F-Spot to Shotwell

digitaleagle Photo Management, Uncategorized 3 Comments

I still haven’t upgraded to Ubuntu 10.10 yet.  I have been procrastinating, but I have been reading about the new Shotwell.  Since I have been having issues with uploading to Facebook directly from F-Spot, I thought I would give it a shot.

To, upgrade, I basically followed the directions on the Shotwell website.  It is important to use the ppa:yorba/ppa repository because that will give you the new 0.7 version with the import from F-Spot tool.

First, I was excited to see that the Facebook upload worked with no problems.  Now, it time to get our vacation pictures uploaded!

I did notice that the tag features were not near as robust in Shotwell.  I didn’t see Event tags, People tags, etc.  Most importantly, I missed the feature of F-Spot where I could drag and drop tags to search on multiple tags.   F-Spot’s searching features far surpassed Shotwell’s.

That is just a first impression.  I need to spend some more time with it to get a better feel.

Shutter Upgraded

digitaleagle Shutter, Uncategorized 1 Comment

I have been using Shutter a lot recently.  It is a great tool for sending screenshots — a picture is worth a thousand words!

This post is a little old, but it had a lot of great information in it.  After seeing it and looking on the Shutter website, I thought I should write another post on Shutter.

 

I just checked, and I have version 0.85.1 installed.  I just have the version installed from the 10.04 repository.  On 9/12/2010, they released version 0.86.4 according to this post.

So, I decided to try to upgrade.  The website has a nice instruction page to show you how.

Basically, I just ran the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:shutter/ppa
sudo apt-get update

Then, update manager popped up and offered to update Shutter.

Here are the new features or changes that this gives me:

 

The coolest part is that I learned that I can drag a screenshot from shutter and drop it into GMail.  Before, I would have to copy the filename, and then I would have to insert an image in GMail, browse, and paste the path in the browse dialog.

 

Worship Software

digitaleagle Church Software, Ubuntu, Uncategorized, Virtualization 3 Comments

I am working on coming up with an option for our church to run for their services.  We are currently using MediaShout on a Windows Laptop, but I want to try to migrate to Linux.

I thought about using Wine, but that idea doesn’t bode well with their Garbage Rating.  Another option is to run a Virtualized Machine.  VMWare has a converter that we could possibly use to move everything from the laptop to a virtual.  This post shows how to use that with Virtual Box too.  The only thing I am not sure of is about using multiple screens with it.

I found forum post with a list of other software.  AlternativeTo echos these suggestions:

I looked into OpenSong some.  One problem is that they don’t have a x64 version.  This post might have one.   Their page says it is written in RealBasic.

Lyricue was actually in the Ubuntu Repository, and I was able to install it easily.  I was able to install it, but I haven’t played with it at all.  From launchpad, it looks like it is written in C.  When I started it, it ask for a MySQL login, so it must use MySQL database.

The OpenLP looks pretty good, too.  They have a PPA archive that I could install.  I see it is written in Python and QT4.

Then, I found another option that isn’t as well publicised: ChangingSong.  It looks like it is written in Python.

Here is another called “Church Presentations“.  It is written in Java, which sounds cool to me.  They don’t have any released files though.

Here is the rest of my search on SourceForge:

Explorations in Ubuntu Unity Desktop Environment

digitaleagle Great Links, Interesting Articles, Software to Watch, Ubuntu, Uncategorized 1 Comment

I finally got my desktop in my living room working, and I thought I would try the Unity Desktop on it.  Here is a nice little article that gives you some information about it:

First Look at the Ubuntu Unity Desktop Environment

My computer is rather old, and I mistakenly thought it would be a good fit.  These descriptions threw me off: “Ubuntu Light”, “simpler Unity desktop”, and “stripped down Ubuntu”.  What I found instead is that the Light and simpler interface is designed to make it easier to work with in smaller screen environments, not necessarily light on the hardware.

Unity uses the Mutter Window Manager, which is a compositing Window Manager.  According to this article, the name comes from combining Metacity and Clutter together.  This article mentions the hardware issue: “Interesting as the new directions may be, some people fear that Mutter will not run on older hardware.”  I agree with the reasoning: “Almost any desktop or standard laptop built within the last 5 years has sufficiently good graphics.”, but that just means that it isn’t what I originally thought it was.

Now, Clutter caught my attention on a totally different angle.  “Creating fast, compelling, portable, and dynamic graphical user interfaces” sounds great to me.  Unfortunately, I didn’t see Java bindings.  On the wiki page, I only see Python, Perl, C#, C++, Vala, and Ruby.  The javascript option looked pretty interesting also.  I may have to do some experimentation with Seed.  For Java support, I found some references to jClutter, and I found someone else working on something.

Concatenating PDFs

digitaleagle Great Links, How To, Interesting Articles, Uncategorized Leave a comment

I found a great article to help me with creating the newsletter for our Sparks/AWANA club this month:

Easy way to concatenate PDF files in Ubuntu Linux

First, I had to trim off the last page of the newsletter.  I opened the PDF in Evince and printed it to a file, PDF format, pages 1-3 (not page 4).  That gave me a PDF with just the first 3 pages.

Next, I opened the orginal PDF with Gimp and imported only page 4.  That gave me a graphic of the last page, and I saved that as a PNG file.  Then, I created a new Open Office Drawing and inserted that PNG file as the background in the drawing.  (The last page of the newsletter is just an outline for you to add your own club-specific content.)  I added the news items for a our club and saved the last page as a PDF.

Finally, I used this command to build the final PDF:

gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=Oct-Complete.pdf Oct-Part.pdf Oct.pdf

That was it!  Please comment if you know better ways to do this sort of thing.

Bug: cdda2wav required by Brasero

digitaleagle Troubleshooting, Ubuntu, Uncategorized Leave a comment

I tried to copy a music CD this evening and got this error message:

Please install the following manually and try again:
cdda2wav (application)
cdda2wav (application)

I installed cdrao first, and it still gave me the same message.  Then, I installed icedax.  I restarted Brasero, and it worked fine.

Resources

Resources for Grub/Lilo

digitaleagle Great Links, Troubleshooting, Uncategorized Leave a comment

I have been trying to solve a problem with Ubuntu booting on one of my machines.  So, I have found these links helpful:

These instructions were very handy for mounting an already installed system from a LiveCD:

sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/boot
sudo mount -o bind /dev /mnt/dev
sudo mount -t proc none /mnt/proc

Then, to be able to get Internet from the system, I had to copy my resolv.conf into it:

sudo cp /etc/resolve.conf /mnt/etc

Then, to work on the system, I ran:

sudo chroot /mnt /bin/bash

And, then, I can run commands like:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install lilo

Here are some more Lilo links:

I still haven’t solved my problem with all of these links, so here is my forum post if you know of anything that I am missing:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=9885240#post9885240

Where is the Priority Inbox on Android?

digitaleagle Google Phone, Interesting Articles, Uncategorized Leave a comment

I came across this article the other day:

Engadget: Gmail for Android updated, becomes Market app

The new feature they were talking about was the priority Inbox.  I am all for new features and I thought I would give it a shot.  But, I couldn’t find it in the market!

I searched for the App on AndroLib, but I didn’t see it there.  Then, I searched on AndroidZoom and found it.  In fact, AndroidZoom has a nice list of all the applications that Google puts out.

I tried to scan the QR Code found on the download page.  This is the error message I got:

There are no matches in Android Market for the search: pname: com.google.android.gm

And, I think I finally found the problem on the official blog.  The application requires Froyo!  Here is the quote:

The Gmail update requires Froyo (Android version 2.2), so it’s available if you have a Nexus One, HTC EVO, Motorola Droid 2 or Motorola Droid. (Not sure if your device is running Android version 2.2? Check here.)

Software to Watch: Memoranda

digitaleagle Great Links, Software to Watch, Uncategorized Leave a comment

I came across this tool from SourceForge recently: Memoranda.  It is a great tool for managing information relating to a project.  It seems to work pretty good, although, I would prefer to keep my notes with my time tracking tool.

The feature I was looking for was the ability to paste screenshots into my notes.  Unfortunately, Memoranda did not allow screenshots in the notes.  So, I will have to find another example for that.

Great Link: ReQall

digitaleagle Great Links, Uncategorized Leave a comment

While catching up on my feeds in Google Reader, I came across Jake’s post about capturing ideas on the go.  In the comments, Stephen Cross pointed out a service called ReQall.  I wanted to remember this service, but at this point, I can’t keep track of the ideas I do remember.  What is the point in capturing a bunch of ideas that you can’t act on or implement?

Anyway, I still thought this website was worthy of comment in case one day I get my organization together and can process this many things.