Sintel trailer released.

So, if you haven’t heard of Sintel before, this is nothing too soon.
Sintel is a project just like Big Buck Bunny, that’s completely made with Free and Open Source software.
It’s more or less a promotion movie for Blender, that’s also why the Blender Foundation is sponsoring the project.
For those that don’t know Blender, should check it out.
It’s a Free and open source 3D content creation suite.
For all those people that are still thinking that still think that huge and task specific applications are only available for huge price’s and delivered by closed private company’s, this is your turning point.
In less than 2 months the full Sintel Video will be released… I can hardly wait.
It’s also fun to check the video’s on the BlenderFoudation youtube profile, it’s full of interesting reactions and insights.

Also be sure to check out their custom server rack:

Download 4chan images automatically with this simple script

I like to spice up my desktop with various wallpapers and have to say, that /wg/ on 4chan has been a great provider.
But keeping track of all the images, shifting forth and back and forth again between the 10 pages has been taking too much effort.
So the solution to avoid spilling too much time lurking on that imageboard, I just wrote a bash script. (Sorry Windows users)

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:

Why you should read your ISP’s Custommers Conduct Code

The idea:

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

Continue reading Why you should read your ISP’s Custommers Conduct Code

How to remove contacts from Google Wave?

It’s fairly simple, but you have to click a little but further.
I know there should be a remove-button inside the tool-tip when clicking on the contact’s avatar, but it’s not.

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

  3. Select the people you want to remove inside contactmanager
    wave_remove_contacts
  4. 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.

How to use the Google Wave Search box

The Google Wave interface is quite easy to get started, but some things may still be more complex than it first seemed.
One of these things is the search function.

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.

Google Wave

I got my Wave invite, it’s party time!

This weekend there was this awesome mail in my mailbox comming from wave-noreply@gmail.com.
The subject? “Your invitation to preview Google Wave”
Guess what, it was my Google Wave invite!
Here’s the mail:

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 😀

The battle for a google wave invite has started

google_waveIn about 3 to 6 hours, Google Will start sending out 100.000 free Google Wave invites to people already using the sandbox and the ones who offered to help report bugs.
They already announced this on their blog on 20 july.

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

Bulk resizing and reformatting of pictures in an easy and fast way

I went to a BBQ yesterday and took some pictures with my cheap 10 Mpx camera.
This resulted in some nice pictures I’d like to share with friends. (not trough facebook, tough)
The problem of today’s Mpx-hype is that pictures are two to three times bigger than my computer screen.
A .JPG picture of Width: 3648 pixels and Height: 2736 pixels results in a 4.8MB file.
One night of pictures can take several Gigabytes.
The problem of this is when you want to upload them to the internet, or you want to mail them to some friends, they’ll take too much bandwidth or eat your download-limit.
When not using picasa, flickr or facebook or some sort of internet service that is.

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

Forwarding of the so-called ‘funny’ mail isn’t funny anymore!

Screenshot-2Everyone knows them. The so-called ‘funny’ mails.
Most of the time they contain a hoax, a big-ass picture, a power-point presentation or a video clip.
On top of this, they usually also contain a huge list of mail-addresses from people you don’t even know.

By this post, I’d like to point out that not all people like these mails unlike what some people tend to think.
Consider that there are people that get a lot of serious mail. (yes, it can be used in such manner)
You might not be aware of it, but reading all those mails take an huge amount of time.
These people are constantly fighting against unwanted messages as it consumes way too much time.
This is not such a big deal, but it gets harder if their mail-address is being used in a inappropriate way.

By inappropriate I mean that their mail-address, along with a lot of other addresses, is put inside the ‘cc:’ field, making it visible to all people ever receiving that mail.
If you’re not aware of the implications, just imagine that your home address or your cell-number is published instead of your mail address.
Some people use this medium for work related communications or for serious business. The so funny mails become quite annoying in this context.
In the end, they are unwanted messages, also called spam.

I understand that you might want to share the funny stuff with people you know.
But take some actions to prevent spamming people.

Things you can do

  • Use the BCC: field to place the mail-addresses in.
    This will prevent you from distributing people’s address to the world.
    You can do this in Outlook .
  • Think twice when forwarding a mail to your contacts.
    Differentiate people that use the mail-system for social contacts and those that use it for serious business.
    You can do this by making distribution listsin Outlook or Windows Live (alias hotmail), categorizing these people.
    This makes it also faster and easier to send the mails.
  • If someone answers your mail asking you to stop sending this kind of mails, don’t ignore it.
    That person will possibly just block all your mails, resulting in the ignorance of serious mails.

For an overview of the email etiquette you can check out this website for a nice and comprehensive list of things you should know before using any mail-system.