alirov

I'll try and get the process written down but in the meantime, feel free to shoot me an email with any questions. You can find my email in my profile.

I looked at some guides for ideas and was hoping to find a ready to go solution but nothing seemed perfect for our use case. Good quality photos for keepsakes was a primary goal so I used this as an excuse to buy a DSLR (which still ended up being cheaper than renting a photobooth for a few hours would have been). I chose to code it up in Python since it seemed like the best candidate with plenty of libraries that could handle what I wanted. I chose a camera based on what devices were supported in gphoto2. Specifically, I chose a camera that supported live preview which allowed our guests to frame their photo better. I answered the question about connecting the camera in another comment but the tl;dr is that it was connected via USB and all communications were through the python app I wrote using the gphoto2 library.

The camera is hooked up to the raspberry pi via USB. I'm using the gphoto2 library in python to communicate with the camera, show a live preview on the attached LCD screen, snap photos and copy the photos onto the raspberry pi after they're taken.

Here's a list of cameras that gphoto2 supports: http://gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php

I made sure to buy a DSLR that supported live-preview so that our guests could frame themselves before the photos were taken.

Nice, that sounds quite a bit more compact than mine. Having really good quality photos for us to keep was the biggest priority so we settled on a DSLR and dedicated flash. Along with the printer, I ended up installing it all into an old speaker cabinet which ended up fitting everything perfectly. I do wish I wasn't living in an apartment at the time and had access to some better tools to build a proper enclosure though.

The photobooth application was written in Python and I was able to get picasawebsync (https://github.com/leocrawford/picasawebsync) working. Even though the documentation says it's probably no longer working, I can verify that it was working for me as of September 2016 which is after the Picasa deprecation. I had to edit the source a little so that I could call it from my app instead of the command line.

Another challenge was that I couldn't find a good application to display the Google photos album. Nothing I found would display any new photos added to the album after the slideshow had begun while also displaying everything in a continuous loop. I ended up writing a second small Python app also using picasawebsync to periodically sync the photos to a second Raspberry Pi which was hooked up to a projector and display them looped in a random order.

I used one to build a photobooth for my wedding. The raspberry pi controls a DSLR camera to take 4 photos, stitches them into a 4x6, prints the photo and uploads everything to a Google Photos album which was displayed live on a projector.

I'm not sure about other brands but I just looked at the bag of Krave jerky I have in front of me and they don't use any corn syrup. Their website [1] confirms it.

[1] https://www.kravejerky.com/about

Does Southwest selectively offer access to different sites? I know Momondo lists Southwest flights when I search through there. Or is Momondo crawling Southwest's site for prices?

Yeah, there was another one [1] built with the same name later. It's a 2/3 scale model of a battleship which is still on display in Point Loma (in San Diego). I used to work around there and it seemed like they were refurbishing it recently.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Recruit_(TDE-1)

I have a pair of Philips Citiscape Uptown headphones (http://www.usa.philips.com/c-p/SHL5905GY_28/uptown-over-ear-...) and they are awesome. Super comfortable and has good noise isolation (but not active noise cancellation).

I've used Sennheiser HD595, Koss TBSE1 (which are basically the Audio Technica ATH-M50), Sennheiser eH-350 and the Philips Citiscape Downtown as my main headphones at some point and the Philips Uptown sound as good as the best of them.

My only gripe with them is the volume slider on the cord isn't great and is staticky when you touch it. As long as you keep it in its highest setting though then it's not a problem. I've used the headphones to take calls on my cell phone and no one has ever complained about audio quality.

I had that same engine you link to as a kid except mine was orange instead of blue. It's definitely one of my more memorable childhood toys and even though a fairly basic representation of an engine, I agree that it was a great intro. On a side note, I remember the screwdriver that kit came with was ridiculously bad. It made stripping the included screws really easy and made putting together the model more of a chore than it should've been.

Perhaps not exactly what you're looking for but you can get some database dumps that you can browse offline at your leisure. I know Wikipedia offers a file you can download so does Stack Exchange.

I'm sure experiences vary greatly depending on the mix of hardware. I remember having to tweak some things to get bumblebee to work properly (or maybe I had to recompile from the source) but it's worked flawlessly since. This is on Ubuntu 12.04.

pkolaczk does bring up a good issue about the DisplayPort not working properly though. I don't use an external display on my laptop and have never played with that.

On another note, I remember installing 12.10 on my desktop right around the time it came out. My desktop has a Radeon HD3870 video card which was completely incompatible with Unity. I don't remember the issue exactly but my choice was either to use the open source drivers or have the desktop environment fail to show at all with ATI's drivers. I just did a search and I guess the fix is to downgrade X-Server and install a legacy driver. It's a shame something as central to the user experience as GUI performance still doesn't work out of the box or worse yet, critically breaks on an upgrade.

Have you tried using bumblebee[1]? I use it on my Samsung QX411 which has an NVidia GeForce GT 525M video card along with the onboard Intel. The Intel card is used by default at all times. If you want to run a program using the NVidia card, just prepend 'optirun' to the command.

[1] https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bumblebee

A prepaid phone specifically purchased to be used briefly and then replaced is known colloquially as a burner phone or burner.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prepaid_mobile_phone

So basically a phone that can't be tracked to you and you can get rid of and replace easily.

Here's a clip of that joke: http://youtu.be/u6xaj2fC1jI?t=2m38s

I haven't delved into the Windows drivers but clearly they're doing something that the Ubuntu ones aren't for this issue to exist. I just noticed it's happening after a "cold boot" of the amBX. I'm just calling it an initialization issue because that's what it seems to me. Just wanted to clear that up first just in case the way I was using "initialization" wasn't clear.

I'm using a combination of boblight, ruby-usb and combustd to get it to work. This isn't my blog but I used this as a guideline to get everything up and running:

http://slickeel.wordpress.com/2011/03/25/philips-ambx-starte...

The tricky thing was realizing I had to have it "initialize" in Windows before this would work.

I got a secondhand amBX system (just the lights) off of Craigslist a few months ago for cheap and it's been pretty cool. The Windows drivers were a pain to deal with but I got everything up and running in Ubuntu and it works much better.

Interesting issue is that when the power is plugged in for the first time (or the power is reset), the drivers in Ubuntu don't properly link to the device. The lights just flash continuously or don't turn on at all. I have to restart into Windows with the amBX plugged in which I guess does some sort of initialization to them. From there, if I restart back into Ubuntu, everything functions normally.

No issues with burn out so far. There's something pleasing about lighting up my room at night in bright colors. And it gets even better when used as music visualizations!

Bumblebee works well for me on a Samsung QX411. Once installed, just prepend 'optirun' to any command (like when running a game) and it will use the discrete graphics card.

I've used the same feature through Citi credit cards although it's fairly well hidden on their site if I remember correctly. I've never found this feature with my American Express or Chase accounts.

Regarding the video quality, they do stream some games in HD. As far as I know, it's still a minority of games at this point though.

I don't follow baseball so please correct me if this information is for something less than it seems to me. A quick google search brought up two services (MLB.tv and MLB Extra Innings). The former seems to cost about $40-$50 while the latter is in the $200 range for the season. Also, Extra Innings looks like an add on package to an existing cable/satellite subscription while MLB.tv is a standalone service.

MLB.tv: http://mlb.mlb.com/mlb/subscriptions/index.jsp

Extra Innings (found price info on Wikipedia): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MLB_Extra_Innings

I don't know about boxing but to watch the NBA (I know that's not going to cover college sports), you can get NBA League Pass for around $100. It's not necessarily cheap but it's cheaper than paying the $64 a month I used to with DirecTV (the cheapest option in my area).

Edit: Just wanted to point out that it's $100 for a whole season and not per month of course.

I just tried my American Express account and you can add that to the list of financial institutions discarding case-sensitivity.

Almost true. You can have the front side windows tinted as long as 70% of light still gets through. Which in actuality is fairly close to not tinting at all. The windshield of course can't have any tint whatsoever except on the top 4 inches.

You're right, it does check the weather through the Wi-Fi connection:

"Nest uses its Wi-Fi connection to keep an eye on current weather conditions and forecasts so it can understand how the outside temperature affects your energy use."

Calculators haven't been allowed on the GRE either but with the new one (it either started this month or next month), they are offering an on-screen calculator built into the test.

I tried a photo taken with a Fujifilm Z37 which is on the supported list. However, the photo didn't display a serial number on the EXIF data. I'm pretty sure I've never seen an option in a camera to not write just the serial number. Perhaps the list isn't 100% correct?

This just about sums up my office and what everyone likes about it. Snacks and coffee and a fridge filled with beverages is a huge plus that everyone seems to like. And definitely lots of natural light.

And to add to the bad, how about being next to a military airport with jets flying past all day (yes, I speak from experience).

I have encountered plenty of people that just can't be convinced of buying a product that's not of the brand that they're loyal to, no matter how much better the respective product of a different brand is. So I would say brand loyalty is very much alive.