Character encoding. Its enough to make grown people break down and weep bitter tears of rage. Perl provides rather good UTF-8 support, and there are some excellent tutorials out there. So, my contribution is more of a checklist and cookbook than a technical explanation._H_UTF-8 In your source …

The other day I had need to make a sort of distressed/grungy/textured looking font using The GIMP. You know the kind of thing. A little googling bought up Grunge texture text from gimp.pixtuts.com, which got me most of the way towards the effect I wanted. This video is my simplified version of t …

One of the roles that I have at work is maintaining the Magento software that runs our ethical gift shop. I recently upgraded one of our Magento installs from 1.5.0.1 to 1.5.1 using the newly introduced mage commandline tool. As regular readers will know I am a bit of a CLI freak, and was happily …

Selective focus tilt/shift photographs can create an amazing toytown feel to them. I’ve used a lensbaby composer to similar effect, for example in my photo set Toytown, but the true master of the art in my opinion is Olivio Barbieri, whose work is truly stonking. Well, the thing is th …

This section will be a collection of tips and things that I have discovered about taking photos and about editing them later on. I am by no means some big shot photographist, so do feel free to correct my naivete in the comments. My photo gallery has (what I consider to be) some of my better pics …

Just a quick update today. I want to make myself a little most popular pages this week for the front page of this site. Now, I am using the lovely Piwik Analytics tool to monitor the site. So I first looked at the Piwik API. That should be the way to do it right? Not quite. The Actions plugin can …

This is a quick tute for folk who want to send email from the commandline under the various Unices, especially those who also need to include attachments. This has been tested on Debian GNU/Linux with Icedove/Thunderbird. We start by simply sending an email from the commandline. I shall use th …

The slider requires javascript. Trying to load it now... $('#slider').flickrshow({ autoplay:true, interval:5000, set:'72157626958402918' }); A few weeks back I was browsing round Perlmonks as is my wont, when I came across planetscape's post How can I …

This is a pretty minimal tip. The other day I was looking for a way to shorten URLs from the commandline. Now the bit.ly API expects you to authenticate before doing any shortening (I’ve not pulled apart the web ui to see if its possible without). The is.gd URL shortener has no such restric …

I don't know if you heard about it but Fabrice Bellard recently made a Javascript PC emulator that could boot a full linux with emacs and vi and even a c compiler. Which is insane. I wanted to check it out, but the core Iceweasel on Debian Squeeze (3.5) isn't up to the job, Fabrice has coded it t …