Spotify the free music application for Windows and Mac has finally been officially ported to Linux, while this is only a preview build and currently unsupported it’s at least a step in the right direction and no more running the Windows version through Wine and all the trouble I had with that.

The main differences in this version is the lack of local music and that it’s only available to Premium subscribers while they are looking in to ways of “reliably” displaying ads for Free and Open users of it’s services.

With simple installation instructions for Ubuntu 10.04 and Debian Squeeze other Linux distribution users may be out in the cold for a while but I’m sure hacks and development with come quickly. Below are the instrutions given on Spotifys secret labs page:

More information can be found on their blog and secret labs pages.

After installing an update to WordPress I received the error:

“Briefly unavailable for scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”

I was unsure if this was down to my hosts servers being temporarily down, going down during the update or if WordPress had simply failed to update whatever it was updating. Turns out it was the latter and it’s really easy to fix, first log on to your ftp, file manager or whatever for your hosting and browse to your wordpress install, in the root of this there should be a .maintenance file, just delete this and everything should be back to normal. Once back in the WordPress dashboard you may be asked to reinstall whatever failed however sometimes it will have completed the install and just not managed to delete this file.

Remember this Photoshop CS5 sneak peak showing off it’s latest and greatest feature Content-Aware Fill a couple months ago, well it turns out a reasonably old plug-in for GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) named Resynthesizer seems to work just as great and because it is what it is, it’s free and open-source.

Installing on Ubuntu 9.10/10.04 install:

or for the Source/Windows/Fedora Core 4 versions see the download section.

Once you have it installed, it’s simple to use really just select something on your image that shouldn’t be there and right click on the selection Filters -> Map -> Resynthesize.. and up should pop an options box, these settings are pretty standard and will get rid of most things given that they aren’t too big. It’s best if you’re not getting the results you want to play around with the settings yourself to get to know them better.

Click after the break for an example with step by step guide.

Example:

Let’s see, we start out with this nice photo of a house but wait.. what are those smelly students doing there? Well, let’s sort that out..

First thing you’ll want to do is grab your best selection tool and cut around the edge of those waste of time students..

Now all you have to do is right click Filters -> Map -> Resynthesize..

Next here, you can just hit the Ok button and watch as they magically disappear (probably back to their germ infested student flat).

Now you can just do that for anything, however while doing the edges some strange things happen with the default settings:

To counteract this, I found unchecking “Make vertically tileable” seemed to fix this and I would assume (without trying) that if you are doing a vertical edge you might want to take off the horizontally tileable option.

This brings the end result to a pretty reasonable (student free) image only after a couple of minutes, much better than could be expected from using the clone tool and whatever other means you would go through.

UPDATE

I now have it working and wrote a guide of how I got it to work -

http://alexsleat.com/2009/12/02/howto-install-opencv-in-ubuntu-karmic-9-10/

END UPDATE

I found a great guide on getting OpenCV to install on Ubuntu Karmic (9.10) –http://ivkin.net/2009/11/installing-opencv-2-0-on-ubuntu-9-10-karmic-koala/

Most the comments show the guide works however I have a couple of problems:

Firstly when reloading the libraries to make opencv show up
ldconfig -v | grep opencv
That results in the following output:
/sbin/ldconfig.real: Cannot stat /lib/i486-linux-gnu: No such file or directory
/sbin/ldconfig.real: Cannot stat /lib64: No such file or directory
/usr/local/opencv/lib:

However continuing on with the installation and it is able to compile all the sample programs, but when attempting to run most of them it seems it fails at running the GUI:
./facedetect
OpenCV Error: Unspecified error (The function is not implemented. Rebuild the library with Windows, GTK+ 2.x or Carbon support. If you are on Ubuntu or Debian, install libgtk2.0-dev and pkg-config, then re-run cmake or configure script) in cvNamedWindow, file highgui/window.cpp, line 100
terminate called after throwing an instance of 'cv::Exception'
Aborted

When I find the fix for this I will make sure to update the post, if you find my post and fix it yourself please leave a comment how you did it.