Programming and technology blog

Sample arrows that you can create with GIMP plugins If you want to create professionally-looking arrows with GIMP because you are tired of creating arrows that look like you drawn them drunk, then don't despair. I will show you three GIMP plugins for creating great-looking arrows: ArrowsCreator-0.4 is a Python plugin that supports 7 styles of arrows arrow.scm by B-Ranger is a script-fu plugin to "draw an arbitrary arrow into an image or a new layer" arrow.scm by programmer_ceds is a modified version of the previous script that allows you to draw curved arrows ArrowsCreator-04 Here are the steps to install the Python plugin ArrowsCreator-04 : Download the zip file ArrowsCreator-0.4.py.zip , and extract the two files ArrowsCreator-0.4.py and ArrowsModule.py Copy the two Python files into the plugins folder which on macOS is located at /Applications/GIMP.app/Contents/Resources/lib/gimp/2.0/plug-ins For other platforms, check out this guide

markdown-toc ( version 0.4.2 ) is an Atom ( version 1.28.0 ) package that generates a table of contents from all your markdown headings. However, when generating links for headings having underscores (e.g. "The file logging_conf.json") by markdown-toc , the underscores are ignored in the generated relative URLs. GitHub needs the underscores within the headings' URLs so your internal links work correctly. Underscores are ignored by default by the markdown-toc package when generating the relative URLs for the internal links in the TOC Thus, you will have to modify the regex used by markdown-toc for ignoring some characters (e.g. underscore) in the headings when forming the relative links. In order to do so, do the following: Go to Atom->Preferences... , then click on Open Config Folder . On the Project tab, search for the file TOC.coffee that you can find within the folder packages/markdown-toc/lib/ . Find the line hash = hash.replace /[^a-z0-9\u

If you are adding GIFs on your GitHub pages (e.g. README.md), and are getting hit with the " Content length exceeded " message when accessing the said GIFs, it means that your GIFs are too big (more than 5 MB). Even if the GIFs were initially uploaded to a third site (e.g. blogspot.com, or giphy.com), they are eventually copied to GitHub servers, and if your GIFs are too big (e.g. more than 5 MB), they will no be shown (only the dreaded error message will be seen). To solve this problem, you have two choices : Commit your big GIFs to your GitHub repository: you might have other problems eventually when pulling from your repository, since these big GIFs will also be pulled locally Resize your GIFs : go back to the drawing board, and play with your video editing/GIF making software (e.g. PicGIF Lite) by trimming some images, lowering the video resolution (# pixels wide and tall), or speeding up the video. The best solution and the one I opted is the second one

There are two tools I tried on a  Mac to generate a movie from a sequence of jpg images: iMovie : very complete video editor, i.e. lots of interesting features such as adding sound to your video, titles and transitions. Works on jpg and png files. However, the video encoding is a slow process if applied on too many images (e.g. more than 1000). Official website . I tested with version 10.1.8 Time Lapse Assembler : very simple interface, i.e. a lot less features than iMovie.  Works on jpg files only. Great if you are only interested in generating a simple movie from a sequence of images without adding sound, titles, or transitions to your video. Application works great when applying it on lots of images (e.g. more than 1000). Official website . I tested with version 1.5.3 Contents    1. Mini-review #1: iMovie    2. Mini-review #2: Time Lapse Assembler    3.  Use case: Time Lapse Assembler applied to security camera images Mini-review #1: iMovie When using iMovie, i

There are two tools I tested to make a split screen movie on a Mac: iMovie: video editor from Apple, official website . I tested with  version 10.1.8 OpenShot:  free and open source video editing software that works on FreeBSD/Linux/macOS/Windows, official website . I tested with version 2.4.1 Contents     1. Split screen layout selected     2. iMovie         2.1 Steps to make a split screen movie with iMovie     3. OpenShot         3.1 Steps to make a split screen movie with OpenShot Split screen layout selected More specifically, I wanted to create a split screen movie with the following layout having a 16:9 aspect ratio: Figure 1. Split screen layout: Movie 3 should take the right half of the screen My basic motion detection system generates 3 videos, and I wanted to combine them in a single movie for better visualization. Movie 3 should take the right half of the screen because it is the most important video of the three: it tracks the moving objects