John Hunter: Teaching with the World Peace Game

Back in 2004 Matteo "Peach" Pescarin did a poster edit of his "Gentoo Abducted" wallpaper.

The poster is portrait format and shows a city in background, instead of countryside, if you look close. He has now re-released its SVG sources.

With these sources the Förderverein Gentoo e.V. is able to offer a limited number of FREE A1 poster prints at LinuxTag Berlin next week. Please drop by to get your copy.

The posters were printed from a 3521x4978 TIFF file, which is A1 plus 1mm overlap everywhere at 150dpi, making a 50MB upload after removal of the alpha channel. Flyeralarm has done a great job on print with regard to all of quality, time, price, and service.

UPDATE : We have run out of posters on the fourth (and last) day of LinuxTag. 100 posters it was.

I recently heard of Eric Brasseur's article Gamma error in picture scaling. The news that many graphics tools including the GIMP hurt certain colors during image scaling was rather surprising to me. I was actually looking a command line tool to that job right out of the box — any recommendations besides ImageMagick/convert or netpbm/pamscale? — but I ended up writing a pygimp-based GIMP plugin yesterday. It does the job and comes with a simple GUI. Compared to core GIMP, the speed is quite disappointing though, probably because of using Python (and an extra layer) but C code.

Once you have the plugin installed

# sudo layman -a betagarden
# sudo emerge -av media-plugins/gimp-imagescaler

you should find an item "Scale Image with correct Gamma..." at the bottom of the "Image" menu.

The code is free software, clean patches are welcome:

• Download 0.5 tarball
• Git repository

In 2006 Marius Morawski did some quality artwork for Gentoo: a logo for Gentoo/FreeBSD and two related wallpapers. His work is licensed under GPL version 2 and available through the Gentoo website finally.

Credits for the non-trivial task of re-shaping the dark skies wallpaper to aspect ratios of 4:3, 5:4 and 8:5 go to Matteo 'Peach' Pescarin.

When saving an image as PNG in GIMP you are facing the choice of checking option save gamma or not. When you check it — according to official GIMP documentation — the gamma value of your display environment is embedded into the PNG file. I was resizing the Gentoo logo, file gblend.png. Checking save gamma on export results in the left (correct) image, leaving it unchecked in the right: too far towards purple.

If you use Firefox or Thunderbird these two images look different. To my recent surprise they look identical in all of GWenview 4.6.2, gthumb 2.12.3 and Thunar 1.2.1. Interestingly, now that I have seen the difference I notice that the logo shown on gentoo-wiki.com does not have correct gamma. See for yourself. I have contacted its operator about it, let's see what happens. I don't really have time to inspect this issue much further. If you do that would be awesome. Please send patches to upstream for me. Thank you!

EDIT : Mike has updated the logo on gentoo-wiki.com by now.

Woody Norris invents amazing things

If I can believe Woody Norris, it is now possible to direct sound much like you direct light with a spotlight.

Before I fully arrived at GNU/Linux I thought that Acrobat Reader would be one of those things that would be hard to miss. As there is a Linux version I would not even have to live without it, but even better: there's quite a few good alternatives that are true free software. At some point I started using KPDF of KDE and moved on to its sucessor Okular at some point. Even after switching from KDE to XFCE I still kept using Okular (besides a few other strong KDE tools: Konversation, Gwenview, KSnapshot, Yakuake, K3b). I have finally added a link to pdfreaders.org to the link section of this blog (on the right, a bit down). When googling for "pdf reader" pdfreaders.org is showing on the first page already, 9th place. It would rock, if we get it to the top and I'm optimistic that one day it will make it. Please link to pdfreaders.org on your site, too. Your link can change something.

Ich bin spät dran, aber das Thema ist trotzdem wichtig. Das Atomkraftwerke mehr als nur ein "Restrisiko" sind, müssen in diesen Tagen in Japan viele Tausend Menschen am eigenen Leib erfahren. Hier bei uns sieht das trotz weniger Erdbebengefahr nicht viel anders aus: Kritiker gehen davon aus, dass zum Beispiel keines unserer Kraftwerke einen Anschlage à la Nine-Eleven überstehen würde. Mich persönlich haben in den vergangenen Tagen hauptsächlich zwei Video-Reportagen wachgerüttelt:

• Risiko Atomkraft
• Quarks & Co: GAU in Japan

Wer noch extra Motivation braucht: Die Band "Wir sind Helden" spielt im Anschluss (siehe Ablauf) live, die kennt sicher der ein oder andere... In Berlin beginnt die eigentliche Demo 11:00 auf dem Potsdamer Platz, losgelaufen wird um 12:00, siehe Ablauf. Ich bin dabei.

Zum Video hier: Geheimer Prüfkatalog - Alle AKW vor dem Aus? Auch das angesprochene geleakte Dokument "Erste Überlegungen zu Konsequenzen Fokushima" findest sich dort zum Download. Ein bisschen Hoffnung habe ich, es könnte funktionieren. Aber das wär schon irgendwie ein Wunder und so naiv kann ich dann offiziell wohl doch nicht sein. Spannend fand ich auch die Landkarte mit den Orten der Atomkraftwerke in Deutschland. Die hab ich mal ausgeschnitten.

Das ARD-Logo rechts oben ist dem Ausschnitt zum Opfer gefallen. Auch hier wieder Dank für den Post von netzpolitik.org.