Hardware, Linux

Webcams on Linux

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Since Joanne’s parents live in Thailand, they’re not able to see their new granddaughter very often. They use skype to communicate regularly, so we thought we’d grab a cheap little webcam so that they could see Ruby while they were talking as well. I picked up the cheapest webcam they had at the local Best Buy: a Logitech QuickCam Communicate STX for $35. Just for fun, I thought I’d try it out on my Ubuntu Feisty machine, not really expecting much. To my surprise, I plugged it into the USB port, fired up Ekiga [1], and within 10 seconds was having a video chat with my brother (well, the video chat was one way, since he doesn’t have a webcam or a microphone, but I’m told that he could see and hear me).

By contrast, to get it to work on Joanne’s Windows machine (so she could use it with Skype), it wanted to immediately download updated ‘drivers’ (probably including a bunch of useless utility software — over 100MB!) and of course, install them. It installed without problem, but all-in-all, it took about 10 times as long as it did to get it working on Linux.

When I first started using Linux, I would have never dreamed that hardware support would have gotten this good by now. In fact, on the way home from picking up the webcam, I joked to Joanne that getting it to work on Linux was going to be my weekend project. Ha!

[1] By the way, this is the first time I’ve used Ekiga. It’s quite nice, and the new GUI work looks great.

Agave, Minnesota, Nemiver, Photography

Spring Cleaning

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Interesting to see Agave featured prominently in the screenshots for ubuntu studio. (That site might be down, it doesn’t seem to be withstanding the traffic very well).

Things with nemiver are coming along at a decent pace and we’ll probably be doing another release in the near future. The next release should bring quite a few nice new features and a lot of bugfixes, most of which Dodji has already mentioned.

I recently bought a new Digital SLR camera, the Nikon D40. I wasn’t necessarily looking for the best camera I could find, just something reasonably priced that took decent pictures. The D40 is relatively small so I don’t feel like I’m lugging a huge camera around (which is important or I probably wouldn’t end up using it as much), it’s cheap (it comes with a reasonable lens kit for around 600 US, which isn’t much more than I paid for my old point-and-shoot digital back in the day), and it takes vastly better pictures than my old camera. I’m really loving the fact that I can actually get decent pictures even if the lighting and environment is less than ideal. I’d highly recommend it if you’re looking for a decent entry-level DSLR. I still clearly have a lot to learn about photography (this camera just lets me take better-looking crappy photos). But I’m slowly learning, and I’m getting lots of practice, like any new parent.

Hacking on GNOME, but with a healthy dose of C++

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