ubuntu opens in the form of Intrepid Ibex.  This is a “normal release” from Canonical, rather than a “Long term support” release and that usually means that it is a bit more adventurous than their LTS bretheren.  That said, when Hardy Heron was released it shipped with a beta version of Firefox 3, so even then they’re not exactly playing it cautious.

2008 has seen the rise of the “netbook”, a low powered, very cheap and very small laptop who’s only purpose is to get you onto the internet as cheaply and as conveniently as possible.  Linux has managed to find its way onto most of the netbooks on the market, whether it be the Asus EEE and its Xandros distro or the Acer Aspire with its Linpus distro and unsurprisingly, Canonical felt they were missing out on the action.

Needless to say Ubuntu 8.10 has turned its attention to connectivity.  The wifi configuration dialogues have been reworked and will now connect to 3G networks when the appropriate hardware is present.  It seems to connect to my home common-or-garden wifi connection quicker too.  Whether you have a wifi connection or enjoy the choice between downloading a photo with a 3g connection or paying the rent/mortgage, Intrepid Ibex will get you onto the internet.

Overall system responsiveness seems to have taken a step in the right direction too, it feels noticably quicker, boots a bit faster and shuts down a little quicker.  It is using the 2.6.27 version of the linux kernel as well, so it’ll detect and work with the GTX 200 series of Nvidia GPU’s, which is nice.  I have a GTX 260 and under 8.04 I was frustratingly limited to 800×600 on a 22″ screen and I gave up all hope of installing the drivers from the Nvidia website.

The bundled apps haven’t changed an awful lot, but there is now an option to create a USB version of your installation, rather like you’ll find on Fedora 9 and Mandriva.  There is a new network manager and Canonical have done a deal with the BBC to deliver content through the Totem app.

8.10 does come with a great new theme.  It looks like a cross between the Ubuntu studio theme and the standard “human” theme.  It is now my theme of choice, as is the funky new background image.

So far, Intrepid is a quicker, more polished and rock stable addition to the Ubuntu family and deserves it’s place as my laptop and desktop OS.

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.

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.

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!