Grid Wars 2
Sometimes it’s nice to kick it and play a few simple games. I was trying to do that earlier today and realized i don’t have anything worth playing on this Ubuntu machine. After a bit of Googling, I’ve stumbled upon a rather addicting game that you can download absolutely free. It’s called Grid Wars 2, check it out and download it.
Ubuntu 8.04
The update destroyed my computer. Broke my networking, nfs shares, display drivers and configuration, and a boat load of other things i don’t have time to fix. Looks like it’s time for a fresh install. Good luck if you’re about to make the move, hopefully it goes better for you then it did for me. Technorati Profile.
Ubuntu HDR Tutorial
HDR or High Dynamic Range photos are a great way of making something look twice as good as it really is. The camera part is easy, you basically need to take at least 3 (or more) photos with different exposure settings. You want to get both the dark and light aspects of the image, so try doing a show with an exposure of -2, then a 0, then a 2. You can mess around with this until you find a setting you like best. Keep in mind you have to keep the camera as still as possible, as the 3 images are going to be blended together to form the HDR image. So basically this is useless without a tri-pod and a fairly still scene.
Once you have captured the photos get on your ubuntu computer and open up a terminal and type:
sudo apt-get install qtpfsgui
Once installed, you should be able to click the Ubuntu logo in the top left corner, go to the Graphics menu and then click on Qtpfsgui. Once the program opens, you can select the images you took at different exposure settings, and then create your HDR image. Qtpfsgui is a very agile program with many different options, so after a little experimenting you should have no problem making HDR images to suit your needs.
Here’s an HDR image i made, notice the accented sky and colors.
Website Screenshot Generation in Linux
I’ve been looking for an easy way to generate thumbnail screen shots of web pages on the fly. This could have several interesting implementations, such as showing users a screen shot of the page they are going to, dynamically generating images for your site, etc, etc. This has actually become a popular service across, the internet. Either way the point i’m getting at is why not do it yourself. The best one i have found and implemented has been Webthumb, just a few dependencies and really quick setup.
Internet Explorer in Linux
Most web designers know, a site is worthless if it only works in Firefox. As nice as it would be to have a Firefox only internet, the reality of the matter is your site needs to look nice across all browsers. For most, this isn’t a problem, but for us Windows-Free folk, this is kind of an issue. Luckily for us, the nice people over at IEs4Linux have made it extremely easy to install Internet Explorer 5, 5.5, and 6 in your Linux environment. So here we go, the guide to get and install IEs4Linux. Easy as 1-2-3. The only prerequisites are cabextract and Wine (easily installable and configurable in all Linux environments).
Installing fonts in Ubuntu
If you ever need to install a font in Ubuntu, now you’ll know how:
1. For User
If ~/.fonts directory doesn’t exist, create it:
# mkdir ~/.fonts
Copy the font from the command line into the fonts directory
# cp [font-file] ~/.fonts
Run the following from the command line:
# fc-cache -f -v ~/.fonts
2. Install Font System Wide
Make the following directory as root:
# sudo mkdir /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts
Copy the font into the new font directory:
# cp [fonts] /usr/share/fonts/truetype/myfonts
Run the following from the command line:
# fc-cache -f -v