Nozell, rhymes with Oh Hell » apps

Moving photos around behind f-spot’s back

Marc Nozell — Mon, 03 Jul 2006 01:44:45 +0000

I’ve been using f-spot since it showed up in Ubuntu/Breezy and have been keeping all my photos in a directory structure like this:
/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.30/ /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.07.01/
But sometimes I’ve forgotten to unclick the “Copy file to the Photos folder” box in the photos import dialog and end up with photos under ~/Photos/. Recently I checked and found there were almost a gigabytes worth of photos under there.

So this is what I did to move them to under /PHOTOS/Photos/ and keep all the tags and metadata correct.

Back up /home and /PHOTOS to an external USB. I love rsnapshot.
$ rsnapshot daily
make an extra backup of the f-spot database
$ cp ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db photos-backup.db
Start poking around the f-spot database and updating it.
$ sqlite3 ~/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db sqlite> .schema photos CREATE TABLE photos ( id INTEGER PRIMARY KEY NOT NULL, time INTEGER NOT NULL, directory_path STRING NOT NULL, name STRING NOT NULL, description TEXT NOT NULL, default_version_id INTEGER NOT NULL );
See how many photos are in ~/Photos…
sqlite> select count(*) from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%'; 260
Take a look at a few of them to see the path names…
sqlite> select directory_path from photos where directory_path like '/home/marc/Photos/%' limit 0,10;
Update the pathname to my prefered one. I’ve added an ‘a’ to the end just so I won’t overwrite an existing directory.
sqlite> update photos set directory_path = "/PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a" where directory_path = "/home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22"; sqlite> .quit
Make the directory and move the files to the new location…
mkdir /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a mv -v /home/marc/Photos/2006/6/22/HPIM117* /PHOTOS/Photos/2006.06.22a

Repeat for each directory. I did it all within emacs’ shell so cut-n-paste made it a snap.

Creative Webcam Live! works with Ubuntu/Dapper

Marc Nozell — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 21:00:28 +0000

I just picked up a Creative Webcam Live! which does a reasonable 1024×768 snapshot and 640×480 video resolution for $49. At first it looked like I’d have to build the spca5xx kernel module for Ubuntu/Dapper, but it is now included in the default kernel & modules packages.

Just plug it in and start using one of the many video capture packages like camorama, webcam, camstream, motion, gqcam, etc and start playing around!

FWIW here below the fold are my loaded kernel modules:

Module Size Used by spca5xx 653808 0 videodev 10144 1 spca5xx binfmt_misc 13064 1 rfcomm 43604 0 l2cap 28192 5 rfcomm af_packet 24520 4 ppdev 9668 0 fglrx 391756 8 ipv6 286912 44 speedstep_centrino 8752 1 cpufreq_powersave 1920 0 cpufreq_stats 6688 0 cpufreq_userspace 6496 1 cpufreq_ondemand 7752 0 cpufreq_conservative 9000 0 freq_table 4928 2 speedstep_centrino,cpufreq_stats tc1100_wmi 6884 0 video 16324 0 acpi_sbs 20172 0 battery 9988 1 acpi_sbs i2c_acpi_ec 5120 1 acpi_sbs i2c_core 22848 1 i2c_acpi_ec container 4608 0 button 6704 0 pcc_acpi 12416 0 sony_acpi 5580 0 ac 5220 1 acpi_sbs dev_acpi 11236 0 hotkey 11492 0 ext3 148104 3 jbd 65876 1 ext3 md_mod 76052 0 dm_mod 63256 1 lp 12356 0 ide_cd 35780 0 cdrom 41408 1 ide_cd sd_mod 20448 0 scsi_mod 145960 1 sd_mod snd_intel8x0 35740 1 snd_ac97_codec 99808 1 snd_intel8x0 snd_ac97_bus 2400 1 snd_ac97_codec snd_pcm_oss 56448 0 snd_mixer_oss 20544 1 snd_pcm_oss hci_usb 18004 2 pcmcia 41948 0 tsdev 8032 0 joydev 10432 0 bluetooth 54084 7 rfcomm,l2cap,hci_usb snd_pcm 96676 3 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss pcspkr 2244 0 tpm_infineon 8724 0 snd_timer 26884 1 snd_pcm tpm 11232 1 tpm_infineon parport_pc 37988 1 parport 39400 3 ppdev,lp,parport_pc floppy 64676 0 yenta_socket 30124 3 rsrc_nonstatic 14624 1 yenta_socket ath_pci 81820 0 ath_rate_sample 17224 1 ath_pci pcmcia_core 45272 3 pcmcia,yenta_socket,rsrc_nonstatic wlan 146684 3 ath_pci,ath_rate_sample ath_hal 148848 3 ath_pci,ath_rate_sample tg3 113284 0 snd 60004 8 snd_intel8x0,snd_ac97_codec,snd_pcm_oss,snd_mixer_oss,snd_pcm,snd_timer soundcore 10784 1 snd snd_page_alloc 11304 2 snd_intel8x0,snd_pcm psmouse 40036 0 serio_raw 7748 0 intel_agp 24700 1 agpgart 36784 2 fglrx,intel_agp shpchp 49504 0 pci_hotplug 30788 1 shpchp evdev 10176 1 reiserfs 284016 3 ide_generic 1504 0 ehci_hcd 33800 0 uhci_hcd 35408 0 usbcore 137700 5 spca5xx,hci_usb,ehci_hcd,uhci_hcd ide_disk 19200 9 piix 11652 1 generic 5124 0 thermal 13768 0 processor 26344 2 speedstep_centrino,thermal fan 4836 0 fbcon 43904 0 tileblit 2784 1 fbcon font 8320 1 fbcon bitblit 6464 1 fbcon softcursor 2304 1 bitblit capability 4968 0 commoncap 7328 1 capability

w32codecs for ubuntu ‘hoary’

Marc Nozell — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 23:23:58 +0000

The stock Ubuntu repositories don’t include the w32codecs (wmvdmod.dll, etc) so xine, mplayer can play WMV and other formats. Basically the package puts 127 DLLs in /usr/lib/w32codecs.

So, I temporarily added the following line to my /etc/apt/sources.list

deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ testing main

And then did this:

apt-get update && apt-get install w32codecs

I then commented that line out since and apt-get upgrade would have picked up a bunch of updated packages from that repository.

Migrating to Ubuntu Hoary on my laptop

Marc Nozell — Fri, 22 Jul 2005 00:33:54 +0000

I’ve been running Debian/Sarge (now the stable branch) on my laptop for quite a while now and its time to try a new distro for dailyl use — Ubuntu. This week I’ve been running Ubuntu ‘Hoary’ and the transition has been very smooth.

The only configuration issue was I wanted to use ALSA on this HP Compaq nc6000 laptop. The install did detect the sound device, but did separate the speaker from
the headphone controls.

phzi on #ubuntu pointed me to the unofficial UbuntuGuide.org, specifically the section configuresoundproperly. Those instructions were perfect.

ipodder (v2.1) on Ubuntu ‘Hoary’

Marc Nozell — Thu, 21 Jul 2005 20:54:03 +0000

I’d upgraded to the latest iPodder (v2.1) on my Ubuntu (‘Hoary’) laptop today.

# tar jxvf iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2

# cd iPodder-linux

# sudo ./install.sh

(take the defaults)

The only glitch is wx libraries aren’t in the default PYTHONPATH, so set this environment variable either at the command line, or pop it in ~/.bashrc

export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode/:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH

Now clean up a little bit…

$ cd ../

$ rm -rf iPodder-linux iPodder-linux-2.1.tar.bz2

Now, you are all set to start iPodder!


$ (nohup iPodder&)    # or add it to a menu bar button

Getting closer to not needing any special knowledge to get iPodder running on a GNU/Linux distro…

- – - – -

Just for searchers, this is the problem you see if you don’t set the PYTHONPATH:

$ iPodder Traceback (most recent call last): File "iPodderGui.py", line 38, in ? import iPodderWindows File "/opt/iPodder/iPodderWindows.py", line 4, in ? import listctrl as listmix File "/opt/iPodder/listctrl.py", line 296, in ? EVT_DOPOPUPMENU = wx.PyEventBinder(wxEVT_DOPOPUPMENU, 0) AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'PyEventBinder'

fyi: straw database recovery

Marc Nozell — Fri, 13 May 2005 13:05:09 +0000

This morning I accidentally double clicked on the straw RSS aggregator icon and two copies raced
to see who could corrupt the app’s database first.

straw refused to start with this error:

ItemStore.py:52:__init__: DB_RUNRECOVERY: Fatal error, run
database recovery – - PANIC: Invalid argument
Recovery Error: See README for details on how to recover data.

And the straw README says to do this:

$ db_recover -h $HOME/.straw -c -v
$ db_checkpoint -1 -v

Fair enough, but I don’t have those scripts installed db\_recover or db\_checkpoint. It turns out that they are in the libdb2-util package. (apt-get install libdb2-util)

Fortunately the recovery processed work fine.

Getting the bleeding edge iPodder on Linux (debian/sarge) mini-HOWTO

Marc Nozell — Tue, 04 Jan 2005 15:42:56 +0000

Lately, I’ve been using the bleeding edge version of iPodder from CVS (which confusingly is in the
iSpider directory) Here is how you can grab a copy for yourself:

$ cvs -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder login
CVS password: (press return)

$ cvs -z3 -d:pserver:anonymous@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/ipodder co iSpider

[tons of informational messages about downloading iSpider]

$ cd iSpider
$ export PYTHONPATH=/usr/lib/python2.3/site-packages/wx-2.5.3-gtk2-unicode:$PYTHONPATH-unicode:$PYTHONPATH
$ python iPodderGui.pyw

… And fire up your favorite dev tools!

Creating an audio blog reply using Festival

Marc Nozell — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 00:19:06 +0000

I listened to Dave Winer’s Coffee Notes for 24-Oct-2004 podcast on the way home tonight and felt compelled to reply to him with an audio reply email about Richard Scoble/Scooble’s voice mail. Here is how I created it.

* Get the Festival Speech Synthesis package for your Debian GNU/Linux box

$ sudo apt-get install festival

[...bunch of status about installing a festival and dependancies removed...] $

* Create a snappy reply. I like emacs. This is exactly what hi-dave.txt looks like:

Hi Dave!

This is Marc No-zell and I just listened to your Coffee Talk with
Richard Scoble. It sounds like Microsoft’s voice mail system is using
a descendant of the DECK-talk system that was created by DECK in the
1980s.

I’m creating this audio reply using the Festival Speech Synthesis
System on my Deb-ian GNU Linux laptop. Neener, neener, neener!

Well, thanks for the Coffee Notes!

Now I did do a little cheating here. Festival follows strict pronunciation rules and sometimes gets words wrong. For example my surname would be said as ‘nozzel’, so I spell it how I want it to sound. The same is true for DECtalk and DEC, which sounds like ‘dec-tork’ and ‘december’ (trying to be a little too clever ;-)

* Convert from text to wave format:

$ text2wave hi-dave.txt -o hi-dave.wav

* Convert from wav to mp3 format

$ lame hi-dave.wav hi-dave.mp3

* Listen to the result:

$ xmms hi-dave.mp3

wifistatd-0.1

Marc Nozell — Thu, 03 Oct 2002 03:47:00 +0000

I ran across this little app today. One of those things I was going to code up but never got around to doing.

gnobog (a Gnome Bookmarks Organizer)

Marc Nozell — Tue, 28 May 2002 20:30:00 +0000

gnobog is a nice
little bookmark app. Since it use galeon, mozilla, konqueror and
other random web browsers, this lets me keep my bookmarks in one
central location.