Raw pictures can have non-efficient file names from the digital camera. This makes them hard to organize and list. Raw pictures can be huge in file size. This is a problem for storage, backup, transfer, upload and download. Raw pictures can contain hidden data from your camera, camera software and picture editing software. The hidden data can include automatic data, such as timestamps, face identification and software details. That can be a security problem.

Therefore, you might want to prepare raw pictures for sharing over the internet.

In the following example, we will prepare a number of raw pictures from a digital camera for sharing over the internet.

The pictures are rotated according to their orientation data in Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF). The orientation data in EXIF is then reset. The pictures are renamed according to the timestamp in EXIF. The pictures will have their EXIF header removed for security reasons. All this is done using jhead, which a JPEG EXIF header manipulation tool, that is perfect for this task.

jhead -autorot -ft -nf%Y-%m-%d-%H-%M-%S -purejpg *.JPG

The pictures are resized. This makes them smaller in file size and makes them fit the target. In this example, we will prepare pictures for sharing on Facebook, which uses a maximum size of 720 pixels. This is done using mogrify, which is perfect command line processing tool for this task. mogrify is a part of ImageMagick. If the picture is horizontal, the picture is resized to a maximum width of 720 pixels. If the picture is vertical, the picture is resized to a maximum height of 720 pixels. The aspect ratio remains the same.

mogrify -resize 720x720 *.jpg

If needed, we can apply grey scaling and then a blue tint. This effect will make all pictures appear blue.

mogrify -modulate 100,0,100 -fill 'blue' -tint 25 *.jpg

If needed, we can add a watermark. In this example, we will set the font type to the Kompakt TrueType font, the font size to 36, the place to bottom right, the font outline color to white, the transparency to 30% (0.3), the font RGB color code to 200,0,200 (pink), the transparency to 30%, the location to 5,0 (a little more space to the right edge) and our website address as the watermark.

mogrify -font /usr/share/fonts/truetype/opentech/kompakt.ttf -pointsize 36 -draw "gravity southeast stroke rgba(255,255,255,0.3) fill rgba(200,0,200,0.3) text 5,0 'www.opentech.dk'" *.jpg

Open Tech SmbA can help your company automate picture and image processing. Contact Open Tech SmbA by mail at opentech@opentech.dk or call Open Tech SmbA at +45 43 62 22 88.

Visit YouTube and find the video clip, that you wish to add (embed). Find the URL field. Click the Customize button. It looks like a star. Choose your preferred settings, that will work with the design of your website. Copy the HTML code, next to Embed, in the field.

Visit your website or blog post. Switch to HTML. Click the anchor point, which is the place, where the video clip will be inserted and anchored to. Paste the HTML code. Apply your preferred settings, such as alignment, vertical space and horizontal space. A CMS has a button for this because the CMS will change the HTML code.

In this article, we have ambedded the System Administrator’s Day song by Wes Borg.

However, we generally recommend, that you use a link to the video clip. This way, the video clip can be viewed in other resolutions – and the viewer can read comments, bookmark it and more.

A quick way to make a website or a blog post printer friendly is to use an online utility, that will read the URL, that you wish to print, convert it for print and offer you to print or save in PDF. The website or blog post can offer a print friendly link to the online utility – or the visitor of the website can use the online utility manually.

We can recommend PrintFriendly.

Personal data can be used for theft of identity, criminal activities, revenge and other critical abuse, that can give you severe trouble with authorities, debt and other traumatic events. You can as innocent even get arrested and emprisoned.

Make sure, that the personal data, you give, is proportional to your goal. An example of this is when you as a private person is buying a service or a product from a private company – and the private company asks for your social security number. This is not proportional to the goal and should be denied.

Make sure, that your service memberships, subscriptions and accounts use different  usernames, passwords and mail addresses. An example of this is when you use the same password for all services, such as computer, mail and social networks – and a hacker obtains the password from the least secure service. This might give the hacker access to surprising amounts of personal data about you and your relations.

Make sure, that you have a policy for using social networks. The policy should include your rules for privacy settings, personal data, content, applications, quizzes, relations and sharing. An example of this is when you make unverified relations or accept applications and share personal data, that can be abused.

Make sure, that you have a policy for content of conversions, chats and communication. You can assume, that most conversations are logged, monitored and recorded. This includes public areas, rooms of interest, fixed phones, mobile phones, messaging, mail and social networks.

Make sure, that you use secure encryption when transmitting or storing private data. Use digital signing and encryption of mail. An example of this is when you submit credit card details to an insecure non-encrypted payment service. Another example is when you store private data on an insecure non-encrypted computer, which is then lost during transportation, subject to theft or hacking.

Make sure, that you use and surf the internet anonymously. Replace the domain name service (DNS) servers of your internet service provider (ISP) with open DNS servers. Replace the mail service of your ISP with your own mail service. Replace the proxy server of your ISP or the direct connection to the internet with a connection through a network of virtual tunnels, such as Tor.

Make sure, that electronic devices, that leaves digital tracks, are turned off or is offline when not in use. This include mobile phones, computers, watches, sports equipment, security wear and other devices, that use trackable systems, such as GSM, GPRS, GPS and other networks.

Make sure, that you can get advice from a system administrator and a criminal defence lawyer.

Learn more at European Association for The Defence of Human Rights, European Digital Rights and IT Political Association of Denmark (IT Politisk Forening).

Which method you use depends on the operating system, web server, language and content management system.

If you use the FreeBSD operating system and the Apache web server, a simple solution is to use the htpasswd utility.

In the following example, two users are given access to a password protected part of a website. Each user will be given a username and a password. The same commands can be used for changing password.

nano -w www/www.foobar.com/ppc/.htaccess

AuthUserFile /usr/home/foobar/www/www.foorbar.com/ppc/.htpasswd
AuthType Basic
AuthName "Foobar Password Protected Content"
Require valid-user

htpasswd -c www/www.foobar.com/ppc/.htpasswd ann
htpasswd www/www.foobar.com/ppc/.htpasswd bob

When opening the password protected part of the website, a dialog appears, and, if correct password is given, gives access to the password protected content.

Note, that website password protection should not be considered safe in general.

NextGEN Gallery handles pictures much better. It is easy to create a new gallery, upload one or more pictures into it – and then insert a picture from the gallery or the complete gallery into a post. The way, that NextGEN Gallery displays pictures is neat, smooth and fast. It supports full screen.

This procedure will install NextGEN Gallery.

cd wp-content/plugins
ftp http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/nextgen-gallery.zip
unzip nextgen-gallery.zip
rm nextgen-gallery.zip

Open the website. Click “Log in” or “Site Admin”. Click “Plugins”. Find “NextGEN Gallery”. Click “Activate”.

The plugin is now installed and it is ready to use.

Click “Gallery”. Click “Upload pictures”. Set the value of “New Gallery” to the title of your new gallery, such as “2009-04-16 The Queen and Chris-Craft”. Click “Add gallery”. Click “Upload Images”. Click “Browse…”. Select file with MouseLeft. Select more files with Ctrl and MouseLeft. Click “OK”. Set the value of “in to” to the new gallery. Click “Upload images”.

If you want to insert  gallery when adding or editing a post, then click the “Add NextGEN Gallery” button. Set the value of “Select gallery” to the new gallery. Click “Insert”.

If you want to insert a picture from one of the galleries, then click the “Add NextGEN Gallery” button. Click “Picture”. Set the value of “Select picture” to the picture. Set the value of “Float” to either “Left”, “Center” or “Right”. Click “Insert”.

PS is used on stable media, such as a memory stick or a digital video disc (DVD). The related MPEG transport stream (TS, MPEG-TS) is used in unstable media, such as transmitting over the internet.

In this example, we will go through the proces of making movies from the video clips.

We turn the DVR on and attach the USB cable to the DVR and the computer. On the DVR, we select access to internal or external memory (memory stick) as necessary. The operating system Ubuntu presents the MPEG-PS video clips, which we transfer to a local directory. It is not recommended to edit video clips, that is stored on a network file system. This might result in problems – and the operating system behind the network file system might even backup the huge amounts of temporary files.

In our example, the video editing program Kino is not installed yet. We install it from Applications and Ubuntu Software Center.

We are now ready to edit our video clips from the DVR. However, we do not run Kino from Applications, Sound & Video and Kino. Instead, we right click the first MPEG-PS video clip and open it with Kino.

This is important because Kino reads aspect settings from the first frame. If no frame is available at run time, then it defaults to wrong aspect settings, that will result in black borders and wrong aspect settings. This is a bug, that has never been fixed. Also, we go to Edit, Preferences and look under Default. We confirm, that the aspect ratio is correct. If not, we change correct it and close Kino. This setting is only read on start. This seems to be another bug.

Kino offers to import and convert our video clip into raw digital video (DV, DV-DIF) format, which is used in video editing. The resolution and the frame rate of the video channel remains the same. The sample rate of the audio channels remains the same. We drag the MPEG-PS video clips into Kino.

We are now ready to edit the video clips. We go to Edit. The purpose of this step is to end up with a series of scenes. Use the drag, cut, copy, paste, split, join and timeline tools. Keep it as simple and as short as possible. Save the project at this point.

We can now add special effects as necessary. This is done in FX. There are two types of effects. One is scene effects. One is transition effects. The scene effects are applied (rendered) on one scene at a time. If transitions effects is needed, such as cross fading, then render these.

If titles are needed, then prepare a scene of reading time length and render these. We can recommend the following themes.

Theme  Font               Opa  Colour  O  Opa  Colour  Align   Fa
Pinky  Market Regular 56  200  F52AF5  1  202  451342  Center  25

If audio dubbing or mixing is needed, such as adding background music, then render these. If other video or audio filters are needed, then render these.

Kino is now ready to export the final movie. Save.

Now, we are almost done. We will now want to export our series of scenes into the final movie. This is done in Export. We select every 1 frame of all.

There are different movie formats available. You should choose the movie format, that suits your purpose. If your final movie is to be uploaded to YouTube or Facebook, you might want to choose Flash. This format is also a good choice for MPEG1 video clips with bad frame rates and aspect settings.

In our example, we choose the MPEG1 format. We open the MPEG tab. Set File to the filename of the final movie.

An example of a valid filename is “mpeg1″ or “flash-broadband”. Do not include a complex path, the home hyphen or a file type suffix in order to avoid weird errors, such as “Error writing to KINO/MJPEG audio – aborting”.

We set the File Format to Generic MPEG1. This format can be viewed by most users and does not require the DivX software. We click Export and Kino now writes the audio track (MP2), write the video track (MPV) and join (multiplex) them (MPG or MPEG). The multiplexer is MJPEG. The final movie is stored in the user home.

The following are other acceptable test results of a scene with a duration of 6,5 sec.

Encoding                    Time   MB  Pixels  fps   kHz kbps
Generic MPEG1               0:54  1,1  720x576  25  48,0  224
Generic MPEG2               0:29  2,6  720x576  25  48,0  224
Flash / Broadband           1:52  0,7  384x288  25  44,1   NA
DivX Single / Broadband     0:56  0,5  512x288  25  32,0   64
DivX Single / Medium        0:54  0,5  512x288  25  44,1  128
DivX Single / Best          1:20  4,3  720x576  25  48,0  192

We copy files as necessary and delete the temporary files.

In this example, we will install Graphviz on the Ubuntu operating system, which is an open source utility, that can read structural information from text format in the standard dot language and present it in graphics, such as a flowchart, proces or network diagram. It can read from the command line or from a script. It can write to a graphics format, such as PNG, JPG or PDF.

Graphviz is bundled with a number of filters, that draws the structural information in different ways.

• dot is a filter for drawing directed graphs.
• neato is a filter for drawing undirected graphs.
• twopi is a filter for drawing radial layouts of graphs.
• circo is a filter for drawing circular layout of graphs.
• fdp is a filter for drawing undirected graphs.

Graphviz is available in the package system of Ubuntu.

sudo apt-get install graphviz

That’s it! We can now draw directly from the command line or in a text file.

echo "digraph G {A->B->C;A->D->E}" | dot -Tpng > abcde.png

nano -w abcde.dot

digraph G
{
A->B->C
A->D->E
}

dot -Tpng -o abcde.png abcde.dot

This is the procedure for creating a favorites icon and making a website load it.

We boot an Ubuntu computer and open The Gimp, which is a recommendable graphics editor, and create a new image with a size of 16 pixels x 16 pixels. We set the zoom level to 1600 percent and create the image. We can use all of the squares as the browsers will add a margin around the icon. When done, we save a copy of the image in the PNM format, which is the format, used by the image conversion utility, we will be using.

If not installed, we install the image conversion utility Netpbm.

We use Netpbm to convert the image to the favorites icon format.

ppmtowinicon -output favicon.ico favicon.pnm

We transfer the favorites icon to a directory of the website, set permissions as necessary and make the website load it by inserting the following links in the header section, right below the title tag. Test, that the browser can view the icon by direct path.

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="/wp-content/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />
<link rel="icon" href="/wp-content/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon" />

DivX

Computers, that are based on the Windows operating system, might not be able to play Xvid or DivX movie clips in the built-in movie player.

This procedure will make it possible for those computers to play Xvid and DivX movie clips in the default movie player.

Install the free DivX Codec software for Windows. You only need the DivX Codec component, thus you can disable other components, other related software and registration details.

That’s it.