I’ve asked Lebara Switzerland about it twice, but they’ve ignored the requests so far. Any idea what to do about this?

• Maximizing windows when moving them might be neat, but why not get rid of the button then and use the screen real estate for something useful?
• Apple wrote the book on usability, but they screwed up when they skipped their own advice and put the minimize, maximize and close buttons right next to each other. That’s fine if closing an app doesn’t actually close the program, but in GNOME it makes absolutely no sense.
• I just added my Minecraft shortcut to the side bar thingie, but some minutes later something went belly-up and not even a Java process was started when clicking on it. After a restart the shortcut was gone from the side bar.
• Keyboard layouts have driven me crazy the last couple days. I can’t type “programmer quotes” (actually, single and double tick) without, for some reason, clicking the compose key once. After that it continues working, and it didn’t seem to realize that I had pressed the compose key at all.
• Where did my freaking weather reports go? Did nobody else use that? There’s not even an option for it anymore.
• Mystery meat navigation was never fun – Why would a sane person want to hide the main menu of each application?
• Grouping applications by function was one of the best things about leaving Windows for Ubuntu 8.04.

Fortunately Ubuntu Classic is still available in the login menu. Yay for real backward compatibility!

Cropping

High resolution is not everything, but it’s a useful substitute for a good zoom lens if you’re going to show the final result in a lower resolution than your camera produces. This is very common, and will probably continue to be common for a while. CCDs quickly surpassed desktop screens in resolution (and are likely to continue that way), and showing a full-screen, full-resolution video without stuttering is more than many desktop computers are able to do today.

Flickr staff recommend 640×480 (SD) or 1280×720 (HD) resolution with 25/30 FPS. Anything else I presume will be resized and slowed/speeded up. Since most digital cameras nowadays have much higher resolutions than these, I’ll base the instructions on 1280×720, 30 FPS, but it should be easy to adapt them if you want.

If you want to have as much surface area as possible for your video, you should crop it to fit the aspect ratio (16:9 for 1280×720). This is easy in GIMP:

1. Open the image
2. Select the crop tool
3. Set fixed aspect ratio 16:9
4. Move and resize the crop field until it fits your purpose. This is where you have the chance to get rid of that random stuff in the corners that you don’t want to leave in the finished movie.
5. Note the crop position (e.g., x=0, y=495) and size (e.g., 4752×2673) in pixels for later.

Resizing

Your images are probably still larger than 1280×720 pixels, so we’ll need to resize them as well. We’ll force the aspect ratio (! below) to avoid any rounding errors which might occur since our image size is most likely not a multiple of 1280×720 pixels.

Do it!

Now make sure you have a backup! Then replace the crop values with your own, using the geometry <width>x<height>+<x position>+<y position>:

mogrify -monitor -crop 4752x2673+0+495 -resize 1280x720! /path/to/*.jpg
mencoder -nosound mf:///path/to/*.jpg -mf w=1280:h=720:type=jpg:fps=30 -ovc lavc -lavcopts vcodec=mpeg4:vbitrate=9000000:mbd=2:keyint=132:v4mv -o time-lapse.avi

Example

1. Connect USB cable
2. sudo apt-get install hplip-gui
3. hp-wificonfig
4. Select network, insert password if necessary
5. Disconnect USB cable

At this point you can connect to your printer via wireless. You may need to set it up separately using hp-setup or System → Administration → Printing. In the latter you can rename or remove the USB connection to avoid confusion with the wireless configuration.

Pepijn de Vos has made a tool to graph materials in Minecraft save games across heights, to see how deep one should mine to find for example diamond. As a propaganda minister Minecraft player with too much time on his hands, this was too cool. I just tweaked it a bit, we both contributed speed improvements, and now it looks like this:

On Ubuntu, you can install it with the following command:
sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib && sudo easy_install mian
… and run it like this:
mian ~/.minecraft/saves/World1

Options include:
-b, --blocks – Specify block types to include as a comma-separated list, using either the block types or hex values from the list.
-l, --list – List available block types.
-n, --nether – Show Nether data instead of the normal world.

For example, run mian -b 01,dirt,09,sand ~/.minecraft/saves/World1 to get a map of the more common elements in the map, with the abrupt cutoff of stationary water showing the sea height:

More information is available in the form of a Git repository (of course it’s open source) and Ohloh project.

Update: Now works with The Nether, included in today’s Halloween Update. To graph The Nether, make sure you visit it first, update mian with sudo easy_install -U mian, then add the parameter -n to your command. For example mian -b 56,57,58,59,5a,5b -n ~/.minecraft/saves/World1 to show all the new materials:

Beta update: mian 0.6 works fine with Minecraft Beta. If you have an older version, simply run sudo easy_install -U mian

Direct motives (possible perpetrators):

• Plain sabotage. They simply don’t like the Iranian leadership (US, Israel, Iranian political group) the idea of an Iranian nuclear plant or nuclear enrichment program (US, Israel, environmentalist group), that particular plant (local interest group), or the nuclear plant administrative or technological leadership (disgruntled workers).
• Creating a new Chernobyl (doomsday sects).

Indirect motives:

• Demonstrate the possibility of disabling a nuclear plant (black/grey hats, environmentalist group).
• Increase tension between Iran and its political opponents (Iran, US, Israel).
• Demonstrate skill, to get hired by a government agency (highly gifted person or small group).
• Discredit Siemens software (competitor companies like Realtek).
• Scare people / governments into supporting more strict Internet legislation (US, UK, Iran).
• Scare governments into investing more in “cyberwar” agencies.
• Harvesting of secret information (US, Israel, any nation that wants nukes).
• Other misdirection: The obvious political motive could be a cover for what is happening in Indonesia or elsewhere.

Based on the following documents:

• Backup WordPress.com Blogs by dandavis.
• Saving the WordPress.com Export File and The Linked Media Files (and wget’s strictness) by Andrew Harvey
• Bash script to export and backup online data

I was recently sending out 28 temp job applications with six attachments each. I printed out the motivation letter for each job and 28 copies of each attachment, so I ended up with seven piles of paper which I then had to mix by hand to make 28 applications. Tedious work, and I could have smacked myself when I realized that it would have been much easier to put all the attachments in a single document, and printing that 28 times: Two piles instead of seven. This is really simple with pdftk – Just start up a shell (In Windows: Start → Run → cmd, in Ubuntu: Applications → Accessories → Terminal), and replace the file names in the following command with your own to produce a new file with all the documents in sequence:
pdftk cv.pdf "reference letter 1.pdf" [and so on] cat output new.pdf.

cat is the magic word: Concatenate all the files before it. pdftk can also do other useful stuff, like rotating pages (if they were scanned the wrong way around), splitting, watermarking, digital signatures and much more (see examples).