An alternative to lens flare correction

If your lens tends to create monochromatic spherical flares, one of mine does, then you can get rid of the flare by selecting it, going to levels, selecting the color channel (blue in my case) and fiddle a bit with the middle slider.
That can help you sort out the flare without an issue.

Lens flare correction with gimp

Got a photo that has flare?

It can be corrected with gimp. Check out this article. I am copying the text here so it wont dissappear if the post goes away.

After purchasing a glorious new Nikon D40X Digital SLR Camera online today, I was inspired to fix up a couple images.

So, I was trying to get rid of the obvious flaw in the following picture, and I found a pretty easy way to do it with GIMP.

Now, I’m no expert at GIMP or anything, but all I did was select the region in question using the lasso, like so:

Then, I used the Colors -> Components -> Channel Mixer tool to bend it to my will (make sure you grow your selection to encompass the whole flare using the Select -> Grow tool):

Notice how in the preview window the blemish isn’t visible?  That’s what you want.  Now, hit OK.

So, now all we have is a little bit of a color/contrast issue.  Let’s fix that up with the Colors -> Color Balance tool:

Now, if you look closely, you can still see just a tiny bit of brightness, but that’s alright with me – it’s much better than the blue crap.  Here’s the end result:

And there you have it: how to remove those annoying lens flares with GIMP.

Regular expression development

A nice tool proposed by Mark Papadakis

https://regex101.com

Getting webex to run on linux

It can mess up your system, so why not use docker instead?


Get this image
url: https://hub.docker.com/r/dnk8n/docker-webex/
command: docker pull dnk8n/docker-webex


close all running firefox instances

start image

sudo docker run -it \
    --env DISPLAY=unix$DISPLAY \
    --privileged \
    --name=docker-webex \
    --volume /dev/snd:/dev/snd \
    --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    dnk8n/docker-webex:latest $1


if firefox is already open and you want to maintain your existing session

sudo docker run -it \
    --env DISPLAY=unix$DISPLAY \
    --privileged \
    --name=docker-webex \
    --volume /dev/snd:/dev/snd \
    --volume /tmp/.X11-unix:/tmp/.X11-unix \
    dnk8n/docker-webex:latest $1 \
    /usr/bin/firefox go.webex.com --no-remote

make sure there is no whitespace after \ otherwise the multiline commands wont work

The last unicorn, by Peter S Beagle

A nice book with a rather poetic style and multiple references to the power of the stories.
Recommended

Finetuning an adafruit pir sensor

These sensors are a bit tricky to calibrate, so this web site is quite handy http://arduinobasics.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/pir-sensor-part-2.html

Weaverley by sir Walter Scott

Just finished the first novel of Scott, with the title Weaverley.
It is one of the classic books of Scottish literature and narrates the story of an English gentleman of the name Weaverley, that serves as an officer in the English army during the Jacobite civil war.

Apart from the very long editorial, which may or may not exist in different versions of the book, and the somewhat flowery style of sir Scott, the book is captivating. It is describing the social structure in the scottish highlands during the civil war and also describes how the war itself affected the future generations of Scotland.

Overall a very interesting reading to anyone who is interested in understanding the complicated history of Scotland.