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It’s A Binary World 2.0

Eric’s insights on politics, technology, free software, photography and everything else

Lighting Techniques 1: Getting that White Background

Eric Mesa | January 31, 2010

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 [...]

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February Background Calendar

Eric Mesa | January 30, 2010

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:

For wide screens:

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Review: Ubuntu 9.10 64-bit

Eric Mesa | January 30, 2010

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:
I like the desktop, it looks pretty good. I liked 9.04 a [...]

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Review: Tiny Core Linux

Eric Mesa | January 29, 2010

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 [...]

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A Daily Photo: Northern Mockingbird

Eric Mesa | January 28, 2010

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.

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Review: Arch Linux

Eric Mesa | January 27, 2010

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 [...]

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Mini-Review: Zenwalk 6.2

Eric Mesa | January 26, 2010

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 [...]

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A Daily Photo

Eric Mesa | January 25, 2010

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

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A Daily Photo

Eric Mesa | January 24, 2010

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.

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Slackware 13 Revisit

Eric Mesa | January 23, 2010

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 [...]

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A Daily Photo

Eric Mesa | January 22, 2010

This fox likes to sleep on a pile of grass in the back yard.  This grass came from the first time I cut the grass after buying the house.  The grass was so tall that it filled the compost unit and there was still too much grass.  I didn’t know at the time we had [...]

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Programming to the Rescue: Amortization Automation

Eric Mesa | January 21, 2010

What I love about programming is the instant feedback.  In most programming languages, after you set up a framework for the barest bones of a program you can then run it at every step of the way to confirm that you are moving towards your goal.  What I love second-most about programming is the fact [...]

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Photojojo for Early Jan

Eric Mesa | January 18, 2010

This time last year I was in Hawaii on a business trip while most people here were at the Inauguration.  See this photo capsule online at the photojojo site.

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A Word About Our Sponsors

Eric Mesa | January 17, 2010

Unlike some other web admins, I respect your ability to choose to have ads blocked.  The ad providers brought them upon themselves by making ads really freakin’ annoying into the mid-2000s.  I just want to say that I don’t run any of those kinds of ads on this site.  I have an ad for Servint, [...]

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January Background Calendar

Eric Mesa | January 12, 2010

I was reading Scott Kelby’s Digital Photography books when he suggested making a background calendar to get my photos out there.  A lot of people at work like to have these types of backgrounds and I follow another photographer/blogger that does the same.  Here’s my January 2010 calendar.  To make these your background, click on [...]

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