Using GIMP to get rid of cellulitis

This is a short note about how to get rid of cellulitis on natural skin, using GIMP 2.6 (will most likely work on earlier versions as well). The truth is that I don’t really understand why this works, but it fixed a nasty case of ugly skin texture in a low key photo. The trick [...]

Color Range Mapping on GIMP 2.6: Getting it back.

One of the nice things about upgrading software, is not only that there are a lot of new, confusing and useless features, but also that things that used to work in the past don’t anymore. At best, features which one used a lot have completely disappeared. Upgrading to Fedora 12, with its GIMP 2.6, was [...]

Enumerating FSM states automatically for Verilog with Perl

Having a pretty large state machine, I wanted the states enumerated automatically. Or at least not do the counting by hand. I mean, doing it once is maybe bearable, but what if I’ll want to insert a new state in the future? So what I was after is something like module main_state #(parameter ST_start = [...]

ImageMagick convert: Making viewable copies of underexposed images

The problem is relatively simple:  Sometimes I take images that are deliberately underexposed, or such that have important parts in the dark areas. This is then fixed with GIMP. But in order to choose which image to play with, I need to those details visible in some test image, so I can browse them with [...]

Adding remarks to an existing pdf file with pdftk

This is how to solve a special case, when a PDF file is given, but I want to add my remarks in some free space. The trick is to write the remarks into another single-page pdf file, so that the new text occupies the blank area in the original. In my case, I needed the [...]

When Firefox starts up sooo slowly.

A short note, since it’s so simple and so important. When Firefox gets painfully slow, just compact its Sqlite databases. As has been pointed out elsewhere, the quick fix is to close Firefox, go to where it holds its files, find the .sqlite files, and go (bash under Cygwin, in my case): $ for i [...]

LaTeX, pdf and imported 90-degrees rotated EPS images

The problem: In LaTeX, if I import an EPS file with \includegraphics and rotate it by 90 degrees, hell breaks lose in the resulting pdf file. My processing chain, in case you wonder, is latex, dvips and ps2pdf. I avoid pdflatex since it won’t import EPS (as far as I can recall) but only images [...]

Fedora: Adding an i686 repository on an x86_64 system

IMPORTANT: This post may very well be useless mumbo-jumbo of how to do something that should never be done anyhow. I post it only because I had it all written down neatly when I discovered that I could have skipped it all. From what I’ve seen, every you’ll need is in the x86_64 repository, including [...]

A bash wrapper script for setting up environment variables

The problem Sometimes software packages require setting some environment variables for its proper execution. When these variables clearly have no effect on any other applications in the system, that’s fine. When they want to manipulate some sensitive variables, which other applications may depend on, that’s a whole different story. When it’s a single executable, the [...]

Virtualization: Notes to self

This is just things I wrote down while playing with QEMU/KVM virtualization, for my own purposes of packing two existing computers into a third one. This is just some random jots. I’ve written a similar post in 2024 (14 years after this one). Log files There are definitely two files one wants to peek at [...]