MindlessCode.net

…have waay too much time on their hands.

Like this guy:

I’m kind of wary of a Cowboy Neal version of the Hobbit…

• Upon discovering the magical properties of the Ring, Bilbo comments, “Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!”
• The Elven runes read, “First Post!” The fact that it can only be read by the light of the moon is denounced as a form of DRM.
• The Trolls are moderated -1.
• Bilbo shows Sting to Gandalf, who asks, “Yeah, but does it run Linux?” Bilbo responds by calling him an insensitive clod.
• When the large party of adventurers arrive in Rivendell, Elrond complains that the town has been Slashdotted.
• Smaug’s treasure pile sparks a heated debate about such uneven distribution of wealth. Numerous replies blame George W. Bush’s economic policies for the disparity. After such an intense flame war, having the dragon literally breath flames is determined to be -1 Redundant.
• The Battle of Five Armies is increased to six to provide a Cowboy Neal option.
• In the scene where the group meets the Wood Elves, they approach not to ask for food, but to complain that the Elves’ song is not in Ogg Vorbis format.
• Gollum’s pale, subterranean appearance is lost on test audiences, who when interviewed thought he had just been staying home playing World of Warcraft. Director Cowboy Neal digitally adds a Microsoft shirt and brown Zune to Gollum to emphasize the character’s wretched condition.

How come some people get all the comic genius?

Yes Isak, I stole your title.

It’s time once again for the annual printed Wild Garden Seed catalog. This means pictures. And that means we need to find the pictures. And that means they need to be organized.

Applications like Picasa, F-Spot, iPhoto, and even Flickr do a pretty decent job of making your photos somewhat organized. You can tag/label/add keywords, put the photos to sets/albums/galleries, make screensavers, and burn CDs, but you can’t keep your photo collection on removable media (read: CDs/DVDs). I don’t know if this is just a case of “it’s hard”, or if the target user doesn’t need that feature. Most applications would work fine for the normal person who wants to take pictures and then find all the pictures of their dog to put on their Christmas card.

The fabled Joe Average takes at most a 1GB or 2 of photos a year. Most new computers can easily store this amount of data for years without running out of room. The problem comes with professional photographers, who might take 2GB in a month (that’s about 22/day at 3MB/photo, which is what some of the higher end cameras take). The average computer could maybe store 2 or 3 years of photos at a stretch. After that, what do you do? Buy a bigger HDD and reinstall Windows? Get an external 300GB HDD to keep everything on? What about laptops, who always are limited for storage? I suppose if you’re a large stock art company or magazine you could setup iSCSI or ATA-Over-Ethernet, but most photographers don’t have unlimited IT budgets and full time geeks on payroll.

I can only guess that the solution most people turn to is removable media like CDs and DVDs. We used Picasa to choose photos for the catalog, it was a nice piece of software, and worked surprisingly well. First, though, we had to manually look at each CD, writing down the ones we wanted, and then copying them to the hard drive for Picasa to manage. That was a pain. It would have been a lot easier to tag each photo as “lettuce” or “spider” when it was downloaded from the camera. Then, when you entered “spinach” into the search, all your images on your CDs would automatically be listed. Wouldn’t that be cool?

Of course, maybe I missed something really basic. Maybe F-Spot or Picasa already do this and I just wasted a bunch of time. I really hope so, because that would be great! But I’m afraid probably not. Which means I need to write another piece of software, or patch F-Spot, which might not be a bad idea.

Like Isak said in his post, I sound ungrateful too. I should write a patch. Hopefully I will. Soon.

Sometimes I’ll take fairly random screenshots on my computer. Here’s my latest selection:

A Job Advertisment on The Daily WTF. A little ironic, in my opinion.

When Batteries Die:

taj@moria:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/info|grep mAh|head -n2
design capacity: 6000 mAh
last full capacity: 65157 mAh


taj@moria:~$ cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT0/state|grep m[AV]
remaining capacity: 65157 mAh
present voltage: 12600 mV


That’s on a Intel Pentium 4 2GHz processor w/ 1GB of memory. Nice. (If you can’t read it, Firefox is using 93.4% of my CPU and 12.2% of my RAM)

GMail shows the weirdest “related content” sometimes…

On a side note, I’ve finally gotten a Flickr Account. It’s got some of my favourite photos from 2006. Who knows, there might be one of you there. Actually not, because “you” don’t read this.

Oh, and I’ve lost 7 keys of my laptop keyboard now. 1 Ctrl, 1 Alt, 4 Arrow Keys, and End. A new keyboard (if you can find it) costs at least $100. I’ll suffer.

Yay, Fireworks last night to ring in 2007! It was a lot of fun and fairly uneventful except for the launching platform burning up and 2 fireworks falling on their sides and going off pointing right at us. Pictures (click to enlarge, of course):

Purple Rain Tipped Over	This thing spun around, launched itself into the air and came down right next to our Seed Drying Facility
Mortar-Style Shells Explode and Light up the Entire Sky

Special Burning Paper–After it burns almost to the end it will lift off, fly to the ceiling, and float back down. (More New Years Entertainment)

Year in Review: No. You don’t care and I don’t either. However, I will say this: All 3 fiddle camps I went to this year (Mt Shasta Camp, and O’Connor Camp, and Booher Camp) all totally rocked. I learned so much, but I also got to be with friends for an extended period of time. I swear, those two weeks of O’Connor and Booher camp were the best 2 weeks of my life. Two whole weeks of just being with friends–learning, jamming, eating, playing games, talking, staying up until 2AM–it was the best.

The rest of the year was good too–I got my GED, my learners permit, took Drivers Ed, learned a lot, spent too much time on the computer, the usual, you know. I’m way too tired (and sick too :-() to post anything longer, but I’d hate to not post anything at all on New Years. (Brian: It’s your fault I posted this, hope you enjoy it :-))

Onto 2007!