Shooting

gphoto2 I’ve been using to control external cameras over USB doesn’t work with webcam so I had to find something else and found streamer (that’s the name of the command and the name of the package in Ubuntu repositories)

streamer -o 0000.jpeg -s 1280x720 -j 100 -t 20:00:00 -r 0.1

takes 1280×720 resolution images with jpeg quality 100, interval 0.1 images/second (right, this sucks, I’d like having the option to use fps instead of fsp) until 20:00, and names the images as xxxx.jpg where xxxx is the running number of the image.

streamer -o 0000.jpeg -s 1280x720 -j 100 -t 2900 -r 0.05

Does the same except doesn’t care about the clock but takes 2900 shots.

Cleaning

I shot around 2300 images with about 33s interval. From these I removed about 1000 images of boring nothing-but-black night shots – just to make it more interesting to watch.

Parsing

mencoder -nosound mf://*.jpeg -mf w=1280:h=720:type=jpeg:fps=40 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2160000:v4mv -o movie.avi && vlc movie.avi

1230 images with 40fps results a 45s movie.

Pros / Cons

Webcam’s great as you don’t run into problems with power. But that’s about all.
The image quality isn’t very great compared to 3000×2000 px SLR. The automatic color/exposure/contrast/… adjustment is bad and doesn’t allow one to see properly the change of lightning conditions. On the other hand if you want to be sure to see all details what happens somewhere this will do it but so will a ‘proper camera’ in automatic mode.

So, if you want..
Long shooting duration: Webcam or normal camera with AC power
Good quality shots or manual settings: normal camera (with AC power)

Result

Not really that interesting, just another demo of what can be done easily with Linux + webcam.

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I was sick a while ago. The first day I didn’t do much but sleep and read comics. The second day, the most exciting event of the day was to see how the frost flowers in the window melted. In the morning it was about -27C but then during the day the sun heated the window so much that the frost flowers melted away. Seeing new flowers in the window the following morning, I decided to try to make a time lapse video of how they melt.

Code to control the camera

First, I grapped a piece of old camera control code from one of my old posts. gphoto2 is able to control my Nikon D70 DSLR over USB: tell it to take a shot, download the image and so on. So this is the code I ended up with:

for i in {1..400};
do
echo "#################"
echo "Photo $i"
date
echo "#################"

#capture a photo
gphoto2 --capture-image &
sleep 60
gphoto2 --get-file=$i
done

This takes a picture, waits for 60 seconds, downloads the previous picture, and starts it all over again. As it does this for 400 times, it should give me almost 7 hours of shooting time.

Notes

• Nikon D70, on manual mode, 1/800s, F7.1, manual focus
• Sigma F2.8 105mm macro lens
• D70 needs to be set  to PTP mode and also had to set the camera to store on the memory card (see gphoto2 –set-config-something..)
• Make sure you have enough space on the card! If this is a problem, you can also remove files from the camera using gphoto2 -D …
• Make sure you start with a full battery. I did. It went empty. Tried to replace it – only to find out that also my backup battery was empty. Fail.
• Don’t move the camera. Don’t touch it!
• During the shooting, I had this one-liner running in the folder where the images were downloaded: while true; do gwenview -s . && sleep 300; pkill gwenview; done to see some of the images on the screen all the time. It’d be nice if gwenview would integrate new files in the slideshow folder to the running slideshow, but as this didn’t work, I needed to kill and restart it every now and then to see the latest results.

Converting JPG files to video

It sure wasn’t easy to figure out a decent way to do this. But this is how I did it:

• Create a 3008x2000px (same as my camera resolution) jpg to use as title of the movie
• Save 4 copies of it (title1.jpg title2.jpg etc..)
• Create 1 second title clip: mencoder -nosound mf://*.jpeg -mf w=1504:h=1000:type=jpg:fps=8 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2160000:v4mv -o title.avi
• Create the ‘main film’: mencoder -nosound mf://*.JPG -mf w=1504:h=1000:type=jpg:fps=8 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=2160000:v4mv -o movie.avi
• Join these together: avimerge -o final.avi -i title.avi title.avi title.avi movie.avi title.avi title.avi

Result

Have you tried it? Show me your results!

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You know the story, Nokia announced their co-operation with Microsoft. Here’s a summary of what’s been said by people who know about these things.

• MEEGO@NOKIA: Under the new strategy, MeeGo becomes an open-source, mobile operating system project. MeeGo will place increased emphasis on longer-term market exploration of next-generation devices, platforms and user experiences. Nokia still plans to ship a MeeGo-related product later this year.
  Nokia Press Release
• MEEGO@ELOP: First, we cannot blame Elop for this. He did not kill MeeGo in February 2011. He was one of the finalists for CEO, who had to propose a plan to solve Nokia’s severe crisis. That involved painful cuts no matter how you looked at it. The Board approved a plan in September, where one part meant MeeGo was dead. Elop didn’t kill MeeGo now. It died last September and the Board approved that plan where MeeGo would go.
  Communities Dominate Brands – the best analysis so far (based on public information so not 100% accurate..)
• MEEGO@INTEL: “Intel is disappointed at Nokia but life goes on. Our decision and resolve on MeeGo is only stronger.”
  Intel’s response
• MEEGO@NOKIA: #info Elop: Nokia would continue to develop the MeeGo operating system in collaboration with Intel
  So, definetly this work will continue.
  #meego-meeting irc-logs from 2011-02-15. I’ve heard the same from other people inside Nokia that the work on Meego still continues. Some teams have been told to stop their work but definitely not all of them.
• MEEGO@N900: #meego – No way in hell that we’re giving up! #wearemeego and we’re ready for battle and very much alive.
  Carsten Munk, MeeGo Nokia N900 hardware adaptation maintainer
• QT@KDE: What we in KDE need are calm, stable heads to plot the lay of the land first and then examine how our strategy should be adapted and extended. Change often produces opportunity, but first one has to understand the change to recognize the opportunities. Right now it’s infeasible to speak to what the real opportunities and challenges are without first doing our homework.
  Aaron Seigo, KDE developer
• QT@NOKIA: Unequivocally, Qt is not dead. This morning we heard top Nokia executives like CTO Rich Green talk about Qt and the future. Qt will continue to live on through Symbian, MeeGo and the non-mobile Qt industries and platforms.
  Head of Web and Community & Communications Manager at Nokia
• SYMBIAN&QT@NOKIA: Qt will continue to be the development framework for Symbian and Nokia will use Symbian for further devices; continuing to develop strategic applications in Qt for Symbian platform and encouraging application developers to do the same. With 200 million users worldwide and Nokia planning to sell around 150 million more Symbian devices, Symbian still offers unparalleled geographical scale for developers.
  Nokia’s letter for developers
• QT@WINDOWS PHONE7: Qt will not be ported to Windows Phone 7. One of the key benefits of joining an established ecosystem is that there is an established toolchain that everyone uses. All Windows Phone apps will run on all WP7 devices. Adding Qt to the mix would only cause fragmentation.
  Head of Web and Community & Communications Manager at Nokia
• FLOSS@WP7: But one thing is extremely obvious. Microsoft wants to keep its platform clear of Free Software. Period. Jan Wildeboer
• SHAREHOLDERS: We are a group of nine young Nokia shareholders. All of us have worked with Nokia in different capacities in the past. We plan to challenge the company’s strategy and partnership with Microsoft in the next Annual General Meeting scheduled for May 3, 2011.
  nokiaplanb.com This was a hoax after all. Forget it.
• Backup plans for Nokia, nokiaplans.com.

So Meego will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Qt will live on, both inside and outside Nokia. Symbian will die. Qt will not be ported to QP7. KDE will survive.

The bad news is that no FLOSS on WP7 (Market?) – and many (up to 5000?) Meego, Qt and Symbian devels in Finland will loose their jobs. Feeling sorry for you guys. Maybe now it’s time to start a new Nokia?

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In October Facebook announced that they will make all user data downloadable. This means that you now can download a single .zip file with all your status updates, messages, photos and profile information. You own your information and now it’s possible to do something with it, not only give it all to Facebook!

Download window

As I had a closer look at what’s this about, I found out that this is actually a treasure you definitely want to get and keep!

How to download your Facebook data?

• In Facebook, click Account, select Account Settings
• Click on ‘Learn more’ next to ‘Download Your Information’
• Press ‘Download’ button – after reading the warnings, right :)
• Press the second ‘Download’ -button
• It takes a while before Facebook prepares your data to be downloaded in a single compressed file. They will e-mail you a link to the download page
• Click on the link you get in the e-mail
• Type in your password
• Click on ‘Download now’ and the download starts

Download button

What’s in the file?

My facebook-risto.kurppa.zip was around 16MB of size. You need to extract it to get access to the files.

• html folder, size 9.1MB, 15 files
• photos folder, size 6.9MB, folder for each photo album and full size .jpg photos
• README.txt with a single line: Downloaded by Risto H. Kurppa (http://www.facebook.com/risto.kurppa) on December 4, 2010 at 9:59 pm
• index.html – this is where you start the browsing. Open it with your web browser.

Downloaded file

When you open the index.html, you can see your profile, wall, photos, friends, notes, events and messages.

Profile

Profile

• This lists everything about yourself you’ve submitted to facebook. In my case it shows my b-day, ‘about’, relationship status, e-mail address, facebook profile address, website, favorite quotations, groups and names of Facebook pages I like: music, movies and other
• Only the facebook profile is a link. It’d be great to have links also on each of the pages and groups to be able to see what’s ‘Paul Fenwick’s Facebook Privacy Study’ group about.

Wall

Wall

• This is your wall. It shows all your status updates and all wall posts from your friends (with their names, without their profile photos)
• Hovering mouse cursor on the lock icon shows you what privacy settings (=friend lists) you have shared each item with
• You can see how many have liked your statuses but you can’t see who they were
• You see all comments from your friends.
• It would be great to have each status linked to the original status at facebook.com
• It’s actually spooky to read status updates from 3 years ago!

Photos

• Shows each album: Cover image, name, amount of photos and time of creation
• Opening an album shows each photo in a list format with date and comments.
• Clicking on a photo opens the original .jpg file. This is great – regain your photos!
• HTML source uses DIV classes: photo, comments, comment, time.

Friends

• Just a plain list of names. No links, no lists.
• HTML source: friend class in DIV

Notes

• All notes on a single page in a clean format. Comments from your friends included.
• RSS imported notes don’t have a link to the original source. Too bad.
• HTML classes: note, time, notebody, comments, comment

Events

Events

• List of events I’ve attended or planning to attend. Actually I think it also shows all ‘Maybe’ events.
• Name of the event, who started it, when, where and description
• Each event has a link to the original facebook.com event. GREAT!
• HTML classes: event, page, time, description

Messages

Messages

• All messages you’ve sent or received in a neat clean list format
• Message threads are grouped together so it’s easy to follow discussion
• Again no links to the original messages in facebook.com
• HTML classes: thread, message, profile, time, msgbody, subject, message reply

Summary

So you have it all there easily readable. The HTML classes make it possible to parse the data to be used elsewhere too – maybe Diaspora will benefit from this somehow?

I don’t know what made Facebook allow people to do this but overall, it’s great it’s possible. No matter if Facebook dies, you will not loose everything you’ve written there. This is definitely something I want to leave to my children. It’ll be easy for them to see that in 2009 we still had snow to ski on or what was my first status update after our wedding. It’d be awesome to read status updates of my grand parents from, say 1940′s! I have received nor written almost no letters during last 5 years. Personal E-mails are also out. Having 2784 Facebook wall events from over 3 years is a treasure to me.

So make sure you backup your Facebook every now and then and store it in a safe place.

Thank you Facebook for this. Please add the links to the original messages, status updates etc.

Please share this to your friends by clicking THIS – they will appreciate it!

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Diaspora, the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all, open source social network (project) has now released it’s source code, as expected. HURRAY!!!!!!

Read more at Diaspora Blog.

I was able to register to one of the installations people have made today, and this is what it looks like. There’s actually not very much to see, that’s why there’s only three screenshots. You can add friends but you can’t see their statuses unless you send them the URL of the status. Can’t add photos or anything else.

UPDATE: Adding photos works, the instance I first tried was a somewhat broken installation.

So this is the first developer release! Can’t wait for alpha, beta & stable releases!

If you want to try, go to one of the official test instances listed at FAQ. Remember that they are wiped every now and then without warning!!

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But it’s useless to ever think like that – you’re surprised with the variety of apps that are available and developed for Linux.
I bumped to this blog post on Planet KDE: Sports Activity Tracking App: The Baby Needs a Name.

And it looks awesome.

Reading the comments I found some other apps that do more or less the same, and Google gave me even more. So here’s just a quick list of GPS / HRM apps you might want to have a look if they’d be useful for you:

• Then Unnamed / Kardio / Kilometer / …
• Sportstracker
• Polarview
• Sonicread
• Polarscope
• Pytrainer
• Viking
• Marble
• FoxtrotGPS
• OpenDMTP
• GPX viewer
• GPSBabel
• QLandkarte M/GT
• OpenGTS
• and the list goes on….So far I’ve been using GPSBabel to convert and Viking to analyze and clean the data, but now I might find some new neat tools… I don’t have a HRM, only GPS (Openmoko Freerunner), so I’d like an app to be able to visualize the track on (OpenStreet)Map like Viking does, but then maybe also somehow store the tracks. It’s a pain to have hundreds of GPX files in folders, some kind of tool to search would be neat. Maybe KPhotoalbum will some day be extended to manage any data, not just photos and videos :)A great place to discuss free GPS software is the FOSS-GPS mailing list, you’re welcome to join!

  Do you have any experience on some of these apps? What features they miss? What’s the coolest thing they can do?

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This is my setup:
File system. Size Used Free Use% Mount
/dev/md0 38G 26G 11G 71% /
/dev/md1 319G 276G 27G 92% /home

First I ran backups to an external 500GB USB disk:
time rsync -av --progress --stats /home/rhk /media/disk/2010-07-24-homebackup/

Then I decided to find out how long I’ve been running this system. A neat way to find it out is to find when the file system has been created:
rhk@rubert:~$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/md0|grep created
Filesystem created: Wed Jul 9 17:35:59 2008
rhk@rubert:~$ sudo tune2fs -l /dev/md1|grep created
Filesystem created: Tue May 8 22:31:04 2007

So I’ve had my setup running since July 2008, from Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04, upgrading to 8.10, then to 9.04, 9.10 and to 10.04. My home partition has been there since May 2007 – that’s when I got this computer and first installed Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.04.

~daily usage, I think running two years in a row isn’t that bad, every now and then installing some off-the-repository packages. And as stated above, there’s still nothing that’d force me to reinstall it.

How long have you had your setup running? Are you always upgrading to the latest version or staying with LTS releases? Do you often install software outside the repositories?

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That’s it.

(you can also try VirtualBox)

Except that I get an error: “Executing ‘grub-install /dev/sda’ failed. This is a fatal error.”

After this Ubiquity crashes.

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It’s small, slick. It looks extremely good. It feels heavy enough to convince you it’s of strong build.

E-book reader. Very easy to scroll pages, just slide your finger from side to side. Nice sharp text screen, very easy to read.

Tried the map application. It had Google Maps (street map, satellite, terrain..) there, GPS pointed me where I was even though I was inside a huge metal building, about 2 meters from a window. Multitouch allows extremely cool zooming  by pinching my two fingers closer or further from each other.

Screen rotation works nice, there’s a hardware key to lock the screen position.

Youtube application wasn’t able to show a single video. Don’t know if it’s the flash fight Apple & Adobe currently have, but it didn’t work.

Tried the Safari web browser. The UI is very simple, I guess it’s the same as what iPhone /iPod Touch has. To me it was a bit of a pain – we searched for a free books in the internet (Project Guthenberg) and were able to find them, but we couldn’t come up with a way to save a file from the browser. In the end we did find out that holding your finger long on a link it’ll open a short menu including ‘copy’. Then you can open the PDF viewer, tell it to find a book from the internet, then do some magic to paste the previously copied URL to the address field to download the PDF. Easy? Not at all..

The hardware button on the front takes me always to the main menu/main view. I didn’t try what happens if one presses it longer. As you can run only one app at the time, you’ll be using this a lot. As iPad doesn’t do multitasking (as far as I know it means that you cannot listen to music while reading a book and so on..), you keep starting and closing applications all the time. I guess this is the reason why a PDF reader has to know how to download PDF files from a given URL, has it’s own download manager and so on.

Appstore having huge amounts of cool applications for iPad, it must be a neat device and many people will enjoy it.

It’s understandable that Apple wants to generate as much money as possible but it must be at least equally understandable that I have problems with the way they do it.

At this stage I tell you that this iPad isn’t mine. Someone I know bought one from US and I had the possibility to play with it for around 15 minutes.

I guess that after using Openmoko Freerunner for almost 2 years now,  I’d very soon get frustrated with the limitations Apple has set for it’s devices. Having to pay for almost every software, not being even able to start it without Windows or Mac OS, move files over with Linux, not having multitasking, not being able to SSH in it, not being to install any app I or someone else has written and so on. They generate money and make slick devices, but the rest is not fair play.

One question I came up with while using it – can I run Openstreetmap instead of Google maps? Yes, I can.

I need to do soon something with the theme my blog uses.. the content area isn’t wide enough for Youtube videos :/

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Someone organizing the Ubuntufest release party at Tampere, Finland on 5th of May (Akademy 2010 will also be there this summer!) asked if we’re planning to write a press release of the new Ubuntu release. Well.. it was on our TODO list but it really didn’t look like anyone would have the resources to write one like we’ve done earlier.

So I decided to run a small test on the community – would it be possible to create a press release without making it a pain to anyone. I opened an Etherpad, copied the original English press release there and annouced it on the same #ubuntu-fi-tiimit IRC channel requesting people to join to translate it.

Etherpad

Etherpad used to be a proprietary, but free (as ‘no money asked from you to use it’) service at etherpad.com. Then came Google, bought it, disabled it for a while, open sourced it, reassigned the developers to work on Google Buzz and now finally shuts Etherpad completely down. Quite exactly what happened with Jaiku, the Finnish microblogging service some years ago: Bought it, Open sourced it, reassigned developers to work on Buzzz. Jaiku is still up&running as it was moved it over to Google App Engine.

So now as Etherpad is open source, there are open source versions of it, see piratepad.net, pad.ubuntu-uk.org and http://etherpad.org/etherpadsites.html

The cool thing with Etherpad is that anyone can use it without a need to register or log in. Many people can edit the same file at the same time and they will immediately see the changes the others make. You can save revisions, export the files as txt, html, pdf and so on. It’s also great to see how the text is color coded: each user has his own color so it’s quite easy to see what has changed and so on. It also features an awesome time slider letting you to see when the changes have been made and so on.

Results

Screenshot of the press release - click to see it bigger

In less than two hours we had a press release, translated by around 10 people. See the screenshot on the right to see how one sentence can be edited by many people – and still make sense. At least to us, who read Finnish ;)

Releasing (=mailing it to news papers and other contacts) started immediately. This resulted a nice visibility in Finnish IT magazines – we’re still waiting for the break through on non-IT magazines :/

You can see the pad we used here: http://pad.ubuntu-uk.org/JnzhILi8dT (Thanks Ubuntu UK for supporting us :)

So I can recommend Etherpad to you and your community – it’s an awesome tool to allow your volunteers to skip all unnecessary registrations and focus on the results.

Thanks for everyone who contributed. You can check the final press release at Ubuntu-fi wiki.

ps. My guess is that Google will buy Doodle and ‘do the magic’ there in the following 12 months ;)

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