Well since he has his own OpenSuSE Desktop I thought it would be good to teach him the tools required ( QDVDAuthor that is ).

So I started off with downloading the images and thought to myself that I would be nice to have the latest rpm of DigiKam installed.

And sure enough, OpenSuSE 11.3 comes with an outdated version 1.2 but the current version 1.4 is also available through rpm’s. I know now I should not have; but I did anyways …

So after about 1/2 day fixing DigiKams broken dependencys I finally managed to break the whole installation.

Last way out was a 330MBytes ‘zypper dup’ run to update the whole distribution. So there went my 1’st day …

2′nd day started better as we could download the images to the computer and create the DVD in QDVDAuthor just fine. But yet again I run into some obstacles.

1) I could not generate the animated DVD menu which lasted for 3:20min because after about 2000 frames png2yuv burned up all available memory. A quick googling revealed that the current rpm version has a memory leak which is fixed in cvs.

So I had to install gcc and all development stuff to fix it on his box. Thereafter I could compile mjpegtools and install the fixed version.

2) The next test run uncovered an issue with my spumux version, which ignored the set transparency I used for the buttons.

So here again I grabbed the latest source off of sourceforge compiled and installed dvdauthor and was finally able to create the DVD as I wanted to.

BTW, I used all background songs from Magnatune which made for a great combination. The background DVD menu was taken from MandelBox

After all the hard work … NICE !

Disaster struck after our vacation.

I turned on our external backup-hard-drive, trying to back up our images and ….
All I got was the clicking noise of a frustratingly unresponsive 500GByte hard-drive.

After enduring the tears and curse-word attack of my wife I decided I wanted to have a bit more redundancy in my backup and decided to go to Microcenter and spend some money on a dual bay hard-drive enclosure ad two 1 TByte hard-drives.

Hornettek X2-RAID

I have to say this is a really nice unit. I configured it for Raid 1 to have a backup in case one of the HD fails. Of course if there is physical damage ( dropping the unit or taking it into the pool ) this config is still not 100% reliable.

But in case we have another HD failure, chances are we have some time to rebuild the lost HD from the remaining backup.

So now I am spending some time in re-building all that we have lost on our external hard-drive. Thankfully I have created DVDs to hold all of our important family pictures, and other important data ( like source code, and videos ).

Considering that we have 1TByte redundancy, the $200 I spent on it was well worth it and will allow me to sleep better. Also looking at some of the ‘off-the-shelf’ products, which boast a single 1TByte external HD capacity for $160, this extra $40 is well invested.

KenBurns is now functional in the Slideshows including transitions and all. The only draw back in this implementation is the lack of fine tuning from picture to picture. But who knows, I might implement a more detailed version if people ask for it.

As for now, it works well enough for me.

Also I wanted to thank the countless people reporting bugs in this app. I am trying to keep up the bug hunt and improve reliability this way.

All went well until today, when ScreenshotPimp was upgraded. After restarting firefox I was offered to have ScreenshotPimp handle my default search settings. This was odd, but after un-checking this option I was appalled by what I saw.

I just received a new row for the infamous ‘Bing’ search in firefox.

WTF. What has a screen-shot tool to do with my search settings. Puh-lease, this was the lowest blow ever and I despise the developer who sold his soul to Micro$oft.

This piece of crapware should be removed from the firefox add-ons repository. After all, if I really wanted to use Bing instead of another search engine, I would do so and install BingPimp or simply reconfig the search box parameters.

Grrr, another Sunday ruined by Mircro$oft.

Why the federal reserve violates the U.S. constitution

An interesting observation I believe is that no matter how hard you try, or how long it takes, but eventually things will follow logical patterns again. Think of all those bubbles you have experienced in the past decade or so.

You knew something was off but could not explain why it was acting this way until the bubble eventually burst.

I just spent on hour watching a documentary on The Car of the future. I am sure I’ll get dragged into the Science Fiction, Science Fact tomorrow.

Please enjoy watching some good entertaining documentaries.

I did finally finish my tax return for 2010. It was the first time I used TaxACT online edition.

Of course I am sure there are a lot of places where it can use some fine-tuning, and I should probably switch to German to find them myself, however if you are German and you use QDVDAuthor, I would be very appreciative if you can give me some hints ( or better, a corrected qdvdauthor_de.ts file ).

German:
Ich habe endlich die Uebersetzung ins deitsche abgeschlossen und habe hoechstwahrscheinlich ‘ne menge Fehler mit eingebracht. Sollte dies jemand lesen, dann wuerde ich mich ueber fehlerberichte freuen ( oder besser noch, die verbesserte Datei qdvdauthor_de.ts schicken ).

I have also received a bunch of error reports which I have yet to look into. Tax season is taking its toll as well as my latest endeavor, which is separate from QDVDAuthor.

Of course all my old excuses still stand: Too tired, too much work at work, got to play with the kids, weather is too bad, weather is too nice, watched Startreck, watched Starwreck …

There are some interesting talks which are good for a couple of hours of fun watching.