May 10 2022 BASH, Firefox Snap, Star tracker, digiKam, Bokeh

Our second attempt at a hybrid meeting was less successful than our first with problems with both video and audio.

Darren had been exploring Bash and in particular the various options for using brackets; there is a good article on Linux.com exploring the various options.

Brian shared a problem with Firefox which comes as a Snap but is incredibly slow in Ubuntu 22.04. He had discovered from Jupiter Broadcasting that installing the Flatpak version solved the problem but he had to remove the Snap version which otherwise opened when he clicked on a link.

John commented that openSUSE still provides Firefox as an RPM but, for the most recent updates, you need to add the Mozilla repository rather than rely on the default repository.

Bernie shared a video of the star tracker demonstrating the controls enabling a camera to follow the path of a star.

John shared the recent expansion of the Todmorden Makery since the re-opening last year of Todmorden College as a community interest organisation.

Darren has a couple of assignments to finish to complete his Open University BSc; one is a progress report on his project to develop a way of determining whether two folders are identical or similar; the other is an end-of-unit assignment comparing two image recognition systems using AI to identify images of animals to determine whether one is better than the other.

Bernie has been getting more involved in photography using GIMP among other things and John suggested he have a look at digiKam/showFoto which is very good at doing standard things for people who do not understand the technicalities but also allows people who do to adjust things to their needs.

DigiKam does the downloading from a camera or smartphone, allowing you through its Settings to download raw images while showFoto handles the editing.

John highlighted Colour->Auto-correction which offers five simple options, one of which is often enough to restore a faded image, Enhance>Local contrast which is very good for restoring faded text and the various options under Transform: Aspect Ratio Crop, which offers a variety of fixed aspect ratios, Free rotation which allows you to shift an image back to vertical, Perspective adjustment, which allows you to manipulate all the dimensions of the image, and Resize, which John finds particularly helpful because you can set the resolution at the same time; so he can create a 96px copy of an image for a website and a 300px copy for a newsletter.

The main feature of GIMP which he uses is Clone which is very useful for removing blemishes from older images because you can clone the background from a clean area of the image to remove the blemishes.

He mentioned David’s legendary presentation on Digital Photography which he had found very helpful.

Bernie mentioned that he had come across the concept of Bokeh, or how a lens blurs out-of-focus parts of the image which can vary from lens to lens and produce better or less good results.

Finally, Bernie shared some recent videos of the hedgehogs engaging in what he has discovered are courtship rituals.

Past Meetings