March2010

Remove borders from image using ImageMagick convert

The easiest way to crop a border from an image is to rotate the image as you chop. It’s pretty much the same way you would cut a border from a piece of paper using a pair of scissors unless you were ambidextrous and even then wouldn’t it be faster to just rotate the picture rather than changing scissor hands.

YouTube: How to skip ahead to any part of a video

You can skip to the closest key frame in a youtube video by supplying the time you wish to jump to as part of the URL. This is quite handy for sending someone a video where you want them to see a specific part. Instead of sending a link and saying jump ahead to 3 minutes and 14 seconds, you can just send them a link that does it for them.

Battlefield Bad Company 2 Multiplayer Patches

The Battlefield Bad Company 2 servers were offline while the patches were implemented. Numerous multiplayer issues were addressed along with a few single player campaign not worth mentioning. While their servers were down, EA was directing everyone to check a twitter feed for the latest news.

Google Picasa on Fedora and Ubuntu Linux

Google Picasa is available as an rpm and deb for Linux. You can get it from google package repository if you already have that installed, but the latest version doesn’t appear to be available from there just yet. This app is run under a self contained wine installation.

Create panoramic images from regular photos with Hugin

Hugin is the GUI frontend for a bunch of image tools that allow you to stitch together multiple pictures with overlapping scenes to create a single panoramic images. The images don’t have to be the exact same color or from the same perspective. The image tools will manipulate the pictures in an attempt to smoothly blend everything into a single scene. You can create different kinds of stitched together images such as 360 degree fish eye and super wide angle views.

Cinepaint for photo editing in Linux

Cinepaint feels intuitive and relatively easy to use given the awesome manipulative power you have at your fingertips. If it seems familiar to you, that might be because it’s a fork of GIMP 1.0.4. Although it’s intended audience is video editors, you can use it for anything from gif, jpg, and tiff to cineon, hdr, xwd, xcf, and a long list of other formats. Cinepaint is for editing and touching up individual frames, not working with video files directly.

Pay off the credit card with the highest interest rate first

Pay off the credit card with the highest interest rate first. Ignore the balance when determining which account to pay off. What ever your situation may be, consult a financial expert to you and your particular financial situation. The goal is all the same, pay off your debt.