Posts Tagged ‘picture’

Use mac PC built-in camera to make / take pictures on Mac OS X macbookair notebook with Photo Booth

Friday, February 26th, 2016

take-picture-or-video-with-built-in-camera-on-MacOSX-PhotoboothLOGO

It seems we lost our Good high quality Digital Camera somewhere and I was in need urgently to make a good quality photo (my ZTE Phone) has a very bad camera, so I got the idea to use Macbookair's camera as it has better
resolution to picture my present a  Tank Tort 🙂 hand made by my wife as a present for the Day of the Defender of the Fatherland which is a major feast in Russia, Belarus and many of the ex-Soviet Union members communist countries.

Actually using build in camare in MacBookAir is a handy thing for people mising at the moment a good high quality digital camera as it is thin and light and build in MacBook cam can be used to make Videos and Pictures exactly the same way
as an ordinary Tablet Computer is used so commonly nowadays by many:

In other words I needed for the Mac OS X equivalent to Cheese's (Photo and Video) capturer program for Linux.

Luckily for people interested in using their Mac OS notebook as a amateur camera this is easy by using default shipped Mac Application called:

Photo Booth app

To Launch Photo Booth app it just look it up in Finder and double click it:

PhotoBooth-how-to-take-photos-on-macosx

Clicking the large red button underneath the preview area will take a picture after an optional countdown.

Tort Tank of Svetka

Besides being able to capture Video and Pictures from Mac's camera it could add also some nice effects to taken pictures and videos (supports a basic video editing) features and effects.

The effects you can choose are are: Sepia, Black and White, Glow, Comic Book, Normal, Colored Pencil, Thermal Camera, X-Ray, and Pop Art. There are also effects that change the person in the picture using these effects: Bulge, Dent, Twirl, Squeeze, Mirror, Light Tunnel, Fish Eye, and Stretch. Actually  photographic filters of Photo Booth are very similar to Adobe Photoshop.

make-picture-on-mac-photobooth-effects-screenshot
By default Photo Booth will create picture, howver

Photo Booth saves your photos as JPEG files in a folder named Photo Booth, located in your home folder.

Choose File > Reveal in Finder

to see your picture files.

A much better way to be able to easily see and access all taken Pictures and Videos with Photo Booth is to

 

open Terminal

 

and type:

——-
 

 

$ cd Pictures
$ ln -s Photo\ Booth\ Library/Pictures/ PhotoBoothPics


This will make Link to pictures be easily accessible from your Finder -> Pictures folder
 
Applying custom photo backgrounds

A very useful feature of Photo Booth is that the user can apply backdrops to provide an effect similar to a green screen. When a backdrop is selected, a message appears telling the user to step away from the camera. Once the background is analyzed, the user steps back in front of the camera and is shown in front of the chosen backdrop.

For people who prefer to take photos using a console program on Mac OS I guess you should take a look at ffpeg
Here is one more snapshot of the Tort Tank snapshot made with the Macbookair of Svetlana 🙂

Tort Tank


P.S. If you like the Tort Tank and you happen to live in Sofia Bulgaria, you can order it  by dropping me a comment with request 🙂

Enjoy ! 🙂

Ditaa convert ASCII diagrams into bitmap graphic (pictures)

Monday, May 12th, 2014

ditta_convert-ascii-art-diagram-to-png-jpg-picture
As part of my passion for ASCII art, I've found another interesting tool useful to ASCII art maniacs like me, the tool is called ditta and is able to convert manually drawn ASCII art diagrams to graphics, below is tool description from my debian apt-cache as well as a screenshot:

 apt-cache show ditaa|grep -i ditaa -A 4

Package: ditaa
Priority: optional
Section: graphics
Installed-Size: 164
Maintainer: David Paleino <dapal@debian.org>

Filename: pool/main/d/ditaa/ditaa_0.9+ds1-2_all.deb
Size: 107270
MD5sum: 05ec52d9274b954b053f1835ca5d7a7f
SHA1: 792d91d05fff2a2a19c0ebce317351d138436c18
SHA256: c4319d32e7918aab782e2f38cdad745bc9023f9f09a999033d983095ee4f70d5

 DiTAA is a small command-line utility that can convert diagrams drawn using
 ASCII art ("drawings" that contain characters that resemble lines, like | /
 and -), into proper bitmap graphics.
 .
 DiTAA also uses special markup syntax to increase the possibilities of shapes
 and symbols that can be rendered.
Homepage: http://ditaa.org

 

To install ditaa on Debian and Ubuntu Linux:

debian:~# apt-get install --yes ditaa
...

Ditaa text diagram to Graphics converter is also available in Fedora Linux and in Source RPMs to be used on Redhat Based RPM distributions.
To install in most of RPM based Linuxes:

[root@fedora:~]# yum install -y ditaa

For most people probably Ditta will not be of any value except as a PoC and of a Hack value just like Ditaa's home page suggests. Nomatter that Ditta is cool but has just 2 drawback it doesn't understand non-latin characters i.e. Cyrillic and requires Java Virtual Machine .. but if you're a real geek you will do  the sacrifice to install a whole bunch of the heavy java for the sake of some oldschool fun 🙂 Being written in Java makes Ditta multi-platform, but you will need a Java VM version of at least 1.6 (it doesn't work with Java 1.5).

The format Ditta understands is close to HTML

<ditaa [optional parameters]>
 
... (some ditaa-code) ...
 
</ditaa>


There are also special tags understood by Ditta which are automatically turned into shaped graphical buttons and forms.
 

Possible tags

Not all shape selector tags are documented on the ditaa site. A quick source scan revealed:

tag Description
{c} decision(Choice)
{d} document
{io} input/output, parallelogram
{mo} manual operation
{o} ellipse, circle
{s} storage
{tr} trapezoid (looks like an inverted {mo} )

Here is an example Ditta code
 

<ditaa round noedgesep right>
+--------+   +-------+    +-------+
|        | --+ ditaa +--> |       |
|  Text  |   +-------+    |diagram|
|Document|   |!magic!|    |       |
|     {d}|   |  c478 |    |       |
+---+----+   +-------+    +-------+
:                         ^
|       Lots of work      :
+-------------------------+
</ditaa>

This Ditta code will generate following picture:

ditaa_convert-ascii-art-picture-to-graphic-png-jpg-bmp


To learn more on ditta please check Ditaa's Project homepage on Sourceforge
Many thanks to Cybercity's 30 Cool Open Source Software of 2013 for inspiring this post.

Linux: Rename all files extension from upper to lower cases

Friday, February 14th, 2014

Lets say you're an admin involved in webhosting and due to a programmer's mistake, you end up with directory full with files with extension in upper cases but for actual version of website (all pictures are red only in lower cases), hence would like to transform these to lower cases.
To give an example, to illustrate what I mean, lets say you have in a directory files like;

filename.JPG, picture.PNG, new-picture.GIF

and you would like all files to be renamed to lower extension characters, i.e.:

filename.jpg, picture.png, new-picture.gif.
 

# find . -name '*.*' -exec sh -c 'a=$(echo {} | sed -r "s/([^.]*)\$/\L\1/"); [ "$a" != "{}" ] && mv "{}" "$a" ' \;

That's all enjoy 🙂

I work for money if you want loyalty hire a dog – thinking that can solve your internal workplace (dilemmas) issues :)

Wednesday, February 12th, 2014

I-work-for-money-if-you-want-loyalty-hire-a-dog

I WORK FOR MONEY IF YOU WANT LOYALTY – HIRE A DOG!

I was told about those picture few months ago by a friend (Ivan Pushkaroff – Pushi) while we were drinking beer together in  (Delfincheto – a pub more known among people under the name "Ribkata (The Fish)" – A Metal Music pub in Studentski Grad (Sofia's Student City). By the way if you're in Sofia and near "Studentski Grad" be sure to drop by there – they serve great and always fresh fish also for ex-metal heads for me it is always nice to get some memories about  "the good old metal years"

when I tried to complain how difficult it is for me on my job place. I'm a quite sensitive person and a perfectionist and always try to do a great job. Often however there are many obstacles to do your job in right way (as you depend on so many bureaucracy and external people that even if you do your best someone else can mix it up and screw all your effort by not doing his part of the job. The failure of project or Task due to inadeaquacy of someone else involved to do his job right can leave you with a feeling that you have failed even though it is completely not your fault. As these days I'm quite stressed on my job and I have to work on a lot of badly designed projects (and improperly) assigned tasks – yes in big companies it is like these "the right hand doesn't know what the left one is doing". I remembered my dear friend advice to not take it seriously or personally and decided to put these funny picture in hope that these will help me and others to deal with situation of hardships in job in a humorous way After all I'm just a mercenary and I'm doing my best right now in my job at HP … I work for money if they expect higher degree of loyalty let them hire a dog 🙂

FastStone nice alternative picture freeware viewer software to Windows Photo Viewer

Tuesday, October 22nd, 2013

Faststone Windows 7 Vista Win 8 free good picture iewer program logo
I'm forced to use Windows in my work place in HP and occasionally have to open pictures. Default Windows viewer Windows Photo Viewer is very limited in what it can do. It can't even Rotate a picture so I find it a good idea to find a good alternative. Historically I liked to use IrfanView Freeware but I saw a colleague to use FastStone Image Viewer and I decided to give it a try. It looks more function rich than IrfanView so I install it and intend to use it as primary picture viewer on HP work Elitebook 8470p with Windows 7

Irfanview windows 8 picture viewer alternative to default Microsoft Picture Viewer screenshot

I strongly recommend the program to anyone looking for a good alternative to 'woody' Windows Image Viewer and who for some reason wants alternative to Irfanview.

FastStone has all the basic features I need like Crop image, Rotate Image etc. by using it I don't have to run GIMP for simple image manipulations. Another good reason to use FastStone is many of well known shortcut keys are similar to Proprietary (Non-Free) ACDSee which I used to heavily used in old days when I was still using Windows 98 so it feels using it quite confortable. Other thing is FastStone manages quite well non-standard RAW formats from various Cameras.

FastStone image pictureviewer windows good windows Image Viewer alternative to Windows default image viewer program and IrfanView
 
FastStone has even a bunch of standard Effects to apply to a picture, play with Shadows Lightning and most of basic professional File manipulation embedded. Hope someone will benefit out of the post and will start using it.

Enjoy

Converting JPEG Images to ASCII Art text (picture) in Microsoft Windows (2000 / XP / Vista / 7)

Friday, May 18th, 2012

A friend of mine, just mentioned about a program ASCIIPic – capable of converting graphic images in JPEG to plain text ASCII in Microsoft Windows OSes.
Yesterday I blogged about caca-utils (img2txt) – console tool to convert picture graphics to plain text ASCII , so knowing of the Windows freeware ASCIIPic existence catched my attention and I decided to give it a try to get idea what is situation with Images to ASCII text convertion in Windows? 🙂.

1. Generating ASCII from JPEG images with ASCII Pic

As I don't have a Microsoft Windows OS at hand, I downloaded it and run it on my Debian notebook with WINE (Wine Is Not an Emulator) MS-Windows emulator.

For my surprise the program run succesfuly its GUI interface and worked pretty smooth even emulated on Linux.

ASCII Pic 2.0 JPG PNG GIF to ASCII text MS Windows Convertor screenshot

As of time of writting, the latest version of the freeware program available is 2.0. You see in above screenshot the program is pretty intutive to use. You select an Input file, an Output file and you're ready to Process the image to TXT.
One small note to make here is the program couldn't recognize as Input files images in PNG or GIF formats, it seems the only image formats the program recognizes as input are JPEG and BMP.

ASCII Pic Windows image to ASCII program picture shot

The converted images to ASCII results are quite unsatisfactory, I tried converting few pictures originally in size 1024×768 but the produced ASCII was messy huge (the program didn't automatically set height / width dimensions to 60×80 and therefore, when I revied the produced pictures, they were very ugly and hardly readable. It could be the same image looks better if reviewed in MS-Windows Notepad but I seriously doubt that …

I thought some improvement to the produced ASCII image might be possible from the app options so I played around with the Zoom, Negation, Brightness and Monochrome options, none of them had a drastic change on the output. Using any of the program options didn't make the output TXT "image" to look closer riginal JPEGs..

ASCII Pic 2.0 Windows picture to ASCII Program options screenshot

ASCII Pic official website contains a number of other tiny tools, like WinKill and RemoteShut, however most of the tools are already too obslete and useless just like ASCII Pic

If I have to compare ASCIIPic produced ASCII Images to libcaca's Linux img2txt, asciipic's ASCII images are a piece of crap.

2. jp2a command line tool image to ASCII generator

As of time of writting a good alternative program I found for Windows is jp2a
jp2a is a free GPL-ed software available for all major operating system architectures Linux, BSD, Mac OS X, Windows.
jp2a is a command line tool and lacks any GUI interface but if compared to ASCII Pic the output ASCII image is awesome.

jp2a Windows binary can be downloaded from here , also I've made a mirror of windows jp2a bin in case if it disappears here

3. ASCII Generator 2 (asc2gen) – Windows GUI Images to ASCII generator

ASC 2 Gen is actually the best I can find program to convert images to ascii in Win as of time of writting.
Just like img2txt it generates pretty decent looking text images.

ASC2Gen failed to run emulated on my Linux host with wine version 1.0.1, hence to test it I used a a Windows host via teamviewer.

Below are few screenshots illustrating most of the options ASCII2GEN provides:

asc2gen Microsoft Windows image to ascii generator inverted penguins screenshot

asc2gen penguins in inverted color set (black color text background)

ASC2Gen backhead penguins ascii picture screenshot

ASC2GEN flipped backhed generated image to ASCII

ascii2gen generate images to ascii in colors Microsoft Windows shot

Picture to ASCII text converted with ASCII colors

Dithering Windows image to ascii text generated picture ASCII

ascii2gen dithering level option shot

asc2gen jpeg, png, gif to plain text ascii brightness contrast screenshot pic

asc2gen contrast / brigthness atune shot

ascii2gen penguins converted images to plain text inverted with capital letters for picture

asc2gen save as options shot

Something else nice is it supports a lot of image file formats as input including (BMP and GIF) images.
I've also made a mirror of asc2gen v. 2.0.0 here

While researching online, I found plenty of other Image to ASCII geneartors, however as I didn't tested them I can't say if they are  better ones.
Anyways I will be happy to hear if anyone knows other good ASCII generator alternative progs for Winblows?

How to digital watermark to a picture – Protect pic with copyright image or text with composite, convert and Phatch on GNU / Linux

Friday, March 23rd, 2012

Watermarking is a technique to identify a physical or non-physical object with its owner (creator). First watermarks in history originates from very ancient times.

There are two basic types of Watermark types:

I. Physical Watermarks (classical)

II. Digital Watermarks

Historically Classical Watermarks, were mostly important. As we tend to use more and more visible and we switch to use of more invisible stuff, nowdays the importance and use of digital watermarks is steadily raising.

You have most likely already seen pictures from websites which contain a copyright holder message stamp or website logo on it.
As you could imagine the picture watermark is placed in order to prevent pictures from being re-used in another internet space ,without the picture copyright holder explicit permission…

Watermarks have entered most if not all areas of our life, but we often don't recognize they're there / rarely think about them.
Few of the many "physical watermarks" we use daily are:
 

  • paper money watermark (to protect against anti money forgery)
  • bank debit / credit cards stamps near the card chip
  • postcards paper stamps

There are too many different kind of "physical watermarks" and since this is not the accent of this article, I will continue straight to explaiin a bit on Digital (picture) watermarks and how to watermark images with ImageMagick image editting command line suit.

Just like with physical watermarks, there are different kinds of digital watermarks. There are:
 

  • Picture (Images) digital watermarks
  • – Steganography

  • Video watermarks
  • Audio stream digital watermarks
  • Visual digital watermarks
  • – Visible area of text or picture over another text picture or video

  • Invisible digital watermarks
  • – digital information (files) metadata with watermark content etc.

The topic of watermarking is quite wide, so I will stop here and focus on the main idea of this article – to show how to place digital watermark on graphic image or collection of pictures.

The most straightway non-interactive way to do picture watermarking is with ImageMagick's composite command line tool. This little handy tool is capable of creating watermarks in single and multiple pictures.

If you prefer to have a simple text as a watermark, then you should use imagick's convert cmd.

1. Putting a watermark of picture in the right bottom corner

$ composite -gravity southeast -dissolve 100 \
watermark_picture.png image-to-watermark.png \
output-watermarked-image.png

Snoopy Writting pc freak watermark picture text watermark on the right bottom corner with composite

2. Placing watermark to picture in the bottom right corner

$ composite -gravity northeast -dissolve 80 \
watermark_picture.png image-to-watermark.png \
output-watermarked-image.png

Snoopy Writting pc freak picture text watermark on the right bottom corner with composite

3. Watermarking picture in the bottom left corner

$ composite -gravity southwest -dissolve 90 \
watermark_picture.png image-to-watermark.png \
output-watermarked-image.png

Snoopy writting watermarking picture on the bottom left corner imagemagick (composite)

4. Watermarking picture in the top left corner

$ composite -gravity northwest -dissolve 100 \
watermark_picture.png image-to-watermark.jpg \
output-watermarked-image.jpg

As you see from above example, composite even accept mixing up input / output between PNG and JPEG pictures 🙂

Output Watermarked Image picture on top left corner with pc-freak logo image Imagick composite

5. Put a watermark in the image center

$ composite -gravity center -dissolve 100 \
watermark_picture.png image-to-watermark.png \
output-watermarked-image.png

position watermark on the picture middle (center) composite output picture

6. Sealing image with custom text / Text Watermarking a picture

a) Writting text watermark to an image centered in "footer"

$ convert image-to-watermark.png -pointsize 20 \
-draw "gravity south fill black text 0,12 \
'hip0s Watermark'" output-watermarked-image.jpg

This will place a watermark in position 0,12, meaning the text will be added in the bottom center of the watermarked image.

Watermarking a picture sealing with custom text image imagick composite pic

-pointsize 20 defines the text font size. hip0s Watermark is the actual text that will be stamped.

b) Writting image watermark with font type customization (Arial Tahoma etc.):

To list all available fonts ready to be used by convert, type:

$ convert -list font
$ convert -list font |grep -i arial
Font: Arial-Black-Regular
family: Arial Black
glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial_Black.ttf
Font: Arial-Bold
family: Arial
glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial_Bold.ttf
Font: Arial-Bold-Italic
family: Arial
glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/arialbi.ttf
Font: Arial-Italic
family: Arial
glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/ariali.ttf
Font: Arial-Regular
family: Arial
glyphs: /usr/share/fonts/truetype/msttcorefonts/Arial.ttf

$ convert -list type
Bilevel
ColorSeparation
ColorSeparationMatte
Grayscale
GrayscaleMatte
Optimize
Palette
PaletteBilevelMatte
PaletteMatte
TrueColorMatte
TrueColor

On my system, I have 392 of fonts installed, to check the number of installed fonts ready for use by convert I used:

$ convert -list font|grep -i 'font:'|wc -l
392

To only check exact fonts names usable in convert:

$ convert -list font|grep -i 'font:'

To use the red marked Arial-Regular for font of the text picture timestamp issue;

$ convert watermark_picture.jpg -font Arial-Regular \
-pointsize 20 -draw "gravity south fill black text 0,12 'hip0s Watermark'" \
output-watermarked-image.jpg

Watermark and with Arial-Regular font image magick convert screenshot dog type writter

c) Using external font with convert to place image text watermark

Lets say you would like to use an external font (arhangai.ttf) not listed in convert -font list usable fonts:

$ convert image-to-watermark.png -pointsize 20 \
-font /usr/share/fonts/truetype/arhangai/arhangai.ttf \
-draw "gravity south fill black text 0,12 \
'hip0s Watermark'" output-watermarked-image_7.png

Talking about fonts, if you would like to add some external, nice free-fonts (ttf) files to your current logged in user, exec:

hipo@noah:~$ cd ~/fonts
hipo@noah:/fonts$ for i in \
$(lynx -dump http://www.webpagepublicity.com/free-fonts.html|grep -i .ttf|grep -i http|awk '{ print $2 }'); \
do wget -r -l2 -nd -Nc $i;
done

This will add 85 new nice looking fonts. Putting fonts in .fonts/ directory, are red while fonts are looked up by applications installed on respective the server or desktop GNU / Linux systems. Any font put there is ready to be used across all ImageMagick command line tools, as well as will be added across the list of possible fonts to use in GIMP and the rest of gui editors installed on the system.

According to the (watermark) texts font size passed to convert on some pictures the text written will exceed the picture dimensions and only partially some of the text intended as watermark will be visible.
If you encounter the exceed picture text problem, take few minutes and play with fonts sizes until you have a good font size to fit the approximate dimensions of the (expected minimum / maximum – horizontal and vertical) stamped picture dimensions.

For the sake of clarity, here is a list with arguments used in above, composite and convert examples.
 

  • composite — The ImageMagick command that combines two images.
  • -dissolve 80 — The number after the option determines the brightness of the watermark.  100 is full strength.
  • -gravity southeast — Determines the placement of watermark.
    Possible options are; north, west, south, east, northwest, northeast, southeast, southwest, center
  • watermark_picture.png — The watermark image is the first argument.
  • image-to-watermark.jpg — The second argument is the original image to be watermarked.
  • output-watermarked-image.jpg — The third argument is the new composite image to be created.
    N. B. !  If you don't specify a new file, be careful, the original file will be overwritten.

As ImageMagick is cross platform graphic editting suit – it runs on both *nix (Linux,BSD) and Windows. I have tested it on Linux, only but on FreeBSD and other BSDs it should work without any problem.
The composite and convert above examples should be easily rewritten to run on achieve watarmarking on MS Windows too.

7. Watermarking multiple pictures in a directory

To watermark multiple pictures within a directory use, a short bash loop in combination with either convert or composite could be used:

$ cd your-directory/
$ for i in *; do
convert $i -pointsize 20 -draw "gravity south fill black text 0,12 'hip0s Watermark'" output-watermarked-image.jpg
done

convert and composite also support wildcards like '*.JPG, *.PNG', but I'm not sure if this syntax can be used for mass picture marking?

8. Adding watermark and doing other various advanced Image Edit, Convert and Compose stuff with Phatch GUI program

Another program that is capable to put watermarks on pictures and besides that doing a number of routine graphic manipulation operations achievable with expert Image manipulation programs like GIMP / Inkscape is PHATCH = PHOTO & BATCH

Phatch is swiss army knife for doing web design or or graphics design on Linux.

Phatch is really great and easy to use program. Tt makes putting basic designer effects on pictures with no requirement for any design skills.
With Phatch you can become a designer for a day literally 😉

If you haven't used it yet, make sure you try it!
Below, are two screenshots of Phatch running on my Debian G* / Linux

Phatch Linux Debian Squeeze Screenshot

Phatch Linux Debian Squeeze Screenshot Watermark effect

Phatch is installable via apt on Debian and Ubuntu Linux. It has also a phatch-cli tools, which are a possible substitute to ImageMagick's composite / convert tools.

On deb based distros install Phatch with:

noah:~# apt-get --yes install phatch phatch-cli

In Phatch it is also possible, to create a combination of filters to be later applied to an image file or a group of image files all in a directory. The program capabilities are really outstanding, it is pure joy to work with it.

Using Phatch GUI interface is hard to comprehend in the beginning, I needed few minutes until I can get the idea how to use it. Anyhow once you know the basics, its very easy to use onwards.

Phatch currently can perform the following actions:
 

  • Auto Contrast – Maximize image contrast
  • Border – Crop or add border to all sides
  • Brightness – Adjust brightness from black to white
  • Canvas – Crop the image or enlarge canvas without resizing the image
  • Colorize – Colorize grayscale image
  • Common – Copies the most common pixel value
  • Contrast – Adjust from grey to black & white
  • Convert Mode – Convert the color mode of an image (grayscale, RGB, RGBA or CMYK)
  • Effect – Blur, Sharpen, Emboss, Smooth, ..
  • Equalize – Equalize the image histogram
  • Fit – Downsize and crop image with fixed ratio
  • Grayscale – Fade all colours to gray
  • Invert – Invert the colors of the image (negative)
  • Maximum – Copies the maximum pixel value
  • Median – Copies the median pixel value
  • Minimum – Copies the minimum pixel value
  • Offset – Offset by distance and wrap around
  • Posterize – Reduce the number of bits of colour channel
  • Rank – Copies the rank'th pixel value
  • Rotate – Rotate with random angle
  • Round – Round or crossed corners with variable radius and corners
  • Saturation – Adjust saturation from grayscale to high
  • Save – Save an image with variable compression in different types
  • Scale – Scale an image with different resample filters.
  • Shadow – Drop a blurred shadow under a photo with variable position, blur and color
  • Solarize – Invert all pixel values above threshold
  • Text – Write text at a given position
  • Transpose – Flip or rotate an image by 90 degrees
  • Watermark – Apply a watermark image with variable placement (offset, scaling, tiling) and opacity

Most of the function / effects Phatch in the up list works fine as I tested them to get to know the program.
The only effect that didn't worked for me is Blender effect.
Trying to apply the Blending effect I got error:

Can not apply action Blender:
'dict' object has no attribute 'rfind'

dict object has not attribiture rfind error screenshot my linux

Its really a pity blender filter don't work. I've seen on Phatch's website some pictures showing the blender effect in action and it looks really awesome.

In attempt to work around the err, I tried downloading Phatch's latest release and running it with python interpreter but it didn't work out …
I tried also to install some packages to the system that somehow seemed to be related to blenderversatile 3D modeller/renderer program but this worked neither.
I suspect Phatch blender effect is not working on Ubuntu too as I've red complains in some Ubuntu forums.
If someone succeeding making blend effect work please let me know how?

Interesting feature of Phatch is the program support for applying its predefined filters using a cli interface.
The syntax for phatch cli, should be something like:

phatch -console action_list.phatch

Where action_list.phatch is a Phatch predefined filter. Anyways I didn't manage to figure out how to use the program CLI. I'll be glad to hear if someone succeeded in using the program console, if so please share with me how?

9. Adding Watermark to pictures with GIMP

To add a watermark text or picture in GIMP, there are plenty of ways but is more time consuming by both Phatch or convert, composite..
There is a script in gimp plugin registry site – watermark.scm which adds watermarking capability to GIMP

On my system this script was installed with the deb package gimp-data-extras. To apply the plugin on a pic, I used GIMP menus:

Filters -> Eg -> Copyright Placer

GIMP Copyright Holder plugin Watermark Screenshot

If someone knows about better or quicker ways to do watermarking, please share 🙂

Xubuntu improve default picture viewing with gpicview

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

The default picture viewer on Xubuntu's XFCE is risterroro. Risterroro is quite lightweight, but anyways is lacking even basic functionality with reading a number of pictures in a directory and showing, them one by one lacks any picture automated slider. The lack of picture back/forward functionality makes picture viewing very inconvenient on those Linux distro.

Ristretto Screenshot on Xubuntu Linux Desktop

Thanksfully this kind of unconfortable default behaviour on Xubuntu can easily be changed to use a handy picture viewer program called gpicview xubuntu-linux:~# apt-get install --yes gpicview

gpicviewer grandmothers screenshot on Xubuntu Linux

Gpicview is a good minimalistic program which has all the functionality of the default GNOME picture viewer program eog – (eye of the Gnome). If you're aaccustomed to GNOME's eog you can always install and use eog instead 🙂

Why and How facebook profits because of you? – People, The real facebook investors

Tuesday, March 6th, 2012

Facebook people real facebook investors, facebook profits because of you / facebook greedy money logo

Facebook is usually praised and very seldom criticized. I've seen already on a couple of occasions on the TV channel news on earthquake occasions or some kind of other calamities, where facebook was said to help the rescuing teams etc. We constantly hear how facebook has helped people point their location in disastrous situations or just helping people organize a protest against a harmful company activity. Whilst this might be true, the harms it does are quite big as well. A primary harm it does is to economy as we know it. As people are engaged in filling in Mark Zuckerberg and facebook investors pockets, they rarely think about how actually facebook gets their money?

Let me explain:

Basicly facebook makes money out of its constantly increased social network data content. This could have not been possible without the 800 000 000+ million of people who constantly post updates on facebook, create groups, post pictures, add likes, comment and post links to other facebook pages. If people had not all this volunteers (facebook users) to post all this bunch of mostly junky information, facebook inc. would not have a penny. Therefore what makes facebook grow is the people itself who willingly choose to be part of this money making machine. One would think with regular company the investors are the owners of the company shares. This classical business model is not facebook model, there it is rather different as the real investors in facebook are not the capital shareholders but the regular social network user base – this means (you and me)!.

For all those who still don't get what I'm talking about I will shortly explain.
Everyone who has a basic idea on how internet advertising works is aware that the primary origin for facebook todays profit is the left pane sky scraper field with ever changing advertisements.

Various advertisers pays facebook all the time big money for displaying those stupid advertisement. As many peole are viewing and clicking the advertisements, facebook makes billions out if its advertisers.

So far so good, facebook generates its profits out of peoples free time and delibarately information sharing you would say and you might argue me that facebook steals people (time / money). This would have been true if you don't put in the picture for a contrast, a regular blogger, who makes its daily living out of blogging.
What a regular blogger does is frequent blogging on various kind of topics of his interest. Various bloggers blog at various titles, but most of them has a few major topics which they're following.

The more articles a blogger collects and the higher the uniqueness of this information is the bigger the probability this blog to have a good users base and the more interesting content it will have for search engine robots like Google Bot Crawlers or Yahoo Bot etc. etc.
With all priod said, the higher the probability this blog to have more traffic drawn from web searches to the blog. As the blogger content increases with time when it gets 10000 or more unique articles (pages), consequently it can be used as an advertising place. A 10000 pages blog could earn a person a few hundred of euros (200, 300 EUR) per month.

Well the business scheme behind facebook is exactly the same, except they store and physically own the data of the facebook registered persons. The user posts content on his facebook wall, makes pages or does various activities which generate pages, the content gets indexed in Google and with time the overall facebook website content grows. As new users joins facebook with the increased popularity of website. The website is growing exponentially like in a atoms chain reaction.

Because of this steady content growth, it becomes an interesting place not only for advertisers but for all kind of people that use the internet.
And there you have the monetarization facebook makes billions of dollars every second because of you.  This is the shocking truth, they get their money because people click or view advertisement on each others profile, so there you're YOU make the little people who develop facebook and the original investors richer and richer with every day, where you make yourself poorer and poorer by investing your personal time in facebook instead of using it to work on something that will potentially generate you some dividents in short or long future.

Actually social network is nothing more than just a multiple blogging platform, but some marketing person come with this marketing hype work "social network".
The social network buzz word is in my view just another big marketing "white lie"!. Correct me if i'm wrong but what in fact is a "Social network?". I don't see facebook neither as social, network as network. I don't know about you but I have never made a long lasting friend or relationship using facebook so far. I think the poor Facebook creator Zuckerberg made facebook with a viral mindset. He intended it to be like a social virus and so far he succeed pretty much. I just wait and eager to see who will start the anti-virus for Zuckerberg's (facebook) – people time eating virus.