kontrawize

Linux Display Scaling (NVIDIA)

My laptop has a 1280x800 screen, and few data projectors handle this widescreen format. Normally I have to reduce the resolution to 1024x768 for presentations. With openSUSE Linux and the GNOME desktop (my setup), the default is that the 1024x768 screen is stretched to fill with 1280x800 screen, which just looks wrong. I would much prefer to just have black bars around a screen in the actual size, without the stretching.

I use NVIDIA's display driver on my laptop (not the default openSUSE display driver), because only the NVIDIA driver lets me have two screens to that I can drive a data projector. Today I noticed that there is an “NVIDIA X Server Settings” application on my laptop (presumably it was installed with the NVIDIA driver). It's easy for things like this to get installed without your realising. Anyway, this NVIDIA configuration application allows you to choose one of 3 display scaling settings:

• stretch to fill screen;

• keep at original size (surrounded by black borders);

• stretch but keep the aspect ratio the same.

At the moment, I've chosen this last setting. I don't mind if the screen is scaled up, as long as it isn't stretched to an inappropriate aspect ratio.

It makes me wonder how many other things there are that I want to do, but haven't been able to do simply because I haven't yet stumbled across some configuration application.

How Not To Do Slow Flash Sync

One of my favourite SLR features is  slow flash sync, where the camera uses a slower shutter speed (longer opening time) than would otherwise be required when using a flash. The flash illuminates and freezes the things nearer to the camera, while the longer shutter opening time allows the camera's sensor to get enough light from things further from the camera that they don't end up too dark in the final photo.

This is not a tutorial, however, it's a  tale of woe. I took my current digital SLR (Fujifilm S3 Pro) and my flash (Nikon SB-800) to a family wedding recently, with the hope of taking some nice shots for posterity. The rooms in which the weddings (it was in Germany, where there can be two ceremonies, one civil and one religious) and reception took place were sufficiently large that I wanted to use slow flash sync so that the photos didn't have dark backgrounds. I used to do this a lot with my film SLR (Nikon F-601), and it worked out pretty well most of the time.

Now, the reason you use a flash is because there isn't enough light for a normal photo. If you tried to use the available light, the exposure would take so long that the photo would be blurred (either from the camera shaking slightly in your own hands, or from your subjects moving around). With a slow flash sync, you are relying on the flash freezing the things near the camera so that they aren't blurred. It doesn't matter if the things in the background are a little blurred.

What I  didn't notice until later in the evening at the reception was that there was more ambient light that I expected, so the flash wasn't strong enough (in comparison to the ambient light) to freeze the people near the camera. I should have paid more attention to the shutter speed, to make sure that it wasn't too far beyond the  maximum for hand-held shots. The rule of thumb is 1/focal-length for 35mm SLRs, e.g. 1/35 of a second for a 35mm lens. For a typical digital camera (with a sensor smaller than 35mm), I expect you should divide that time by a further 1.5 to 2, i.e. 1/50 to 1/70 second in this case. So for a shot with the zoom set at 35mm, I should have checked that the shutter speed wasn't too much greater than 1/50 second (e.g. maybe 1/30).

With the  small screen on the back of the camera, I didn't notice the blurring (I should have zoomed in to check it properly, but I didn't, I was too busy taking the next photo). Only later in the evening did I notice, at which point I stopped using slow flash sync, and just used normal flash sync. It's a great pity, because a lot of otherwise nicely composed photos ended up  blurred and useless. I took over 300 photos, so I had a lot of examples of my mistake to remind me of what I need to do next time.  Don't let it happen to you.

(I haven't posted any examples here, because it wouldn't be fair to post failed photos from somebody's wedding.)

openSUSE 10.3 on an HP Pavilion dv2000 (dv2058ea)

I decided to take the plunge and upgrade my laptop from  openSUSE 10.2 to the new (just released) 10.3. I downloaded the ISO image and burnt an installation DVD. The installation was very straightforward (as it was for 10.2). I use the GNOME desktop, and there was some KDE documentation package that didn't install properly, but I didn't worry about it as it doesn't affect me.

The colour theme is back to traditional SUSE green, away from blue; some people like the new colour scheme, but doesn't make much difference to me. I guess everyone wants to be “green” at the moment, though, but this is green as in Kermit. Some of the icons are prettier, and the gory text details are now hidden by a graphic when you hibernate or resume.

Sound works on my dv2000 (dv2058ea), which it didn't out of the box with 10.2 (ALSA has been improving; with 10.2 you can use ALSA 1.0.15 RC1 to get sound on a dv2000). That means I can use Skype (etc.) when travelling, which is a big consideration these days. Still no support for the webcam, but that's not a big thing for me.

A big nuisance is that my wireless connection stopped working. It seems that there is a problem with the new version of the NetworkManager applet; it can't seem to log in to my wireless network (and I'm far from the only person with this issue). I reverted to “ifup” control of the network cards, and I now have a wireless connection, albeit without the useful desktop applet that shows me which networks are available (you could use YaST to flip between the NetworkManager and ifup to see which networks are available and then connect, but you wouldn't want to have to do that too often).

The clock/date desktop applet now supports world time – you can add cities from various timezones around the world, and the times are shown in a dropdown with the calendar. Very useful if you do a lot of teleconferences across timezones. There is also a new search desktop applet that combines results from various sources: program names, file/directory names, file contents (using Beagle), Yahoo! Search, and more. As I use Opera for Web browsing and e-mail, I've become very used to its use of search to find things quickly (much better than only having hierarchical filing and navigation), and this new search applet takes the same kind of approach, so it could turn out to be rather handy, even more so that the Google Desktop, potentially.

YaST, which control most of the system settings, has had a makeover and now resembles the main menu that has been in openSUSE since 10.2. It's hard to say if it's better in any practical sense, but it does look a bit snazzier, I suppose.

10.3 supports the new Skype 1.4.0 for Linux, which 10.2 doesn't (only support 1.3.0). The new Skype client also seems to eschew categorisation; you now search for contacts from a big list, with no obvious sign of contact groups any more.

Otherwise, most things are much as they were in 10.2, there aren't any obvious fundamental changes. I'm still undecided when I'll update my deskside machine and/or my main VMware guest session to 10.3; I'll wait until I have more experience with 10.3 on my laptop.

Sun Weblog Publisher

I've been looking for a while for a good tool to help me in writing posts for this weblog, one that runs under Linux. The problem I have with the  Typepad Web interface is that, when you use a laptop (or keyboard) with a touchpad, it is too easy to jump back in the browser's history when you bump the touchpad; when you go back forwards in the history, you can find you've lost all of the text that you've been typing.

I also tried the desktop blogging applet that comes with SUSE Linux, but it didn't allow me to set things like the title and category, which meant I had to manually adjust everything via the Typepad Web interface after I'd written it. I also tried  BlogTk, which isn't bad; it does let you set things like the title and category (just a single category, though). It isn't ideal for composing posts when you are offline, though, ready to post at some later point in time.

So, I've just paid the princely sum of about US$10 (£5) for the  Sun Weblog Publisher, which is a plug-in for StarOffice and OpenOffice (and hence runs on Linux as well as Windows). If you are reading this post, then it worked. Certainly being able to work in OpenOffice (which I use all of the time) is convenient, and being able to save my work as an OpenOffice file until I'm ready to post is also going to be convenient. Anyway, if you are reading this now, it all works.

Note: as I posted this to Typepad (using the MetaWeblog API), I was able to set the title, but not the category, so I had to post in draft mode and add the category via the Typepad Web interface.   OpenOffice reported an error in posting, but it had been posted correctly in spite of that.

X-Ray Bag for Travellers

A funny idea, albeit only in theory rather than in practice. Courtesy of Gizmodo.