New and old
For around 4/5 years I have been the proud owner of a Canon Ixus 30. A small and versatile pocket digital camera. But I missed a lot being able to tweak some settings, having manual focus, aperture and exposition controls is fantastic. Moreover, it shoots in RAW.
Using it is quite easy if you have used a previous Canon model and if you have ever touched a digital reflex.
Today, while I was thinking of the best implementation solution for the vector operations, I realised that I am just not motivated by writing a raytracer in Forth. I’ll have to find something more interesting, or at least, more Forth minded to work on.
If I want to raytrace, better to improve the Lisp raytracer, which is sitting idly in my Code/Lisp folder. Steps that will follow in the raytracer path:
- Mr(s) Red Square is doomed to donate
Yes, I know it: it is easy. But I will be doing a wipe and reinstall of my MacBook, and when I need to reinstall everything I want a place to check for the steps I did. I found almost all tips needed here.
The first step is checking for Mercurial (wikipedia) in your system. Open a terminal and type
hg version
If your terminal complains about command not found, you don’t have Mercurial installed.
Last saturday I was in a porting mood, and tackled two interesting packages to have in the Ben NanoNote: yacas and 4th.
Yacas (Yet Another Computer Algebra System) is a very interesting application to have in such a small device. The best calculator I have used is my old faithful HP49g. But in these days, it is bulky, heavy and slow. It was superseded by m48 (a HP48+ emulator) inside my iPod Touch.
Do you own a Mac? I use both MacOS and Linux everyday, and found myself with a problem. Before I found Shutter taking screenshots in Linux felt like a PITA. In MacOS you can take region screenshots by pressing Cmd-Shift-4. And I missed this feature in Linux, until I cared enough to look for a solution.
Shutter was the answer, an open source screenshot grabber that fills my needs, and probably yours too.