Already some time ago Google released version 3.5 and 3.6 of their picture management software Picasa which provides a local face recognition feature which is detecting faces in pictures and does some grouping of similar faces which than can be connected to persons. This does not require to upload your images to any of their servers. As I'm much in favor on deciding where pictures which contain myself and my family are going and I assume that this holds true for most of my friends this seems to be a good solution to get finally some (more) structure in my photo collection. Unfortunately the official Linux version is still 3.0 and lacking this feature.
Long time I did not bother to give any later version a try on Linux but this weekend while I wanted to sort some holiday pictures - I started Picasa while my wifi connection was down. Looking into the empty local folder which usually is mounted with the pictures from the NAS Picasa decided to drop all it's knowledge about the pictures. One connection was up again it started scanning all over the pictures again - ARGHHH. That seemed to be a good point in time to change something in the setup.
Up to know I'm still not aware of a good alternative to Picasa which overcomes the major issue with Picasa - namely not supporting multiuser/single repository setup and being a windows application. Suggestions are welcome. So I just gave the current Windows version - which is 3.6 - a try. As the official Linux version comes with an embedded wine, it should be possible to get the current windows version running under wine as well. And Bingo - both under Ubuntu 9,10 and 10.04 the standard wine package is good to run Picasa without any hassle. That was easy although some of the nice feature - namely geo-tagging is not working. I decided it to run Picasa now on the NAS itself (Atom 330 based) to circumvent the network /multi-user issues by just having a shared account on the machine. Performance of Picasa - which still tends to sleep now and then for a while - is comparable to the earlier setup. It seems that network latency and smaller computation power balance themselves.
It took roughly 2 days to scan our complete picture collection. Once in a while we dropped into the process and started to create persons and match face groups to persons. Went quite well. I must say that our picture collection for sure contains quite some challenges - like uncounted picture of the 4 first years of my Son's life. Surely a challenge. We ended up with having a lot of distinct face groups for the same persons, but this is manageable. The amount of false positives is quite low. In the end we still have more than 5000 faces which are not matched yet. Quite some work but most of them are faces of unknown people somewhere in the crowd. Really working nice. We also got some quite funny detections like recognizing the face of a Playmobil puppet as a face or detecting my son's face on a picture which only contains the Christmas tree in the living room - on the first glance but there is also a small picture of my son in the living room.
Once we have finished the job, I really want to work on extracting the information from the Picasa database/files and get them into the pictures itself to prevent vendor lock-in. There seems to be a tool for this purpose - AvPicFaceXmpTagger. Will give it a try once the face recognition process is finished.
There is no free lunch. Picture data becoming more and more structured is great if you want to manage your stuff but you might still not want to provide all this structure once you upload the picture e.g. to a website. So there is still a task for removing the structured information again form the pictures.
Thursday, May 13, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Dance on the Vulcano - Being off-line
Finally it was there - holidays. Being ready for some relaxing holidays for quite a while, we decided to book a package tour. Nothing to organize from our side - that was the idea. As destination we selected Lanzarote - one of the beautiful Canaries islands. We had a great time there - fantastic weather, great places to visit and a good hotel - and I took quite some notes and picture which I intend to share at a later point of time.
Have you spotted the issue on the picture above?! Me neither. I decided to be really off-line during the holidays. No Internet, no TV, no news papers and rarely radio news. Worked out quite well. In the beginning I felt some time a need to check my emails and social networking pages but this was going away fast and in the end I felt superior than the guys which spent a significant time in front of their facebook pages in the Internet kiosk of the hotel. Being off-line is really relaxing - a luxury these days!
On the other hand being off-line has also some disadvantage in out on-line world. We checked our flight back in the file folder of our travel agency at the hotel the night before we wanted to fly back. Everything fine. The other day as we checked out from the hotel - there was a surprise waiting for us. We should be really happy that we can leave suggested the woman at the reception. "No - we are not " I said as I really could have stayed a little bit longer on this beautiful island. Than we figured out what the whole on-line world did know already for 24 hours at least. All airports are closed, no flights, big chaos in Europe as Eyjafjallajökull - a vulcano in Iceland erupted.
Nice surprise - you could imagine worse situations than being forced to stay longer on holiday. True and we also had booked package tour - no worries the travel agency will manage it. So no worries? A few phone calls later - with the travel agency in Germany, the local travel guide and the airline - the situation changed a bit. Travel agency annulled he contract because of act of nature beyond control. They would still support us but there would be nothing they could do for us. As our flights are with Ryanair, this would be special anyway - just sit and wait.
Nice advice - we would be still there if we would have followed this. In the end we prolonged our hotel, kept luggage there and drove to the airport to speak face two face to some people from the airline and this was the key to get home. In the queue in front of the desk we got first information. Airline offers to rebook the flights to later flights but direct flight back home would be only available in 10 days time. That will be a quite expensive holidays and will create some trouble at work I thought. In the end we got some flights via Madrid in 6 days time. After prolonging the hotel for the whole time, extending the rent of the car and passing the message to home and company we tried to enjoy the time as holidays as good as possible - but now on-line.
My take away from this. Organizing holidays on my own is definitely a proven alternative. Booking a packaged tour I would next time spent more effort to select a different agency. The one we selected - urlaubstours.de - was a completed fail in this situation. Looks like that low cost airlines does not fit well into the concept of packaged tours but they are still an alternative for self-organized travels. Let's see if and what cost we could claim back from airline or travel agency.
Have you spotted the issue on the picture above?! Me neither. I decided to be really off-line during the holidays. No Internet, no TV, no news papers and rarely radio news. Worked out quite well. In the beginning I felt some time a need to check my emails and social networking pages but this was going away fast and in the end I felt superior than the guys which spent a significant time in front of their facebook pages in the Internet kiosk of the hotel. Being off-line is really relaxing - a luxury these days!
On the other hand being off-line has also some disadvantage in out on-line world. We checked our flight back in the file folder of our travel agency at the hotel the night before we wanted to fly back. Everything fine. The other day as we checked out from the hotel - there was a surprise waiting for us. We should be really happy that we can leave suggested the woman at the reception. "No - we are not " I said as I really could have stayed a little bit longer on this beautiful island. Than we figured out what the whole on-line world did know already for 24 hours at least. All airports are closed, no flights, big chaos in Europe as Eyjafjallajökull - a vulcano in Iceland erupted.
Nice surprise - you could imagine worse situations than being forced to stay longer on holiday. True and we also had booked package tour - no worries the travel agency will manage it. So no worries? A few phone calls later - with the travel agency in Germany, the local travel guide and the airline - the situation changed a bit. Travel agency annulled he contract because of act of nature beyond control. They would still support us but there would be nothing they could do for us. As our flights are with Ryanair, this would be special anyway - just sit and wait.
Nice advice - we would be still there if we would have followed this. In the end we prolonged our hotel, kept luggage there and drove to the airport to speak face two face to some people from the airline and this was the key to get home. In the queue in front of the desk we got first information. Airline offers to rebook the flights to later flights but direct flight back home would be only available in 10 days time. That will be a quite expensive holidays and will create some trouble at work I thought. In the end we got some flights via Madrid in 6 days time. After prolonging the hotel for the whole time, extending the rent of the car and passing the message to home and company we tried to enjoy the time as holidays as good as possible - but now on-line.
My take away from this. Organizing holidays on my own is definitely a proven alternative. Booking a packaged tour I would next time spent more effort to select a different agency. The one we selected - urlaubstours.de - was a completed fail in this situation. Looks like that low cost airlines does not fit well into the concept of packaged tours but they are still an alternative for self-organized travels. Let's see if and what cost we could claim back from airline or travel agency.
Saturday, May 1, 2010
PCTV Diversity Stick Solo running on linux
As I planned to extend our HTPC with DVB-T capabilities, I bought a PCTV Diversity Stick Solo. Couldn't find any evidence that this one is running on Linux but as it was really cheap, I thought it would be worth a try. It is a usb-stick which comes with two receivers. The stick itself is rather big and together with the two delivered antennas it is nothing I really would like to use in mobile use cases but our HTPC is not moving at all ;-).
Being a absolute newbie to the topic DVB-T on Linux, I was really surprised how it went on our Ubuntu 9.10 system. After connecting the stick to the HTPC dmesg | grep dvb shows right away that the stick has been recognized and everything seems to be green. After installing kaffeine media player - and it's dependencies as I didn't had much kde stuff on it before - and running a service scan it was there: our first DVB-T channel is presented on the screen. Easy piece of cake.
Kaffeine showed two DVB-T devices, so I think both receivers can be used under Linux, but i don't think that diversity modus is supported (using both receivers to result in one single improved input signal).
Next step is to get yaVDR running as I want the topic TV to be handled from within the XBMC software we are using anyway. Real benchmark would be time-shift recording of "Tatort" on Sunday - I can't think of the last time we managed to watch this ...
Being a absolute newbie to the topic DVB-T on Linux, I was really surprised how it went on our Ubuntu 9.10 system. After connecting the stick to the HTPC dmesg | grep dvb shows right away that the stick has been recognized and everything seems to be green. After installing kaffeine media player - and it's dependencies as I didn't had much kde stuff on it before - and running a service scan it was there: our first DVB-T channel is presented on the screen. Easy piece of cake.
Kaffeine showed two DVB-T devices, so I think both receivers can be used under Linux, but i don't think that diversity modus is supported (using both receivers to result in one single improved input signal).
Next step is to get yaVDR running as I want the topic TV to be handled from within the XBMC software we are using anyway. Real benchmark would be time-shift recording of "Tatort" on Sunday - I can't think of the last time we managed to watch this ...
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