October 11 2022 VeraCrypt, MongoDB, GIMP, Inkscape

Brian shared the collaborative tool Figma which Adobe have acquired; it is aimed at improving the user interface and user experience.

He also shared Cloudflare Turnstile which is intended as a free replacement for CAPTCHA.

He then did a demo of VeraCrypt showing how you could create standard and hidden partitions, determining their encryption method, whether they would be accessible through a password or a keyfile, the file format and finally the platform on which they would be mounting. During the creation process, you can create randomness in the encryption by moving the cursor around.

Michael mentioned Oracle Cloud’s 20+ Always free offering.

John made the 14th birthday presentation which had been held over from last month.

Darren has started a new OU course in data management and analysis in which they will be comparing SQL and MongoDB which uses JSON schema; John commented that, when he had been studying databases in the 1980s, there were three types of database: flat file, hierarchical and relational (i.e. SQL). SQL had won out but there are some types of search which are not easy to do in SQL because of its columnar design; hence the development of NoSQL databases like MongoDB.

Bernard gave a GIMP demo, noting that, while GIMP does not import raw files, for example, DNG files, if you install Raw Therapee, GIMP treats it as a plugin; you open the file in Raw Therapee and then GIMP takes over.

Using a relatively fuzzy, low lit photograph, he first demonstrated rotating and cropping the image, then adjusting the levels and the saturation of the image. Then he opened another photograph as a layer, not as a separate image, masked the unwanted area and, in layer mode, darkened the image to make the area he wanted to show up. He mentioned dodge and burn as an implementation of an old technique for manipulating the lightness/darkness of areas of a photograph by masking an area of a photograph from or exposing it to light. He then merged the two images in layer mode asking for the darker parts of each image to dominate in the final result and finished by demonstrating heal and sharpen, the latter using a mask.

This led on to mentions of Blender and Inkscape’s ability to convert JPGs to SVGs.

John explained that this only works with relatively simple images because a photograph such as Bernard had just used would generate far too many points and be far too hard to work with. He had used it primarily for things like logos because, once they have been converted to SVG, they can be scaled to any size.

Another use of Inkscape is to detect and replicate colours in images. Clicking on a colour in any image in Inkscape would give you a reading of its RGB and CMYK values in Fill and stroke allowing you to use those in another application.

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