February 2014 Archives

February 26, 2014 @ 20:41 EST

Before the dance

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Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Photos

February 26, 2014 @ 20:14 EST

Yo, 'Sup?

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Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Photos

February 26, 2014 @ 20:04 EST

Shockwave

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Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Photos

February 24, 2014 @ 23:17 EST

Artistic Insecurity

All throughout the weekend, folks were asking me if I was "getting many good shots." I'd answer "I sure hope so," and genuinely mean it, as I really have no idea. Even the ones I could swear I totally nailed often turn out to be badly out of focus or something equally ruinous.

This weekend was no exception; if anything I felt that things were worse than usual -- And also typically, so far things have turned out not only better than expected, but there have been more than a dozen "damn, I took that?" images so far (and only half a dozen duds) out of the first eighty I've gone through.

Maybe I really do have some fraction of the talent that others keep claiming I possess? I really have no idea. I just try to capture what I see, and sometimes succeed.

...Expect lots of images to be posted over the coming days.


Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Life and other BS

February 24, 2014 @ 22:34 EST

Cleansing Souls

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Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Photos

February 24, 2014 @ 21:17 EST

...oops

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Lens hood wasn't locked properly, and it slipped straight down.

Ironically it was my attempt to save it that caused it to hit the running board/rail of the truck rather than the grass I had parked on.

Time to find out what Tokina's repair service is like...


Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Photos

February 07, 2014 @ 22:54 EST

Data Retention Policy

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Tonight I disposed of a couple of defective hard drives. I'd have personally preferred to put a a couple of large bullet holes through them instead, but for some reason ranges frown on such things.


Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Photos

February 07, 2014 @ 10:00 EST

Yet more Dyesub printer hacking

Over the past month, there's been a push to get the Gutenprint codebase in shape for the long-overdue 5.2.10 release. This will be the first release incorporating the various CUPS backends I've written plus an expanded supported printer list.

This has resulted in a flury of bugfixes and improvements to the backends, including:

  • Support for multi-page print jobs
  • Sony UP-DR200 support
  • Canon SELPHY CP790 support
  • Vastly improved error detection and recovery for all Canon SELPHY models.
  • Printjob pipelining support for the DNP DS40/DS80
  • Support for the Citizen CX/CX-W/CY printers

The Citizen printer support deserves its own set of comments. It turns out that the DNP DS40/DS80/DSRX1 models are just rebadged Citizen CX/CX-W/CY models (down to the same USB IDs!) and they all use an indentical command language.

There are more Citizen models (CW-01, CW-02, OP900, OP900II) that have been rebadged by others too, and every single one of these supposedly supports the same command language as the CX/CX-W family. Most notably, Mitsubishi's CP3800 appears to be a rebadged CX-W.

I like it when things JustWork(tm)! Unfortunately, since I don't know the USB IDs for that second list of printers, I can't add them to the backend match list.

My interest in adding more printers to Gutenprint for the sake of it has waned somewhat, for several reasons -- First, my personal and professional printing needs are now well-met. Second, I have less free time to devote to such things. And finally, the norm for these dye-sublimation photo printers seems to be to require an intelligent backend, and I can't begin to write one without access to the particular printer.

The Mitsubishi CP3800, CP9550, and CP3020 series haven't been tested. The CP-D70/D707/K60 models are known to need a backend (and it's written!) but my original tester disappeared. (I've also started reverse-engineering the CP9600 spool file format, but that's on hold until after tax season..)

The Kodak 9810 and 8500 (itself a rebadged CP3020) also remain untested.

So, if anyone out there has access to one of these printers and is interested in helping improve their Linux support, speak up!

Similarly, if there's some other dye-sublimation photo printer you'd like to see working under Linux, we can probably help each other out. The recent Citizen/DNP and Shinko/Sinfonia additions/suppport were the result of such collaborations.


Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Free Software

February 07, 2014 @ 09:07 EST

A little Photo Organizer love

The software that powers my photo archive (aptly named Photo Organizer) hasn't seen much attention in the past few years or so. That's mostly because it does what I need with little fuss, and the other users either don't exist any more or are satisfied with what it is.

The other reason it hasn't seen much attention is that there's so much tecnhical debt in that codebase that all of the substantial feaures I have on my eventual to-do list require some major plumbing work.

So, the result is that in the past three or so years, development's slowed to a trickle of bugfixes. The notable exceptions are addition of a few more esoteric image formats, and updating the default themes to take advantage of now-common CSS3 constructs. Not exactly earth-shattering!

Last night, I finally sat down and added a major new feature, a (read-only) JSON-RPC interface that exposes the same sorts of information as the RSS feed generator.

My primary goal is to enable gnome-photos to directly interface with Photo Organizer, but this JSON-RPC interface will enable many more things. Unfortunately the data exported through the RPC API is far from complete, but I only see that improving as I figure out what to do with this thing.


Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Free Software