NMBLOOKUP: Looking up IP address of SMB and NETBIOS names on OSX

How to Look up the IP address of SMB and NETBIOS names on OSX.

You know how it is. In your browse list you see a whole bunch of machines, and there's one you want to connect to by IP. On a windows machine you would just do

ping machine

and it would call the local NETBIOS or WINS database.

No such luck on Macs. What you can do instead is to use NMBLOOKUP

$ NMBLOOKUP machine
querying machine on 192.168.0.255
192.168.0.17 machine

Google Voice: dialling from a web page

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/kcnhkahnjcbndmmehfkdnkjomaanaooo?hl=en-au

Howto: Sipgate Firefox extension: SipgateFFX Your login information is wrong

How to fix SipgateFFX: Your login information is wrong


The SipgateFFX is quite a cool addon. But it doesn't exactly give you a lot of feedback.

After some trial and error I discovered that if you have a regular individual account, you need to deselect 'I'm using sipgate team'.

Your username is your Sipgate website username, not your SIP ID, and the password is your Sipgate website password, not your SIP password.

If it is working, on web pages with phone numbers you should see some modifications. Doesn't work for phone numbers in gmail though.

Howto copy GPS EXIF data to a new file

Some image editing programs don't copy the GPS EXIF data, or maybe there was a problem with adding the GPS data. EXIF tool can copy specific tags into a different file:

exiftool -tagsfromfile source.jpg -GPS:all destination.jpg

Nice!

iPhone Bluetooth Support

Support is really an oxymoron in the case of the iPhone... basically with 3.1 it has virtually nothing. Maybe v4 will bring some more goodies?

iPhone Support:

Hands-Free Profile (HFP)
Headset Profile (HSP)

iPhone Does Not Support:

Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP)
Audio/Video Remote Control Profile (AVRCP)
Basic Imaging Profile (BIP)
Basic Printing Profile (BPP)
Cordless Telephony Profile (CTP)
Device ID Profile (DID)
Dial-up Networking Profile (DUN)
Fax Profile (FAX)
File Transfer Profile (FTP)
General Audio/Video Distribution Profile (GAVDP)
Generic Access Profile (GAP)
Generic Object Exchange Profile (GOEP)
Human Interface Device Profile (HID)
Intercom Profile (ICP)
Object Push Profile (OPP)
Personal Area Networking Profile (PAN)
Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP)
Serial Port Profile (SPP)
Service Discovery Application Profile (SDAP)
SIM Access Profile (SAP,SIM)
Synchronisation Profile (synch)
Video Distribution Profile (vdp)
Wireless Application Protocol Bearer (WAPB)

Photographing the Milky Way

Last year I was fortunate enough to go to Tenerife where, in the volcano's crater, there is not much light pollution so you can see the milky way. Unfortunately I didn't get very good photographs because I didn't have my tripod, having to rest my camera on some clothing on the roof of the car.

Luckily I am going back, and this time I'll have my tripod. But its just a regular tripod, not motorized or anything.

So now I looked into how to take good photos of the milky way, and I've discovered a few things:

1. If the moon is up, it'll put too much light into the sky. Check timeanddate.com site where you can put in different dates and locations to see when the moon rises and sets.
   
   
2. I didn't really know what settings to use, so I tried ISO 2500, f/2,8, 25 seconds, which got me
   
   

   From (Very) Amateur AstroPhotography

   
   ie quite a bit of light pollution, and, blurred stars.
   
   
3. There is always light pollution , which means that if you increase the exposure by increasing the exposure time, you will actually only brighten the sky. Its unlikely you'll get to capture more stars, planets etc
   
   
   
4. Even relatively dim objects will, at the setting above, cause sensor bloom ie the sensor will go to 255,255,255. This means that you should use the widest aperture you have.
   
   
5. The stars move surprisingly fast. With a 50mm lens on my D300 ie 75mm equivalent, for a 30s exposure I found the stars travelled about 7 or 8 pixels ie the point of light were not points anymore but trails:
   
   
   
   So I set out to find what a better exposure would be, and discovered that with an exposure time of 5s the stars moved 1 or 2 pixels:
   
   
   An alternative would be to use a wider lens. A 25mm lens would produce half the movement relative to pixels ie 30s exposure would give 3 or 4 pixels of movement, 12.5mm would produce maybe 2 pixels. My problem is that my Tokina 12-24 has a maximum aperture of f/4, and my Tamron 17-50 is f/2.8. So at 17mm on the Tamron 30s would give me ~3 pixels of movement.
   

So there's my answer. 5s f/1.8 highest ISO without getting too much noise. When I'm there I'll try both.

Final tip. Use a cable release because any slight movement of the camera will cause the stars to become trails.

Howto: Use resynthesizer for GIMP on OSX

Who needs Content Sensitive Fill on Photoshop CS5? here's how to do it with GIMP for free!

Howto: Use resynthesizer for GIMP on OSX

Resynthesizer is a great plugin that can create textures based on an arbitrary input.

Here's a photo I took, and the angle of the sun meant I got my own shadow in it.


Using resynthesizer I can quickly create some new texture there to replace the shadowed area.


The plugin is included with the OSX version of GIMP from gimp.lisanet.de (thank you!). For windows and linux you need to download it from www.logarithmic.net/pfh/resynthesizer.

Here's what I did.

For me it seems that the plugin doesn't work if you have selected the background.

So I selected an area to be the texture source and pasted that as a new layer, its called clipboard.



Then I selected a part of the background and pasted into a new layer. Its called clipboard#1.




You'll see that GIMP places the copied image right at the top of the picture. So drag it back down to align with the background.


Then with the layer clipboard#1 selected, use the lassoo tool to select the area to be resynthesized.


Then from filters>map select resynthesize



In the dialog, deselect "Make horizontally tileable" and "Make vertically tileable" and in the "Texture source" box make sure you select the layer with the sampled texture. You can check by seeing the thumbnail preview.



Click OK, and the plugin does its work.

And here's the result. I've left the marching ants so you can see the old and the new.


and here's it without the marching ants.


You may need to play around with the exact source texture area, and on the 'Tweaks' tab there are some settings to fine tune what the plugin does.