Apologies for the lack of updates
2011-11-28
To anyone hoping for an update to PhotoPrint, CMYKTool or any of the other projects here, I owe you an apology.
Due to a number of factors (including a workload that shows no immediate sign of abating, and waning interest due to the direction in which computers in general and mainstream Linux distributions in particular are heading) these projects are on semi-permanent hiatus. Despite that, I do hope to get back to them sometime in the not too distant future, at least to fix a nasty PhotoPrint UI bug that's surfaced in the latest Ubuntu - but for the forseeable future there'll be no major updates.
Git Repo Update
2023-04-30
When Gitorious closed some years ago I moved my projects to github instead.
Since I haven't done any serious work on these projects in a decade they have, unfortunately, succumbed to bitrot - and will need updating to work against current versions of Gutenprint and Gtk. Because I no longer have much time for photography, and don't even have a printer at home any more, I have no particular interest in doing this myself - certainly not as a recreational project. The source remains available, however, should anyone else wish to tackle it.
My Quest for a Quiet Computer - Revisited
2011-02-27
Some years ago I wrote about my Quest for a Quiet Computer – in which I bought a fanless VIA EPIAmotherboard and a nice mini case (Morex Cubid 2677). It was a tight squeeze, but it all fit and it gave a good few years’ service as an email-reading terminal. Unfortunately, the 500MHz VIA Eden processor was a bit on the slow side, as was the Trident CyberBlade i1 graphics chip. The machine didn’t have a prayer of playing a DVD (For comparison, my old Pentium III laptop of the same clock speed could manage that with no trouble providing nothing else was going on in the background.)
Intel D510MO motherboard
Since then I’ve been keeping one eye on the Mini-ITX market, and was intrigued by Intel’s Little Falls boards, which coupled a netbook-style Atom processor with a regular Desktop G31 chipset. The downside of those boards was the power-hungry chipset, which ate way more power than the processor it was supposed to be supporting. The newer Pine Trail boards, though, including the D510MO which I’ve just bought, couples the new low-power NM10 chipset with an Atom processor which is not only 64-bit capable, but also dual core, while using little enough power that passive cooling is sufficient!
Read more...
Creating a Custom Profiling Target for Scanners and Cameras
2010-12-19
When generating a colour profile for a scanner or camera there are several standard targets that are traditionally used. The most widely-recognised of these is probably the IT8.7/2 chart, with its spread of greys, synthetic colours and real-world shades. There are other options too, such as the ColorChecker DC or SG charts, but what if you want to create your own chart?
Read more...
Finally - a Git Repository
2011-06-14
Several people have expressed an interest in a possible Git respository of my projects, and I've finally found time to set one up.
The repo can be found at https://gitorious.org/~blackfiveimaging. Please note, however, that because of the way my projects are currently organised, you'll need to check out at least two respositories. There is a "library" repo that's shared between the various projects, and this library must be in the same top level directory as any project which uses it (the reason is that whole directories from the library are symlinked into the project.)
Read more...
GIMP Classic for Maverick
2011-01-23
The title says it all really - the GIMP Classic PPA now contains a build for Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat.
To install the updated package for Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10, add ppa:amr/gimp-classic to your software sources, then upgrade GIMP.
Another PPA Update!
2011-11-06
The eagle-eyed among you might just have spotted that my PPA list now includes a new entry for Gutenprint. The reason for this is that I wanted an easy way of distributing a particular patch - namely my PSSpeedup patch. This patch, as it name might suggest, provides a significant speedup when using Gutenprint's Adobe Postscript Level 2 driver. As such, this is potentially useful for anyone using PhotoPrint in conjunction with HP-IJS, TurboPrint, the Avasys Epson drivers, laser printers that understand Postscript, and anything else not directly supported by Gutenprint, but for which Linux drivers are available.
Note that this is the stock Ubuntu package of Gutenprint 5.2.6, taken from version 10.10 (Maverick), with the one extra patch applied. While the PPA contains the same version for Lucid, this was actually done accidentally! Since it might turn out to be a useful backport for some people, I've left the Lucid version there - but use at your own risk.
To install the updated package for Ubuntu 10.04 or 10.10, add ppa:amr/gutenprint to your software sources, then upgrade all gutenprint packages.
