The things you’ll need:

• A Computer
• The Gimp (Windows & Linux compatible)
• Some pictures/images (preferably of the same size)
• A (very basic) knowledge of what a .gif is
  A .gif is actually a little slideshow of images.
• 5 minutes time
  or 10, depending on how fast you can switch between open windows.

Get started:

1. Open up The Gimp
   I suppose I don’t have to explain how to do this?
2. Open up the folder where the images are that you want to be inside the animated image

   
   

3. Drag’n'drop the first image into the big empty Gimp window (the image you want to be displayed first in your ‘presentation’)
   If the order of the images don’t matter, just select all the images and drag’n'drop em all at once.
   • Press, and hold down, the button on the mouse or other pointing device, to “grab” the object,
   • “Drag” the object/cursor/pointing device to the desired location,
   • “Drop” the object by releasing the button.
4. Drag’n'drop the second image into the big empty Gimp window (the image you want to be displayed as second in your ‘presentation’)
5. Drag’n'drop the third image into the big empty  Gimp window (the image you want to be displayed as third in your ‘presentation’)
6. Drag’n'drop the fourth image …. ok, you’ll get it now!
   Continue doing this till you’ve dragged all your images in to that window.
   You can check how many and which images are already in there in the Layer window.
   Open it by clicking ctrl+l or going to file\dialogs\layers.

   

7. Click “File” in the top menu
8. Click “Save As”

   
   

9. Choose a location where to save the final .gif file
10. choose a filename that ends with “.gif ” (eg. “ChoopDaWhoop.gif”, without the quotes ofc.)

    
    

11. Select “Save as Animation”

    
    

12. Fill in the comment, or just un-check it. (probably no-one will ever read it)

    
    

13. Select “Loop Forever”

    

14. Choose a delay value (this will set the time before switching to another image)
    Check out the image at point 13
15. Click save
16. Profit!

    

Also be sure to check out their custom server rack:

Be careful, as this script might run a while before it finishes.
You can modify the script as you like.
You might want to remove the user-agent string or the -nd option or ad a -x for that last wget call, etc…

I’ll post later on how I actually remove the duplicated images
A hint for people eager to know: fdupes

fdupes -r -f . > duplicates && echo ./duplicates > duplicates && rm `cat duplicates`

This would actually throw errors when there are spaces in the filenames.

So it was a long, verry long night.
The spirit driving me was like this:

But in the end, it felt more like:

Make sure you don’t miss out on the “Mix Tape” tab.
It’s not only handy, but it gives you the opportunity to find some other awesome artists.

Install ConnectBot on my HTC Hero, connect to my home ssh server to hook up with my Screen session.
‘Why?’ you ask? Because we can!

The process:

1. Create a DynDNS account
2. Configure my router to automatically update the DynDNS service
3. Set up the ssh daemon on my desktop
4. Set up the screen session and configure irssi
5. Forwarded the default ssh port (22) to my desktop PC which has a fixed IP
6. Drink a coffee.
7. Added the credentials needed to the ConnectBot’s configuration

The Result:

I turn off my phone’s WiFi so the phone switches autom. to the PROXIMUS 3G network.
I fire up the ConnectBot app and start the ssh connection to my foobar.dyndns.org location.
The phone gently points out that it’s trying to connect to the host.
After some nail-biting, it lets me know that the connection has timed-out.

So far : Fail!

So now I have to search for the cause of  this connection timeout.
First I fire up the inbound log of my router which doesn’t show ma any blocked requests from my phone’s IP.
But there are as many traces of an accepted connection , but I overlooked that as I was looking for where it was stopped.
So I started to monitor the log files on my desktop.

tail -f /var/log/messages
tail -f /var/log/auth.log

As I try to make new connections from my phone with different settings in ConnectBot (eg. optimize for slow connections), I can’t find anything in the log-files.
I start to adjust the /etc/ssh/sshd_config time-out settings and reverse DNS lookups as I suspect a too slow connection to be the problem.
To verify the settings of ConnectBot I try to log in over the WiFi and this worked just fine. Also in the log files there is nothing suspicious that shows up.

I setted up a VPN connection to the HoGent and try to create an SSL connection back. Also this one fails.
So far the options I have to test my setup from the WAN side… A phone and a VPN connection to a place I don’t even know if it lets my SSH request trough.

So I call a friend to try and make a connection to my desktop and be surprised, it worked!
Then I turn to the #Ubuntu-be channel  on Freenode to ask them if they could try to make a connection.
What seems, they can’t connect.

So some people can connect from the WAN site and some others can’t…. strange.
Then all of a sudden, someone from the IRC channel points out that Telenet (my ISP) blocks all inbound ports < 1024 from other networks (eg. non-Telenet-cliënts).
They explain so on this page (in Dutch).
I took the liberty to translate it shamelessly in google translate and post the output here:

The Internet has long not limited to surfing and e-mail. Every day new applications appear that new demands not only your computer but also to the Telenet network. The service provides Telenet is a best effort service which means that sometimes made choices which applications or not supported.

The applications which Telenet focuses its support;
- E-mail (POP / SMTP)
- Web browsing (http)
- FTP
- IRC
- Usenet

In addition, Telenet including the security of the network and a number of users? Ports? completed on the network. On the residential product range of Telenet Internet, all incoming ports closed in 1024. Outgoing port 25 (SMTP) closed. There are still some specific ports closed for security reasons. As new applications, threats, viruses, worms edm. emerging Telenet wants his policies at all times to match these new developments.

So far the freedom on the internet… when you’re connected over Telenet’s services.

Solution:

I changed the port where SSH is listening on to some bigger than 1023, adjusted my settings in ConnectBot and it fired it up.
Guess what, It worked!

Conclusion:

I’ve been spilling 4 hours on something because I didn’t  read my ISP’s conduct.

1. Click the “Manage Contacts” link on the bottom of you contact-frame.



2. Select the people you want to remove inside contactmanager
   
3. Then hit the remove button in the upper-right corner to remove them.

Note that only the contacts that have an @gmail.com adress will show up in the contact manager. People that only have an @googlewave.com address won’t show up.
But there’s no need to sweat. This has already been noted by the Google Wave team on this support page.

At first the search function is only capable of searching for Blips that contain certain words and that are in some folder.
But after reading this Wave Support page you’ll see that there are much more ways to use the little search box.
Read trough the list of possible commands, and you’ll find a quite strong search box.

Also note that it’s possible to add multiple search commands in the box.
So or example, if you’re searching for all public posts that contain the word Ubuntu you can simply enter the search string:

with:public ubuntu

If you want to search the public waves for all the ones about WordPress and contain the word style, you just query for:

with:public title:wordpress style

The most important thing you can do after you triggered a query  is save it.

Saved searches help you find and filter waves, faster. Here’s how to save a search:

1. In the Navigation panel, click (+) next to SEARCHES.
2. Enter the appropriate details in the box that appears.
   * If you’d like to apply filters to waves matching your search criteria, use the Filter Actions in the box. Archive causes waves to skip the inbox, and selecting Mark as read will unbold all matching waves.
3. Click Submit.

If you perform a search and decide you’d like to save the terms of that search, click Save search at the bottom of the search panel. The same box mentioned above will appear so you can further customize the search.

You can access your saved searches by expanding SEARCHES in your Navigation panel (click (+) next to SEARCHES). Like other options in the Navigation panel, you can edit, rename, reorder, and/or change the color of your saved searches using the More actions arrow next to the title of each of your searches.

From:     wave-noreply@google.com
To:     Me
Subject:     Your invitation to preview Google Wave
Date:     Fri, 23 Oct 2009 21:01:52 +0000 (23:01 CEST)

Google    wave
preview
Check out the videos and example waves
* Invite others to join you
*
Thank you for signing up to give us early feedback on Google Wave. We’re happy to give you access to Google Wave and are enlisting your help to improve the product.

To accept your invitation, sign into Google Wave at the following link*:

https://wave.google.com/wave/invite?a=pre&wtok=4af57blablalblaalla13&wsig=ABk8uhSmlkmlieodqsfqdErsQTtjw

(If you do not have a Google account, you will be prompted to create one)

Once you’ve signed in:

Happy waving!
The Google Wave Team

For help, please visit http://www.google.com/support/wave

* This link will only work for one invitation to Google Wave, it cannot be shared!

Copyright 2009. Google Inc, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043.

So now I got my Wave account, but there are no people in it, yet.
For now, I won’t be able to test that many things as a communication platform is quite useless without contacts.
But as my friends & family starts accepting the invites I send out, it’ll be a great experience.

Every accounts seems to start with 20 invites, but they’re not send out immediately.
The reason is quite obvious:

Invite others to Google Wave

Google Wave is more fun when you have others to wave with, so please nominate people you would like to add. Keep in mind that this is a preview so it could be a bit rocky at times.

Invitations will not be sent immediately. We have a lot of stamps to lick.

Happy waving!

The welcome message includes an introducing video to the Wave platform.
A quite nice way for a multi-billion company to introduce a new product

You might recognise this way of selling their product from the Gmail launch.
By using the invite-system they create some kind of temporary ‘exclusive’ product, and it works!
Back in the time when Gmail was launched, people sold their accounts for huge amounts of money, or traded the invites for a cell-phone.

I wonder if they’ll have the same result with their Wave-invite scheme.
As things are going now, it seems like it’ll be a success.
On Reddit, each topic on Google Wave is resulting in a mass request for invites.
Ofc, Twitter has the Google Wave plague too…
They’re even getting trough to eBay (at the time of writing, at $202 with FREE SHIPPING).
But I guess these guys are pure scams, as there are no invites send yet!)

I just can’t wait to get my hands on to this service, but I won’t pay for it.
In a few months we all get a bunch of free invites to give away…. Don’t forget they’ll try to conquer the internet with this.
To get to this, they’ll have to provite enough invites for the whole world!

So for those not getting the invite, be patiënt…. (I’m more talking to myself right here

[Update] Websites’s put up for sharing invites or people selling invites are pure scams (if they’re still running their service)!
The Google Wave team has confirmed that they’re not allowing anyone to share invites.
You can read so on the twitter status of one of the mayor developers: twaphanie

So for resizing all the images to something more reasonable, we could use The Gimp with the batch function (included in the gimp-plugin-registry package)
But as these are a lot of large images this would simply take too long as each picture has to be opened/displayed.
Instead I recommend the ImageMagick (set of) program(s) to edit all the pictures at once.

Use the mogrify program to resize images and replace the originals. If you like, you can also change the format (extension) while doing so.
If this is the first time you play around with the ImageMagick programs, you might want to make a backup as you could damage your files irreversible.

Go to the directory where the pictures you want to resize are located.

cd ~/Pictures/TestPictures/

mogrify -resize 40% *.jpg

This will resize all files ending on .jpg to 40% of their original size. Note that the original files are replaced!

Now, if you want to convert all the .jpg files to .png’s as well, you can do this by using mogrify’s -format option like this:

mogrify -format png *.jpg

You can even do these two steps in one single command:

mogrify -resize 40% *.jpg | mogrify -format png *.jpg

So now you can relax and lay back till it’s done.

#!/usr/bin/pythonmo