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Joined 7 months ago
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Cake day: July 3rd, 2024

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  • Dark table corrects lens distortion based on the design of the actual lens, not the image itself. The grid it just to check in after the fact. I’m not aware of similar tools in GIMP. It’s trivial in Darktable though, as long as your lens is in the database.

    Don’t use a fish-eye lens, it’s lense distortion will be the worst and most difficult to correct. Use a lens with a longer focal length, ideally a prime lens with a fixed focal length. If you maximize focal length and distance to your object as much as is feasible, you will have already flattened the image (minimized lens distortion) a lot. If you use a prime (fixed focal length) lens from a popular brand, Darktable can remove the remaining lens distortion.

    You can remove all lens distortion by using a pinhole camera, which has no lens. But that’s probably going to be a tricky setup without an expert.



  • Every movie is a muppet movie waiting to happen.

    “No Country for Old Men”, with the killer played by Sam the blue eagle.

    “Brokeback Mountain”, with Kermit and Foxzie Bear playing the leads, no human roles.

    Rowlf as the unexpected lead in “Lawrence of Arabia”, “Fistful of Dollars”, and “Fistful of Dollars”. In Lawrence of Arabia, only the other British soldiers are played by humans. In the Spaghetti Westerns, the only humans are the women.

    “Smokey and the Bandit”, with Kermit as the Bandit, Rowlf as the trucker, the bride played by a real person, Miss Piggie as Smokey, and Fozzi Bear as the groom/deputy.

    “The Blues Brothers”, starring Kermit and Fozzi as Elwood and Jake. All the other characters are Muppets, but the bands are played by real blues musicians.

    “Brazil”: Kermit as Sam Lowry, Robert Dinero reprising his role as “human” Tuttle, Miss Piggy as Sam’s mother, and Jill Layton played by the only other human.



  • The Samsung gear watches all support Spotify offline playback. All the wearOS watches support as much local media playback as the hardware allows (I think), but managing that local library is pretty tedious and awful. Especially if like me you either listen through streaming services or streaming from a library of FLAC media on a NAS at home. With the Spotify app on my watch, I just select a playlist to be downloaded while I’m connected to WiFi and that’s it. It is not flawless though, sometimes the Spotify database or authentication gets fouled up and you’re unable to fix it until you return to WiFi. But I haven’t had many issues with it since Samsung switched away from their own bespoke watch OS to wearOS.



  • I tried Govee outdoor lights.

    The app has some ridiculously invasive permissions required to operate that have absolutely nothing to do with turning a light on/off and changing the color. Goodbye privacy.

    The lights were also VERY far from permanent, they lasted through a couple months of mild weather and light use. No snow, no flooding or heavy rain, no direct sun, no extreme heat, no evident physical damage. In my case it wasn’t just one light that went, it was the whole strand and the way it failed left me feeling worried that it was a fire hazard. Their outdoor lights are not well made enough to be left outdoors for long. I would not recommend Govee lights to anyone.




  • Sounds like you eat trash. Most of what I buy from the grocery store is fresh or frozen, pretty much everything else is a slow boring flavorless heavy salted death. I haven’t found a service that can automate my grocery shopping to my satisfaction and frankly I wouldn’t want to. My weekly meal planning happens in the vegetable department based on what in season, available locally, looks appetizing, etc.

    It also sounds like you live alone, not having to contend with other people’s changing schedules and laundry needs.

    You’re automated “easy” life sounds like an empty void. I’m not convinced you’re “living” your life at all, just killing time.






  • Shit, my bus stop was at least a half mile away without so much as a sidewalk anywhere, just a dirt road and a canal. You didn’t even get a bus stop if you were less than 2 miles from school. We regularly rode our bikes like 12 miles away from home to the movie theater, I think we were pre-teens. Technically I could have ridden my bike to grade 6 (it was on the way to the movie theater), but who wants to show up to 6th grade everyday drenched in sweat or rain (it would always have been one or the other).