Here’s a non-obvious problem that photographers come up against all the time - I bought a white background so why doesn’t it look white in my portraits?  The reason that it’s a non-obvious problem is that you have to remember that the camera doesn’t see the world the same way you do.  The internal circuitry of the camera wants to meter for neutral grey.  So the cure is simple as long as you have an extra flash unit - you have to use it to light up the background.  One important thing to remember if you’re using a small flash (speedlite or speedlight), you need to pop a diffuser cap on that lens to spread out the light over the whole background.  In fact, if the background is wide enough you might need two or more strobes.  Another tip is that it may help to put your flash unit into manual mode so the flash itself doesn’t try to make the background neutral grey.

Here’s the calendar for February.  Click on it to get the full size so you can make it your background.  ( edit:  I noticed a bug in the way the calendar appeared and fixed it on 31 Jan 2010 so just download a new version, thanks!)

For square screens:

[caption id=“attachment_3145” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Feb 2010 - 1024x768 calendar (fixed)”] [/caption]

For wide screens:

[caption id=“attachment_3146” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Feb 2010 - 1680x1050 calendar (fixed)”] [/caption]

[caption id=“attachment_3068” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Ubuntu 9.10 liveCD boots up”] [/caption]

I last looked at Ubuntu 9.04 a little over six months ago.  So I decided it was time to see what has changed.  Since I’m now testing on a 64-bit machine, I decided to test the 64-bit version of Ubuntu.  So here we go:

[caption id=“attachment_3069” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“Ubuntu 9.10 loading”] [/caption]

I like the desktop, it looks pretty good. I liked 9.04 a little better, but there’s nothing wrong with this one.

The guys over at Linux Outlaws are always talking about Tiny Core Linux because it always seems to be releasing a new version.  I was impressed back in the day that Damn Small Linux could have a working Linux distro in only 50 MB.  I know that Tiny Core Linux is technically not a full Linux distro, but I wanted to see what all the fuss was about.  It came in a recent LXF disc and I decided to check it out.

This Northern Mockingbird is one of the many birds in my yard.  I can’t quite pinpoint what it is about birds that fascinate Danielle and I, but we love to watch them cavorting around the yard and interacting with each other.

I’ve been wanting to try Arch Linux for quite some time now.  They seem to have a similar aesthetic to Gentoo in that the main mission of Arch is to build your operating system from the ground up.  You only add the things you need.  So you don’t have any cruft on your system based on what some other people think you should have.  So let’s pop this CD in and see what happens!  (I’m also following the directions on http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Official_Arch_Linux_Install_Guide)  The disc is the 2009.08 snapshot.  I booted into the LiveCD.

I looked at Zenwalk 6.0 back in June and Zenwalk 6.2 is now out.  I’m going to do a mini-review just comparing 6.0 to 6.2 to see what has changed.  This may end up being very short if it’s mostly the same.  One difference right away is that it’s using ext4 instead of XFS.  The install was basically the same.

[caption id=“attachment_3019” align=“aligncenter” width=“300” caption=“The final part of the Zenwalk 6.2 install”] [/caption]

This was taken as I was testing the effects of different f-stops on diffraction.

It’s been a very snow-filled winter this 2009-2010 winter season compared to the last five or so years I’ve lived here.  I think I’m over it.  Spring couldn’t come quickly enough.

In my Slackware 13 review mfillpot gave some suggestions to improve the Slackware experience and I thought I would give them a shot.  First off, changing the init level to 4 to allow KDM to show up instead of this startx business.  I was happy to note that Slackware had emacs.  So many distros have vi and I never really learned how to use it well.  So I changed the value to 4 and restarted.  And there she is: