The collected works of duck - Page 3

It's pretty snowy, the pink bike with 23mm tires might not be a clever move

I've been planning on doing something fun at the (disused, no trains stop here anymore--it's just the ones to the paper factory carrying wood) train station so there might be something for when I get some time off work...



No, it's not fisheye. You might note from the image that you can see all four walls, the floor and the ceiling. It's a 360x180 degree panorama stitched from 24 photos in what's called stereographic projection, i.e. the "bottom" is in the middle and the "sky" is in a circle around the corners (you can adjust the centerpoint of course, this one is not fully 360 degrees but IIRC 291 degrees, so you don't see exactly everything but it's just a tiny circle that is outside view that would be stretched out so large that the middle bits wouldn't be visible. Wikipedia can explain it better I'm sure )

The lens I use is a manual-only Samyang 14mm f/2.8 mostly so I won't have to shoot 50+ photos for one panorama and deal with gigapixel results. I recently got a special tripod head that lets you rotate the lens around the "nodal point" or entrance pupil of the lens making parallax errors go away. This helps stitching and gives you the bonus of being able to get really close to things, the bannisters were something like 20cm from the camera in the picture (got pretty cramped trying to stay out of view, I managed to shoot my own feet in the nadir picture[1] )

You could use a fisheye lens to take panoramas like this, and many use 180° lenses to just take five photos and be done with it; but I think you'll end up making yourself a disfavor because of the severe distortion in fisheye lenses losing too much resolution and getting nasty stretching. Perhaps for fancy-pants medium format digital backs.

Appended a panorama I took to demo the tripod head to a friend because of the interest you've shown. I fumbled terribly while doing it, talking more than focusing on doing it right so the top row of photos were too high and I moved the tripod too short a distance which gave gaps in the center... Turned out pretty nice anyway, my friend photshopped the mistakes away

Anyway, I'll stop the insomniac rambling right here

Edit: Lookit illustration! Gosh I need some sleep.

[1] nadir picture is a picture you take straight down after shooting all of the other pictures to be able to mask out the tripod

A venerable old EOS 450D. I'm about to upgrade to a used 50D when the guy who owns it gets his 6D (should be before christmas, yay! )

It's because I was never in front of the lens in any of the 20-odd pictures of the panorama.

It works like this, you mount the camera on a tripod, shoot a picture, rotate the camera horizontally so that a little bit of the previous picture still is in view in the next, all the way around, making them all overlap slightly. This enables the panorama stitching software match up the edges and produce a large image of them all.

Now, I don't have a lens that covers 180 degrees vertically (even in portrait mode) so I have to take several "levels" of also vertically overlapping rows of photos. The software i smart enough to automatically find similarities between the pictures and align them (and even smart enough to handle several projections of the same subject, so even if you've moved the camera it can align the images, so long as parallax shifts do not occur).

So far so good, now there's only the problem of the tripod at the bottom. To fix this you shoot yet one more picture where you remove the tripod and point the camera straight down (though this is not strictly necessary, the software can still project the nadir image at an angle, but too wide and it will distort it and it becomes ugly)

Hugin, the software that I use, can't really automatically find similiarities for the nadir picture and the rest of the panorama (or I haven't managed it yet) so you end up hunting for simliar features to do it manually and this is a bit of a bother (but not too bad if you were smart when placing your tripod).

Xsgi is funny because it runs the root window at 8 bit, but you are able to request truecolor for new windows; see how it supports a long list of visuals--on XFree or Xorg this was to my knowledge always one and the highest depth available, thus pretty much every single FOSS X11-ware thinks that whatever it gets by default (or inherited from the root window) is the highest possible depth, while in reality it could just have requested 30 bit color and got it.

Still, it is nicer with trueocolor desktop backgrounds

My brother was over last night and we talked about panorama shooting, so I made this from the old "torget" photos. You don't *have* to put the centerpoint on the ground...

(NB. I didn't have the camera pointed high enough when shooting this one, so there was an empty circle at the zenith. This was later slapdashically painted in with gimp)

No new panorama this time, I didn't have the time to go out.

Why? Want to try out some panorama software? It's just regular, fairly wide angle, shots. Repeated 8 times around and 3 times vertically. I'll put the torget images somewhere if you really want to, but they're quite big.



Ah yes, stereographic projection is a bit misleading, it was invented first though

Android 4.0 and up has this feature in the built-in camera app, I'm sure there's something for iphone too. 4.0 can only take horizontal panoramas while 4.2 introduced "panosphere" which can do adjacent images up to 360x180. You move the phone around and it makes a badly aligned, low resolution panorama, but I guess it's pretty cool. A neat feature is that Google+ automatically shows a VR viewer for those (yes, somebody figured out it was XMP data, and I've replicated it on my panoramas ). That VR viewer sucks for now though, it seems to do something with an html5 canvas and is distorted and ugly for anything but phone shots (where the quality is so bad you can't tell )

Managed to squeeze in some time for shooting today, unfortunately I rushed things and screwed up (BOTH ISO set to auto and camera in Av mode, I must've been asleep or high on pizza). Looks pretty cool anyway. Gritty.

I hope it's alright to upload all these large images btw

I have a first generation (I think) MSA30 hooked up to my alpha, but it is missing the dust cover and the giant blowers on the back turn it essentially into a vacuum cleaner. Does anyone happen to have this thing? I think it's a simple snap-on bent metal grid type thing.

The array is pretty flaky (several dead ports, slow) so if you're in northern Europe (shipping distance to Ostrobothnia Finland), I would be fine with buying an entire array (potentially without caddies).

Hmm, now these parcel services are interesting, but I assume these only are for the UK? The one package option we have up here is Itella (the rebranded post office, ugh) which is cheap, but they have recently started to refuse sending lithium batteries; ostensibly because they can catch fire, but if you're a contract customer it's fine... Courier services are all hundreds of euros every time I check.

Eh, Athena?-)

It should be possible, pkgsrc patched autotools does this. I have no idea how though, there's a hell of a lot of magic going on there. I mean sparkly rabbits in top hats with doves in sleeves level magic.

Well [censored], that baby went quick.

So a while ago, I was given a Yamaha MDK-585 minidisc player/recorder, and having previously owned a MZ-R91 I gleefully tried to listen to some of my old discs. Unfortunately they'd pretty much all bitrotted into unusability, but some were ok if formatted and re-recorded.

This got me to thinking, could I somehow record stuff off my octane via the optical link? Yes, this works, but it doesn't seem to be able to separate out the tracks when just played from mxaudio (yes yes, so mp3s to ATRAC would be like hammering nails in your ears, fine)

Then I recalled, the Sony gear used to be able to "sync" record from CD or another MD player, and this somehow got the track marks as well as the title and all the song names transferred too. A little digging around on the intarwebs seems to indicate that this might well be the "user" field in an S/PDIF (inherited from AES) stream.

Now, it seems that (Open)AL has some bit fields for this, would I have to write a custom program to transfer song names and track marks or is there some way that say dmplay (or whatever) could manage this?

Thoughts?

Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't root-password on single user mode required only for post 6.5?

Well, I'd expect the audio library to pad the experience slightly, and I know I got it right if the MD gets recorded with a title. Not sure what you mean by using mpg123 or xmms though, neither of those likely support any of the low-level stuff, after all.

A-ha! That sounds promising. The encoding thing is a good point, I haven't a clue, but perhaps there are some standards documents out there (or intrepid hackers). Too busy to quite sit down and do something about this yet, so we'll see if something materializes.

Does the dillo release source actually have a .hg directory in them? In my experience it's common practice to leave version history out of relesed sources which means you don't have one part of the two histories to merge.

Wasn't there a list of capable monitors somewhere? Ah.. http://www.nekochan.net/wiki/Monitors

I have a LG L245W that sort of works, best I could do was to make it get the sync right some of the time. Re-applying the video mode gives you another shot at getting it right... My HP ZR24W does NOT like my Octane, it refuses to see a signal, and I have a sneaking suspicion it requires a valid DDC2 signal.

Hmm, well that's what you get for replying when half-asleep; I misread your post pretty bad it seems. Sorry.

Welcome! Coincidentally, this video was posted today... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mt2swW5JesE

<insert default reference to Ian Mapleson's SGI depot>

I can personally attest that the I2 is a great machine (having owned two purple ones myself), and a nice entry point to sgi hardware. Beware that the 250MHz version of the R4400 has an interesting bug (ISTR someone saying it's because the 250MHz version is essentially factory overclocked and thus is a little quirky) that it will recoverably freeze if left running and only resume when it gets network, keyboard or mouse input. At the time I set up one of my servers to ping the I2 every second so that I wouldn't have to get up and poke it while listening to music...

Clogin doesn't support XDMCP AFAIK. If you disable "visuallogin" in chkconfig, it'll present you with the (ugly) default X11 login screen that should support it (I haven't tried).

These rare odd memory chips, you wouldn't happen to have any (count eight) 256MB FPM SIMMs (32+4 bit, 70ns or less)?
I'm not even sure modules that large were ever manufactured, but it'd be rather fun to see if the AlphaPC would be able to go four times the maximum memory configuration instead of just two..

I used an AHA3950u2w for a while in my AlphaPC164 (no suffix). It wasn't found in SRM so I booted off a 53c810a. I later got a QLA1080 and a 1040, where only the latter is seen in SRM.

desktop(1) states


however, the font size attribute apparently gets written to $HOME/.desktop-<hostname>/Sizes with values of "small, medium and large"

Edit: dug a bit more, I think the app-default is some SGI_DYNAMIC thing, but my quick look hasn't yet found out where they are defined. Cat (and myself) needs food now so I'll look later.

Edit2: D'oh, look back at the sgi screen and I see files named FontPalette.large FontPalette.medium and FontPalette.large in the Base scheme files...

Thus: To change the fonts to fit your ginormous display, either edit (or make your own) scheme in /usr/lib/X11/schemes/ (untested)

This happens because void does not have a size, you can't go (void *)+1 because it won't know how much to increase it by. With gcc, it defaults to char bits IIRC. Not sure how to fix that, perhaps add a char * variable to do the arithmetic and then pass it to data.


You can ignore these, it's those gcc people who think that enum = int

This might work, depending on what they intended with that double cast:

You're welcome, my obsessive compulsion to fix things flared up again

Might be a more proper solution to include sys/time.h ; anything that uses gettimeofday(2) really should do this, so I'm not sure what's going on. Perhaps there are some braindead ifdefs somewhere.

I'll just add here that vim has a Motif GUI... Am I the only vi user here btw? I sense great disturbances from the emacs side of the force.

It's either the wrong iconv (version) or a path problem. The former probably. It might be as simple as symlinking the lib file to the version it expects (though IRIX often uses the ELF version numbers more than other platforms [in my experience] and this might cause problems even if the different versions ABI equivalent)

Weather's warming up, and I got my ass out of the comfy chair... Here's one I'm really happy with! Enjoy.

Ah no, haven't heard of this guy before, but this is no surprise, I'm the last one to hear about just about anything.

I'm surprised at how bad many of the shots were. There are the typical distortion artifacts that you get from twisting a regular panorama in a circle in photoshop instead of using a projection program like Hugin, PTGui or Autopano; stretched bits in the middle distance (Just look at the last one! Uergh!) and pinched centerpoint with radial lines. This guy seems to have done something clever with a nadir shot though because the latter artifact is not there.

Can you tell ducky is not a photochop affecinado?

Thanks, someday I will do a self portrait with scarf, rose and geyser too

Weeelll... It really should have a baked-in rpath for /usr/nekoware/lib. That's where the dependent libraries are installed anyway, and if they aren't THEN LD_LIBRARYx_PATH comes into play, IMHO.

It's got a spinning cube in the corner, I hope

I'm a little confused as to how this happens in the first place, firefox is launched by a shellscript (shellscripts calling shellscripts in fact) and the final one finds out where the firefox libraries live and prepends its own lib path to the appropriate LD_LIBRARY*_PATH, so the bundled sqlite should always be chosen.

Very nice indeed, makes me miss having one

From the postfix manual page:



In seriousness though, postfix has been awesome to configure and use, even for my obscure, small-scale scenario. I love it.

Cheers, fu! I just ordered a 70x70 cm print of that one... Everyone's complaining that my walls are too bare, should be nice.

Edit: Added units for those non-metrically inclined.