I’ve *finally* completed a new screencast. Sorry for the long delay. This one was a fun one. It demonstrates a fairly easy way to take a single image and break it up into component ’snapshots’. So it looks like you took several pictures of different parts of an object and reassembled them. The example I do is a pretty basic one. You could do things like adjust the lightness, contrast or saturation of each snapshot separately to really give different creative effects.

This is another example where I really think Inkscape is significantly quicker than using Gimp or Photoshop for certain photographic projects. The method is simple, very intuitive and leaves room for lots of creative ideas once you get familiar with it.

Hope you enjoy it.

Our purchasing agent (where I work) just won a radio contest. The morning DJ is going to deliver 6 pizzas to us for lunch today. I declare today Purchasing Agent Appreciation Day.

A few days ago the Screencasters got several emails where the senders wished us to be fed into Miro (the old Democracy Player). I had fiddled with the Democracy Player quite a while ago, maybe when I was on ubuntu Hoary. I thought it was kind of neat but it wasn’t for me in the end.

Last night I decided to give Miro a proper install on my openSUSE 10.3 box. I fired up VirtualBox a couple of days ago and installed Miro on ubuntu Gutsy. Worked like a charm on that distro and installed in like a minute. openSUSE wasn’t so easy. There is no current RPM for it so I downloaded the source so that I could compile it. This is what sent me into a treasure hunt for an entire hour looking for all of the dependent packages so the thing would compile.

Before I got too deep into it I ran over to the Suse forums and asked for some advice. No one was really interested except for one, so he and I tried it together until we both got it installed. I’m not sure the average person would want to go through what we did last night. It was literally a compile until it errored out and then we had to solve the error puzzle before we could continue onto the next step. Cripes! It felt like a game after awhile but we were both determined to get it installed.

In the end I installed so many packages just to get Miro running that I lost track of what needed to be done so that I could help someone else. Which…is why I do not recommend installing this until an RPM is released (hopefully by Guru or Packman, our main community packagers for Suse). I think I did read somewhere where someone made an RPM for openSUSE 10.2 but it was for a much older release. I wanted the spankin’ new Miro 1.0. Miro might be better off if it made an Autopackage rather than supply RPM’s and DEB’s. Of course, maybe it’s not that easy. What the Hell do I know?

So to the original emailers…see what you put me through? :p The next thing Richard and I need to figure out is how to add a video feed into Miro so that our viewers can get to our videos. I am still unsure how to do this so any tips would be appreciated. Not sure if we have everything that we need already with our present RSS feed or if I have to make another just for videos. Nevertheless, I hope that part is easier than compiling Miro. In the meantime you can watch our limited selection on YouTube and the one that I have on blip.tv.