Category: Computers and Internet

Twirls experiment

I’m not sure if I really liked this but looking more at this and trying different options might make me to.

While post-processing can be a cumbersome, long process – you can’t really help it to make sure that your photos look good. I’m going to try making this chore a little interesting by cranking up the process to come up with something line this

The twirl experiment

Another Tiger Hills Sunrise
The original photo that was made to this is

Found the steps in this photo that was edited in Photoshop CS6

  • Adjustments were – Filter – Pixelate – Mezzotint 100% + (medium lines) OK
  • Filter – Blur – Radial Blur (Amount 100%, Blur Method set to Zoom, Quality set to Best) OK
  • Select filter and at the top of the drop menu, you want to select Radial Blur again and then do that one more time by selecting Filter and choosing Radial blur again.
  • Then you want to copy the layer by dragging it downwards into the symbol that says create a new layer. This icon is on the left of the small trash can in the layers pane.
  • Once you have a copy, select the top layer and just above it in the layers pane you will see the NORMAL drop down, select this and then click on lighten on the drop down menu.
  • Still on the top layer, select Filter – Distort – Twirl
  • Change the angle to whatever you like, I started with -100 and changed it slightly, you can see it change when you change the percentage and decide what percentage looks best.

Upload photos to Instagram from Dropbox

Everybody’s posting to Instagram and some even asked – “Oh! You don’t use it?” – so I had to bite the bullet and went about signing up for it.

Here’s a flower photo that I did sometime ago!

Immediate next issue I ran into is how do I get to transfer my photos to the phone because Instagram is a very mobile based app and I use my DSLR to take photos, process and publish – not to say the occasional cellphone photos. I looked around for options, one was emailing it to me which was very cumbersome. You download the photo on your phone and share it from thereon. I looked around the internet and found using Dropbox being a great option. The references I could find so far had obsolete screenshots and I often tend to miss the method – so writing it down here for reference.

I signed up for an exclusive dropbox account, just for this purpose. I use another one for work and didn’t want to mess it up. I use the Web interface to upload the files – photos for the current sake – but have the Dropbox app installed on my Android phone. You could get it for an iPhone too. Instagram itself doesn’t look great on Tablets, it’s a Phone only app.

Here’s how you post directly from Dropbox to Instagram

Once you upload files to Dropbox from your computer, you can open the app on your mobile and see them listed right away. Tap on the downward point arrow in the list to open the context popup.

Dropbox to Instagram - Step 1
Step 1 – Open the context popup

Tap on the Context Menu – marked as 2 in the screenshot above – and drag it upwards till you see Export.

Step 2 - Select Export
Step 2 – Select Export

As a last step, you just need to select Instagram from the Export list pop-up and you’ll see the photo in the Instagram app.

Step 3 - Select Instagram and you're on your way!
Step 3 – Select Instagram and you’re on your way!

While I don’t use an iPhone, it should be much similar to it. Let me know if you want me to look it up for you!

The Opensource playing tricks?

By the time it was 5:30am there’s a flurry of notification beeps from the tablet and phone. Last time it happened a few weeks ago, there was a flickr user who chose to favourite most of the stream – it brought me a smile! I’d sent him a thank you note!

Purple Sunbird

It’s usually UTC 0:00 hours when some automated hackers decide bombard servers with Denial of Services (DoS) attacks. And it’s the turn to one of our servers. So the notifications were of the email alerts! Time to call it Happy Friday and go about it.

2014-12-12_13-56-00-rs-timeout

Nobody provides support for >geek<ily configured servers and sysadmins would sneer at you if you have custom ports to access systems. But the first thing that you’ll hear “You should think of adding Load Balancers and they start only at $10 a month!”. So, to cater to a DDOS attack, the first thing that we need is a load balancer. And the capacity that you’ve built it is running at 98% idle overall – at all times!

I had to drop the plans of dropping my son to the school and I’ll be automatically voided of the small conversation that I could have with him. The rest of day, anyways, goes into meting out the problems that the world is facing!

So it takes three hours of fighting with the text prompts, google searches, teas, having to ignore the sunbirds that have turned extremely purple to find a new route that people have taken to take me for a ride. Maybe it was the same last time but I wasn’t aware. So each time it’s a new type of attack and I have to learn and add to my notes.

Turns out it’s a WordPress vulnerability that’s been discovered and supposedly fixed, has surfaced again. And it seems to be on the surfacing mode all the time – at least 4th time per people’s rambles. I really wonder if WordPress is really bothered about fixing these. For I see a lot of folks moving to their premium hosted solution and is there some strings attached?

At least, I ended feeling good having gotten over it at 9:30am – a flat 3 hours of Hollywood movie time, much like The Matrix. Back in the balcony, we had an army of tailorbirds that came to wish me for the good recovery. I’ve never seen more than two till then. The usual bulbuls testing the waters of the bird bath. The sunbirds whom I can only hear out of the windows a few moments ago, sticking out their tongues.. The magpie robins and white eyes. Wow, it was just all of them. I decided against running for the camera and continued to sip the tea which my better half got for me. All of it brought me the smile. Did you wonder why I had that Sunbird up there?

All that matters!