Fedora 22 Upgrade Part 2: tanukimario
Turns out that the issue was the Fedora SDDM theme. Once I changed that to the default KDE theme everything worked. I wonder what I need to do to get the Fedora theme so that works as well. At least I know for future computers what needs to be done.
Fedora 22 Upgrade Part 1: tanukimario
Started off with the guest room computer as it’s the least used. If things go pear-shaped there’ll be less complaining. fedup had a complaint about the one of the dependencies of the Dolphin Emulator. I just uninstalled it for now. I’ll worry about reinstalling it later. Often during these upgrades it appears that the biggest source of issues are badly written dependencies; badly written in the sense that I end up having to remove the offending packages only to reinstall them post-upgrade without any issues.
Flowers Blooming in the Yard
A trio of flower macros I shot in April:

Potential Bloomers

Some Early Bloomers

Not yet
Cherry Blossom Festival 2015
This year was the first year since Scarlett was born that we went around the entire Tidal Basin. I’d say it was well worth it as we all had a good time and I even got some good photos out of it!

Scarlett and Danielle at the Cherry Blossom Festival

Watching the Show

Glasses On

Glasses Off

On at Tree at the Cherry Blossom Festival

Paddle Boats
Scarlett Draws a Human
I know there’s a fine line between a parent being impressed by their child and a parent bragging. Nonetheless, I thought this drawing Scarlett did was pretty good for a 3 year old.

I am now a Master of Engineering!
When I was in my senior year at Cornell, my adviser tried to get me to enroll into graduate school. My dad had advised me to wait and see what it turned out I wanted to specialize in. Also, I’d likely be able to get work to pay for my degree. My adviser told me I’d never end up getting a graduate degree. Those who don’t do it right away end up procrastinating forever and don’t get one. I knew I’d work at getting one, so I didn’t pay him any mind. I went to work and work did have a program by which they paid for college classes. But I wasn’t sure where I wanted to go. Almost everyone went to Johns Hopkins Engineering because they didn’t require the GRE. But something inside just didn’t feel right. So I waited.
Bridging the XMP Gap with Digikam, RawTherapee, and Exiv2
I found one way around the situation involving a DNG going to RawTherapee and creating a JPEG image that’s missing the title and tags when read by Digikam’s Exiv2 library. It may not be perfect, or even the best way. But it’s one way around the issue that I was easily able to confirm with about 5 minutes of messing around today. First up you want to tell Digikam to make XMP files to go along with all files:
Creating a Black and White Image in RawTherapee
Issues with tags and titles aside, I am really liking RawTherapee so far as my Lightroom RAW processing replacement. I wanted to document my process for getting to a black and white photo that I like both as a tutorial of sorts, but also to document for myself how it works with RawTherapee.

I’ve activated here one of my favorite features RawTherapee has that Lightroom does not, two windows showing just a small region up close. Too often I’m stuck zooming in and out of an image to check various parts of the image as I make changes. It’s not as crucial with this image, but I just wanted to test out the feature.
Scarlett Plays Catch with her Glove for the First Time
Danielle bought Scarlett her first baseball glove and I was curious to see how her first attempt at catch would go. Here is a video of that first try:
And some stills:

Scarlett plays baseball with first glove-2

Scarlett plays baseball with first glove-12

Scarlett plays baseball with first glove-14
What do you think? Sports in her future? Or nerd like her dad?