Finaly - somthing for the hole in the desk

This is pretty cool ...

http://www.engadget.com/2007/03/30/belkins-usb-ipod-hubs-neatly-plug-excess-desk-holes/

Rotating video with mencoder

This is something that has been bugging me ever since I got a digital camera that could do video - how do you rotate a "portrait" video back to "landscape". Recently a friend asked me to do this for something important - a video she took for "The children's wish foundation" so I looked a little more. I finaly found how to do it with mencoder at Scott Hanselman's site.

He even goes into describing the flags for the tool - which is always good. As well, to make things cleaner, how to get the aspect ratio back to 4:3. I now have a few videos to rotate.

Taking single shot panorama

During my trip to Italy, I took a bunch of cool photos. As has happened before, I felt it did not quite the feeling of being there. So I have been looking at ways to may 360 degree pictures with a single shot. I found Panoramic Photography with Fisheye Lenses which tells you how to take a 180 fisheye picture and turn it into a cilidrical panorama. I have also tried doing the same using The Gimp and a metalic sphere, the bigest problem being taking a picture without the camera taking over the entire view - that and I need to polish it.

I'll post photo's once I figure it out.

Making RPMs

I got the January issue of linux Format - I was a fan of the Amiga Format ages ago - and they have a timely piece on creating RPMS. Now the article is the kickstart I needed to get things going. Of course I tried and failed - since I did not try and create the same package as they did.

I'm trying to get the tcptrace utility in an RPM for fedora. I picked this because I use it, it is a simple package - the old clasic : configure , make, make install. It creates a single binary with no config files that gets copied into the /usr/bin directory. So I figured this would be simple !! no dice yet.

For one - I get compile warnings - this is not bad in itself (the author redefines memcpy for some reason) - jsut not clean, and I have noticed that the example they use places things in the proper directories ( bin ) as it builds. So the automated items work - for me they don't. So I have got to dig a little more.