Monthly Archives: May 2009

How to clean up photos of whiteboards with Gimp

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beforeHere is a thumbnail of a picture of a whiteboarding session taken with my iPhone. It’s basically unreadable. I looked for a good recipe to clean this up in gimp, but the googles failed me.

After playing with a bunch of stuff with the gimp, here are the steps that I’ve found to work pretty well:

  1. Load the image in gimp
  2. Now for the magicks: Choose Filters >Edge Detect > Difference of Gaussians…diff-of-gauss
  3. Start with these settings. It doesn’t make it perfect, but it should make the lines stand out much better. Play around with the radius 1 and radius 2 values if you aren’t happy. Radius 1 needs to be bigger than Radius 2. Click OK.
  4. final-levels Return to  Colors > Levels… and move both the blackpoint and the midpoint to the right (to make the lines stand out) and the whitepoint to the left just a bit (to make the whiteboard white). Click OK.

Here’s the result:

after

Installing CrashPlan on Ubuntu 9.04 Server Edition

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Although rsnapshot is super for linux-to-linux backups, I’ve found CrashPlan to work very well as a backup solution for my family’s windows and mac boxes.

The CrashPlan installation works pretty well on ubuntu desktop edition, as all the necessary packages are already there. The server edition fails quietly, though.

Run these steps before you install CrashPlan, and everything should be smooth:
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Samba problems with Ubuntu 9.04

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I was trying to set up samba with a new Ubuntu 9.04 (“Jaunty Jackalope”) box, and was frustrated when windows failed to connect to the [homes] share I had enabled.

It turns out that even if you comment out all the printer configuration in /etc/samba/smb.conf, smbd will still try to connect to CUPS, and quietly die.

After setting smb.conf to log to syslog, I saw:

smbd[30539]: printing/print_cups.c:cups_connect(103)
smbd[30539]:   Unable to connect to CUPS server localhost:631 - Connection refused

The solution? Add this to the [global] section:

load printers = no

and pick up the new setting by running 

/etc/init.d/samba restart

Installing Ubuntu from a USB Drive

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I just bought a new green server (25-30 watts at full load!) and wanted a brand-new Jaunty experience.

The MSI Wind Nettop doesn’t come with an optical disk drive, nor does it come with IDE support, so my old CDROM drives wouldn’t work — I needed to boot from an old 1gb USB drive.

I found usb-creator was already available on my to-be-decommissioned Ubuntu Gutsy box, but it won’t work unless you clear off enough free space beforehand. I ended up repartitioning my USB drive with cfdisk, then running mkfs against the new partition, then restarting usb-creator.

The actual installation was quite smooth and quick. Thanks to the development team!