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.

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.

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:

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.

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:

What do you think? Sports in her future? Or nerd like her dad?

A few days ago I created a page to keep track of various computer projects I’m working on.  I figure this’ll help me keep track of what’s going on and what I’ve written about it and it’ll also maybe serve as a one-stop shop for visitors to the blog who want to see how I implement various projects.

This is the first post documenting my research so far on my Home Server Project. Here’s how I describe it at the moment:

After having filed some bugs and spent a bit of time trying to figure out what’s going on, it appears that the issue with the metadata not carrying over from my DNG and CR2 files to the JPEG is not in any way RawTherapee’s fault. The problem is where Exiv2, the library used by Digikam, is expecting to look for this data. Of course, what I don’t understand about this is that Exiv2 is what wrote the data to begin with. Why write it to a location they were not going to be able to read from? Or maybe they only expect it to be there in DNG and CR2 files, but not JPEGs?

Scarlett asked to talk in my field recorder, but she called it a lightsaber. “Daddy, can I talk in your lightsaber?”

Here’s what came of that:

I asked my wife if she could show me how to cut a mango. This is what Scarlett said:

You use scissors! And you cut! Open. Close. Open. Close. Put your fingers in the holes. Open. Close.

And then I tried to recreate the situation while recording it. Here’s what she said with my prompting:

Two redeeming bits of news for RawTherapee (even though one of them means there’s still something to be solved before I can switch completely to this new bit of software).

1. When updated to the latest RawTherapee (the version in Fedora 21’s official repositories is old), the issue with pink images disappears
2. RawTherapee is indeed preserving the metadata in the JPEG. The problem is that it’s doing so in a manner that Digikam does not read through the exiv2 library. I’ve filed a bug report and hopefully this can be resolved. Once that’s done, I’d be able to leave Adobe Lightroom behind. If I wanted to, I could use the new software now, safe in the knowledge that the metadata was being written, but until it’s time to replace my photo hard drive (later this year), I won’t be moving the photos over to Linux.