Build Your Own Panoramic Head (Novice Approach)

If you're a hobby photographer like me, and you've had a chance to play a bit with panorama photographing and stitching, you've probably noticed that it's very hard to avoid the so-called parallax errors. This is especially the case if you're shooting by hand, and some of your objects are relatively close to the camera while others aren't.

During the stitching process, parallax errors will cause some parts of the images to fit together with each other, while other parts are off. There are very technical descriptions of this phenomenon available, so I won't go into any kind of detail about that here. The important thing to avoid it, is to rotate the camera around the no-parallax point in the camera's lens body.

How to run Wordfeud and other Android Market apps on your desktop computer

Recently, I got rather hooked on the Wordfeud game, like so many others. Unfortunately, they don't offer any desktop version for either Windows, Mac or Linux -- it's strictly handheld-only, and it has to be installed from the Android Market (now Google Play). And unfortunately, my "smartphone" is one of the last Nokias to carry the now obsolete Symbian system, so no luck getting Wordfeud to run on that.

But, there is a solution to those ill-fortuned, like me. It is possible to run an (official) Android device emulator on your desktop computer, load Android onto it, and install your favourite Android apps, like Wordfeud, on this emulated phone. It requires a few ninja tricks, but here's how I did it on my Ubuntu Linux system. There are several guides on how to get it to work on Windows out there, but you can probably use this guide to extrapolate directions on how to do it on Windows and Mac, too, since it's shouldn't be too different a process.

How to set up Box.com autosync on Ubuntu

I was one of the lucky ones who got my hands on a free 50 GB account on Box.com (former Box.net) with their campaign to launch their new Android app (the campaign runs until March 23, 2012). A similar campaign ran earlier with their IPhone/IPad app. Unfortunately, they don't offer a Linux sync app, so here I describe, step by step, how I did some ninja tricks in order to be able to automatically synchronize a certain directory on my harddrive with my Box.com account from my Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneiric Ocelot) installation.