Ever try to get the selection box spot on a particular size and having it jump between odd or even numbers when what you really need is the number in the middle? It’s frustrating indeed. I was trying to resize this selection box and needed to get 1346 x 615. I would drag the selection box resize handle on the left and it would keep bouncing between 1345 and 1347 no matter how delicately I moved the mouse.

So, I switched to the right hand selection resize handle and voila – it would increment between even numbers! I tried this out on a few more selections with different images and notice that pretty consistently the left would increment odd numbers and the right would increment even numbers. Try it out and see if you get similar results.

Thanks Steve for asking about how to crop irregular shapes in Gimp. It’s possible, though not intuitive, so I’ll break down the steps.

Let’s open up a test image and click on the Path tool (icon in the Toolbar). It looks like a pen.

Now click around the shape you want to crop. Don’t drag, just click the various points around the shape – a line will automatically connect these points.

When you get to the end of clicking out the path points around your shape, press and hold CTRL and click the first point to “close” it.

Now, we’re cooking because once you close the path you can turn it into a selection. That’s exactly what we need.

From the Menu bar, choose SELECT | From Path. You will now see the familiar dotted moving line around your shape.

Little tricky part here – to remove around your shape, you need to go back up to the Menu bar and choose SELECT | Invert to now select all the stuff around your shape.

Press the Delete key on your keyboard and *bingo* – you’re left with your irregular shaped crop.

Play with the settings on the Select before choosing it to get a “softer” cut line. Also, once you close the path, you can now even use the handles to arc and curve around your shape and really refine things.

Happy cropping~!

Who can wait for spring to go geocaching? Not the furious tick mafia of Jenny and I, that’s for sure~! The only thing missing from this party with the GPS was the WDM po-po and some chatty muggles. So…. that’s how it is now.

First stop. Urban park. Complete with muggles of all ages. We don’t break a sweat. Well, actually we do. Our motis-distractius: Playing soccer with an old chewed up tennis ball we found under the trees. Dodging fido’s “presents” and a few nice body checks, I score goal.

Jen bounces back with a goal of her own. Then, “conveniently” I feed the ball under the tree with the cache container hanging from it and she goes in for the snatch.

We pause to wheeze and catch our breath to sign the log and it’s time for one more run. I score the final goal, making it a 2-1 win. YEEEESSS, I am SPARTACUS~! A quick ripping open of the jacket whirling it overhead in a triumphant jubilee was quickly squashed.

I was promptly placed in Bank Jail for excessive celebration. Yeah, still wondering about the whole “Bank Jail” word association but hey, I still had the ball. And that makes me the winner. So…. that’s how it is now.

With the rush of victory pulsing in our temples, we make our way along Mills Civic to our next cache, code named Leggo Bridge, a regular sized cache along a sprawling human highway. On our approach, within 25 feet of all this iron, where the GPS starts bouncing like crazy, we’re suddenly aware of that tense moment that occurs between two cachers…who’s going left and who’s going right….

To quote that famous philosopher, Sean Connery, “Choose wisely”. I spot it midway under and Jen locates it seconds later. With no muggles in sight, we leisurely sign the log, play with the contents, and pose for photos.

Well, not wanting to be selfish and steal all the good cacher karma for the day – we decide to try just one more. This is one that I’ve tried to find previously on two occasions. And failed. But I know when to bring out the big guns of logic and that’s my pal Jenny.

Approaching this nano, we know it’s a 1/1 that’s magnetic. My GPS is pointing where it always does at this location – along a fence line behind a huge slippery pile of rocks. We looked everywhere along the fence, on the fence, in the rocks. Had to wander around a bit to distract things as there were a bunch of crazy runner muggles in shorts. Freezer burn much? So….. that’s how it is now.

After a bit, Jen’s like “no, no, no, that’s all wrong…it’s a 1/1 so it’s gotta be right off the path….like….um…right here”, she says as she snags it from the yellow fire hydrant. Really. The fire hydrant. Really.

Here’s a blurry close up of this tiny super camo nano. I couldn’t concentrate. Two words – Dahl’s Fried Chicken.

So, having drunk our fill of geo-victory, we return to our everyday lives until the next great adventure beckons. So….that’s how it is. Now.

Now that you’ve got jEdit and Infoviewer working together to use Firefox to preview your web pages or code, it gets tedious quite quickly to go all the way thru the menu’s just to load a page.

So, let’s setup a button on the toolbar in jEdit to launch our preview.

Open jEdit and go to Utilities | Global Options

Select Toolbar from the left menu and then click the Add button at the bottom.

You will now see all the options for this new button. Here is how I have mine setup:

click for fullsize image

Now, when I click the “Internet” or Globe icon, my current page will load in Firefox directly from jEdit!

jEdit is my code editor of choice. I’m running it on Windows 7. Here’s some quick instructions for setting up the preview of your code or web pages to launch Firefox instead of  jEdit’s own internal browser.

First, install the InfoViewer plugin from within jEdit.

Open jEdit choose Plugins | Plugin Options under InfoViewer | Choose Browser check the box “Use internal…”, then tick the box “External Browser”  and set the path below:

c:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe $u

Apply it.

Now, when you want to load the current page/file into Firefox, choose Plugins | InfoViewer | Open current buffer with browser

Let’s walk thru how to use David’s Batch Processor add on for Gimp to batch process images in a snap! We’re going to focus on batch resizing of an entire directory of images but there are a lot of options available in David’s Batch Processor, such as turn, blur, color, resize, crop, sharpen, and rename. It will take some getting used to on all of the fine details under each tab but well worth the learning curve.

You can download and find install/troubleshooting information on David’s Batch Processor here. You can also send David a donation from that page if you want to send the good karma back.

Once you get it all installed, let’s get started! Open Gimp. On the main window menu bar you will go to Filters | Batch Process

Try to reign in your excitement when you see all the options tabs in this window. I’ll never admit to spending many a late nerdy nights trying out the options to “just see what happens”.

Ok, let’s add the directory of files we want to batch resize.  Click the Add Files button.

You can select individual images or the whole range depending on which one’s you want to apply the resizing to. I usually click the top image, hold down the SHIFT button, scroll, and click the last image to select them all. If you want to select just individual images, use CTRL-ALT and click the one’s you want to add.

Once you have them selected, click Add.

So. You clicked Add right. And it looked like nothing happened. You will need to click the Close button to close this window.

You will now see your added files in the list. To resize all the images in the list, click the RESIZE tab.

Again, lots of options. For the purpose of this tutorial we’re going to keep it simple. Resizing can be relative to the input image size or an absolute size. Check the ENABLE button to “turn on” Resizing and  check the box KEEP ASPECT locks the x and y sliders to the same value.  Set the X and Y to .20, this will resize the images to 20% of their original size.

While it’s tempting to click the Start or Test button’s now, WAIT – we haven’t finished our settings! Click the Output tab and in the drop down area, choose JPG. You can modify the settings here as you’d like, increasing the Quality will increase each individual file size but sometimes that’s a good trade off. I went with a medium setting of 75.

Almost there so let’s click on the most confusing tab ever, the Rename tab. You’re just going to have to trust me on this one. If you really want to make yourself crazy, just try and figure out what clicking the Source Dir button does. I’m not going to torture you, so click the Select Dir and choose the same folder where the original images are. I like to add a prefix to my file names so they will be listed together, as you can see here a “t-” will be added to the original filename when it is resized.

Ignore what the path says after “Original:”. Honestly, you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to sort it. This is easily the most frustrating tab as one errant click here will generate a long and hard to understand error message. If I get that error, I usually close the batch processor and try again.

Click Start and the image batch processing will run until it’s complete. You’ve now got a whole set of original files and a whole set of resized images. Well done!

Independence Day Geocaching! A generous dose of sunblock and I hit the streets for some urban caching. A beautiful day so thought I’d tackle an aptly named “Paul Blartt Mallticache”. This one’s a bit upper league for me with a 4 difficulty rating. While closing in to the coordinates I knew right away I was in for quite a hunt. Lots of places for a hide, trees, shrubbery, rocks, and assorted types of muggles. Ducking quickly into the thick of things to have a look around and let the trees camouflage me. No luck finding it so had to move on.

On down to the next one quarter mile up from here. As soon as the proximity alarm on the GPS went off I remarked “really…right here?!” I was in the middle of a parking lot! I think my GPS was getting some interference from the power transformer close to here or there was a solar flare. I reset the GPS and it still pointed in the middle of the lot. Thought, well I’ll have a look around the area – being a holiday there were no muggles anywhere. Could not come up with the find, though now that I’m thinking about it, I’m thinking this one’s a decoy out in plain sight. Will have to try this one again.

Well, not a good start to the day. I was determined to find at least one cache. I hadn’t been geocaching in months. I can’t be that rusty!

Onward and upward. Literally. Quaint little park just a short drive from this cache. Walking in I notice a nice little muggle family playing with their kids. They didn’t pay any attention to me so on I went in search of the two caches in this park. Followed the needle thru a short field and came upon a barrier of intense grass and thicket.

Poked thru only to find a creek just 50 feet  from my destination. Wait a second. I’m an idiot. I had my nose so glued to the GPS I didn’t notice the BRIDGE just around the corner to the left. Tromped my way out of the thicket (well, at least I got the customary leg scratches) and crossed the creek in style. And with dry boots to boot.

Thats. Just. Great. Being vertically challenged I knew I was going to have to use some skill and dexterity to snag this one.

Fortunately nature had left me a step stool – a large trunk lay just off in the bushes. Placed it right under the hole for that 2 foot boost I needed. It was wobbly but I was able to get my hand in there and fetch out the cache.

Giddily grinning now that I’ve taken my DNF streak to task, I marched back to the front of the park to another bridge.

Only problem here was the mosquitos.

A little tip toe stretch and I had it.

Swaggering back to the car I was keen on getting one more before calling it a day. Quick drive to this LPC with muggles everywhere. Sure to be expected: nice day + holiday + cold beer on tap = muggles.

Just as I was walking up to it, a car pulled right into the parking space next to it. Had to make a cell phone call to my favorite nobody to delay the snag. Luckily the “draw” of miller time made this muggle clear out quickly. Nice way to end the holiday with 3 finds in a row and smashing away the DNF blues.

I’m using Lubuntu as my operating system. It uses pcmanfm as the default file system. For most tasks this is ok, but when I want to connect to shares on both windows and other linux pc’s, I have to use Nautilus.

Here’s how I setup a desktop shortcut in Lubuntu:

Open Terminal (on Lubuntu, it’s called LXTerminal, but any terminal will do).

Verify that you have lxshortcut installed by entering this into Terminal (enter your root password when prompted):

sudo apt-get install lxshortcut

Now to create the desktop shortcut, enter this in Terminal:

lxshortcut -o ~/Desktop/nautilus.desktop

A GUI window will pop up and you can enter the details as you like. I wanted a desktop shortcut to launch Nautilus file browser only, so I entered where it says Command:

nautilus --browser --no-desktop

NOTE: Those are double dashes in front

Finish customizing the name and icon for your new shortcut and Save. Now you will have a desktop shortcut to use Nautilus within Lubuntu.

After wrapping up some work near Spirit Lake, I got out the GPS to find a few caches on my long road trip back to Des Moines. This is just a modern day treasure map, ahem, google maps versus Sanskrit cloth.

My favorite find was this one at the end of a swinging rope bridge, aptly named “Swingin’ in Estherville”. The rivers in Iowa are running really high from all the rain we’ve been having and this one was no exception. The river was loud and rumbling as I approached the bridge entrance.

Took a few deep breaths as I moved out to the center of the bridge. True to it’s name, it was swinging… and creaking… and I felt quite uncertain what would happen at any given moment. As if the world was about to drop out from under me. I felt like Indiana Jones. Well, minus the Thugees. And the screaming blonde. “Hang on lady, we going to go for a ride!”

Back to the task at hand – find the TREASURE! Ah, here it is! And I didn’t have to bring a sandbag.

I left the “Big O” travel bug here in sacrifice for all the oh’s and expletives uttered during the crossing of the rope bridge and got out of there before Mola Ram shows up. I forgot to bring my sword.

Took an old computer this weekend and wanted to learn how to setup a file server. This is an easy way to take an old computer, stack in a bunch of hard drives, and turn it into a file share for music or file storage. Also handy for backing up entire hard drives on the systems you use everyday.

Initially, this took many hours and lots of googling for answers. I’ve decided to list the steps below. On the second pc, the entire process only took 45 minutes to setup.

I used a linux distro called CRUNCHBANG (#!) and I chose the lite version – it’s lean and mean linux goodness. Read more…