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.

To run a JAR file from the command line in ubuntu using the following command:

java -jar filename.jar

Otherwise it is also possible to enable double clicking to run jar files too by the following simple steps:

1. Find the .jar file in the File Browser (a.k.a Nautilus)
2. Right click the .jar file > Properties
3. Click on the “Open With” tab along the top
4. Change the bullet to be Sun Java 6 Runtime
5. Click Close and you’re done.

Now you should be able to just double click the file and it will run just like most other files!

The file ‘/path/file.exe’ is not marked as executable.  If this was downloaded or copied form an untrusted source, it may be dangerous to run.  For more details, read about the executable bit.

While re-installing Spotify on my Desktop I came across an unusual error while trying to run the .exe through wine (shown above) and here’s a really simple way of fixing it:

1. Right click the .exe
2. Properties
3. Under the Permssions tab make sure “Allow executing file as program” is checked
4. Click Close and you should be able to now run it through wine..

Quite a few times I have encountered this problem, which I think is caused when the soundcard was recently used by another program and might still be busy but it means Spotify can’t play music, so a quick fix for this is to load winecfg and test your sound card which seems to force wine into tacking control of the it.

1. Close Spotify
2. In terminal type winecfg
3. Click on the Audio tab (should be in the top middle)
4. Click “Test Audio” and if you hear a sound this should work..
5. Re-open Spotify and check a track, if it’s playing it’s worked otherwise you may have a different issue..

At work I can’t afford to have my Ubuntu system update and possibly wipe out some important libraries I need, and I get pretty tired of closing the Update Manager every time it decides I need to update so here’s how to stop it:

1. System > Administration > Update Manager
2. Open Settings (in the bottom left corner)
3. Under Automatic Updates
4. Uncheck “Check for updates: “
5. Hit Close and the settings should be saved.

The sound in Spotify was jumping or skipping much like a scratched disk would. After a little investigation I found a couple of ways to fix it with people saying one worked but the other didn’t for them. (Solution 2 worked for me).

Solution 1:

Open terminal and type:

winecfg

Click on the Audio tab along the top and remove ALSA and try OSS as your sound drivers

Solution 2:

gedit ~/.asoundrc

add the following line to the file:
pcm.pulse { type pulse } ctl.pulse { type pulse } pcm.!default { type pulse } ctl.!default { type pulse }

gedit /etc/pulse/daemon.conf

change the following to lines as shown below

default-fragments = 8
default-fragment-size-msec = 5

I recently installed Fedora 12 on my desktop alongside Ubuntu Karmic and Windows 7, however doing so I overwrite my grub which meant my Ubuntu system was hidden. To fix this is pretty simple..
Insert your Ubuntu 9.10 Live CD
Click “Try Ubuntu without any changes to your computer”
Once loaded click Applications > Accessories > Terminal
sudo fdisk -l That’s an L (not caps)

This displays all partitions on your system, in my case the installation of my Ubuntu system was /dev/sda5 so replace this for yours in the rest of the code.
sudo mount /dev/sda5 /mnt
sudo grub-install –root-directory=/mnt/ /dev/sda
If all goes successfully you should be done, try rebooting and see if your Ubuntu shows up.

symbol lookup error: /usr/local/lib/libhighgui.so.4: undefined symbol: av_free_packet

To fix it simply make sure /usr/local/lib is in your library path by using the following command:

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/local/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

Error: Dependency is not satisfiable: libstdc++5
This is a simple fix, just grab the libstdc++5 package for your architecture from here:

http://packages.debian.org/stable/base/libstdc++5

UPDATE:
There is a much easier way of installing player/stage in Ubuntu 9.10 as pointed out by Arkapravo in the comments, however this is the 2.0.4-3.3ubuntu3 where as of 21/May/2010 the latest version is 3.0.1 if this causes any issues with your needs.
sudo apt-get install robot-player stage
also check out: http://icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php?title=Player/stage
END UPDATE

I was able to install Player but not Stage using the usual install method which can be seen below how I did it:
You will need to have cmake and build-essentials installed:
sudo apt-get install cmake build-essential
How To Install Player:
Player provides a network interface to a variety of robot and sensor hardware. Player’s client/server model allows robot control programs to be written in any programming language and to run on any computer with a network connection to the robot. Player supports multiple concurrent client connections to devices, creating new possibilities for distributed and collaborative sensing and control.
Download the latest tar (I used player-3.0.0.tar.gz in this guide, if those numbers come up just change them with the version you are using)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/playerstage/files/

Extract
tar zxvf player-3.0.0.tar.gz
cd player-3.0.0
Make a folder to store the build files
mkdir build
cd build
Configure using
cmake ../
Now make and install
make
sudo make install
How To Install Stage:
Stage simulates a population of mobile robots moving in and sensing a two-dimensional bitmapped environment. Various sensor models are provided, including sonar, scanning laser rangefinder, pan-tilt-zoom camera with color blob detection and odometry.
Install some needed libraries:
sudo apt-get install libfltk1.1 pkg-config libtool
You will also need to install openGl:
sudo apt-get install libglu1-mesa-dev freeglut3-dev mesa-common-dev
You will need to download and install fltk-1.1.x and do the usual:
(I used fltk-1.1.10rc3 found here)
tar zxvf fltk-1.1.10rc3-source.tar.gz
cd fltk-1.1.10rc3/
./configure –enable-gl
make
sudo make install
Download and extract Stage (as you can see I used 3.2.2)

http://sourceforge.net/projects/playerstage/files/

tar zxvf Stage-3.2.2-Source.tar.gz
cd Stage-3.2.2
Make somewhere to store the build files
mkdir build
cd build
Configure:
cmake ../
Make and install:
make
sudo make install
Currently this will output the following error:
collect2: ld returned 1 exit status
make[2]: *** [libstage/stage] Error 1
make[1]: *** [libstage/CMakeFiles/stagebinary.dir/all] Error 2
make: *** [all] Error 2
I will make an update on this post when I find out how to fix this, comment if you know how!