GimpGuru's Tutorial For Smart Sharpen - Streamlined

There is this great tutorial by GimpGuru for sharpening pictures without amplifying the inherent noises. However, the first time when I followed his instructions, I fumbled: I didn't get my sharpened picture; I got confused instead.

But with some perseverance, I succeeded in the end.

I thought of streamlining his tutorial as I know that I will be using it often. But a day later, I found an even better tutorial/technique, '"Smart" Sharpening, Redux', also from GimpGuru. I particularly like the ability in this second technique in adjusting and observing the sharpening level, WYSIWYG-style, by merely sliding the "Opacity" slider left or right in the "Levels" dialog window.

In case if you are wondering, I fumbled on the second tutorial too the first time round - I got confused just like the first.

Tutorial - Made Simple

Below are my simplified instructions for the second method by GimpGuru. Have fun! I am using GIMP version 2.6.9, by the way.

The Cheapest Internet Data Plan That I Could Find

As parents to school-going children, my wife and I are entitled to one 1BestariNet Yes ID each. Each of these Yes IDs is internet ready but data is capped at 200 MB. 400 MB from these two IDs is just about right for our needs, and I have been using these two IDs for over the last year or so, for free. My WiMAX modem is actually a "Yes Buzz 4G Cloud" phone by Samsung, a gift that was given to my family as our first digital camera actually.

Unfortunately, somebody decided to revise the 1BestariNet programme recently. Beginning July 2016, no data is allocated to our 1BestariNet Yes IDs anymore. From now on I will have to purchase my own internet data. Only one thing to do now: time to go shopping.

Back To Basics

I find shopping for the ideal internet plan to be cumbersome. Telcos tend to offer products that look similar but differentiated by some minor add-on that makes an apple-to-apple comparison impossible. The end result for me: confusion.

To simplify things, what I did was to go back to basics: I just look at my requirements, my needs.

What do I need? - Internet data Do I need voice calls - No Do I need SMS - No Do I need free media streaming services? - No Cloud storage? - No Data roll over to the following month? - Maybe

And this is what I could find that matches what I want: a data add-on product from Yes (again?) to my 1BestariNet Yes ID:

4 Giga Bytes of Internet data valid for 30 days for RM 31.80 (including GST tax)

The cheapest option that I could find; no voice, no SMS (which isn't a concern to me); just plain internet broadband data all 4GB of it for RM 31.80. There is no additional hardware to buy since what I have is adequate. I would have gone for a much cheaper/lower-data-allocation option that is closer to my usage pattern but 4 GB is the minimal on offer. Beggars can't be choosers, they say.

Lemon Pansy Butterfly

I think it was earlier this year when I tried photographing this butterfly, a Lemon Pansy. I failed despite me chasing it around the front yard from one spot to another for something like an hour under the hot and sunny 11 o'clock morning sun.

But taking the picture above a little over a week ago was a bit unchallenging. The butterfly did flutter about while I was walking around in the backyard. But then when it settled down on a leaf and me approaching it with my camera, it was rather tranquil. Not sure why - perhaps the rather 'cooler' weather has something to do with it during those few days (weather is a bit crazy these days by the way). I did manage to take about 10 closeup shots in the end. My camera was about 1 feet away from the butterfly in all attempts. The lighting was not ideal for my pocket camera though but still the pictures turned out okay.

My Contribution To The 2016 MY Garden Birdwatch Survey

The yearly MY Garden Birdwatch Survey was held this year on the 4th and 5th June 2016. You will find my count results below, which I carried out on Saturday 4th June 2016, between 3:00 PM till 3:30 PM. As in previous years, my counting was done at my home.

Different species of birds seems to appear as different hours. As a consequence, some birds were not counted even though they were seen outside the time bracket of my survey. But I got a surprise though this year: two White-throated Kingfishers made an appearance while I was doing my count. A rather common bird in my neighbourhood but this is actually the first time that they are included in my survey results. They have been quite elusive previously.

We had quite a severe hot and dry weather during the second quarter of this year. Never in my life had I experienced such weather extremes, culminating in heat-waves at times. Some lakes and rivers dried-up and water levels at some dams went down to a critical stage. I wonder if this unusual and unprecedented weather had had any impact on the bird population nationwide? I just can't wait for the results to be released to find out. That's about 2 months away.

When The White-throated Kingfisher Comes Visiting

Just outside my bedroom window, there is this more-than-50-year-old mango tree. Doves, both Zebra and Spotted, make this tree their home. Regular tenants every night, some 4 or 5 of them.

Every now and then though, a White-throated Kingfisher will make this tree its dwelling too. Not permanent but just temporary for over a couple of days, even weeks maybe. I sometimes wonder why? Why such a short stay unlike the Doves.

Getting Xiaomi Mi 4i Detected On Windows XP

I have spent about 4 days working on this. So, I suppose it is worthy of me writing it down somewhere so that I won't have to slog through the whole process again.

Phone Not Detected

Someone in my household bought a new Xiaomi Mi 4i smartphone 2 months ago. Great phone at a great price, by the way. Being quite popular here in Asia, the last thing I would have thought is to have problems in getting this phone connected to Windows XP. The recommended way, I presume, was to install "Mi PC Suite" since the setup program was already included in the phone. But upon successfully installing "Mi PC Suite", Mi 4i was undetectable. No connection to Windows XP means no file transfers between the PC and the phone.

Mi 4i Device Drivers

After working frantically for 4 days, and trying out various drivers, I am glad to say that I finally got the phone connected to Windows XP in the end. As far as I could tell, there were no problems with the transferred files. The file system and transferred files on the phone shows no sign of being corrupted.

Python Script For Posting To Blogger (Via OAuth2)

I hope somebody will find this Python script useful. I actually used this Python script to test things out first (and make sure that everything works) before I started work on fixing RavenPlus last year. I can't remember now, but I think the gist of this script came off from b.py - a Python script for posting blog posts to Blogger and Wordpress.

To post to your blog from this script, remember to replace the blogID "1087XXX5764091XXX95" in the line

post = service.posts().insert(blogId="1087XXX5764091XXX95", body=body, isDraft=False).execute(credentials.authorize(Http()))

with your blog's blogID.

To update an existing blog post, just replace the line above with the following (NOTE: you will need to find out what your blog post postID is, otherwise the statement will fail):

post = service.posts().update(blogId="1087XXX5764091XXX95", postId="4781959859649019078", body=body, publish=True).execute(credentials.authorize(Http()))

The OAuth2 login credentials is named 'plus.dat' and it must be located in the same directory as this Python script file.

I ran this script file under Python 2.4 with some customisation made to the Google API Python Client Library Version 1.2.

The Source Code

Freelance Software Testers Beware

Last Monday 18th April 2016, there was an online job posting looking for freelance software testers. This was what the ad says:

Looking for someone to test my application called "Crush Clean" its a Simple app to clean your desktop Please just open the application test it and tell me what happens and payment will be made Thanks

Baited

Sounds simple enough. So I proceeded to download the attachment, a Windows executable compressed in a ZIP file, without much thought.

I updated my anti-virus scanner, scanned the downloaded file and it appears to be 'clean'. Everything looks good.

I loaded it up in my Windows 7 test environment running under VirtualBox. I then ran the application from the command line. There was nothing much to see, much less to report: it just 'terminated' as soon as I press the <ENTER> key - no window or anything admire.

I launched the "Windows Task Manager", clicked on the "Processes" Tab and there it was resident in the system's memory. It seems to spawn a sub-process (which then terminates almost immediately) every 5 seconds or so. Good, now I have something to write about and so I submitted my proposal and reported what I saw.

Maybank Online Payment Problem At Superbuy.my

I made an online purchase recently at Superbuy.my. Everything went well until the point when I wanted to make an online payment via Maybank. It failed with an error message "Could not connect to remote server" at URL

https://netpay.my/web/Payment/GeneralEntry.aspx

I tried again but this time with the Mozilla Firefox web browser, thinking that the Opera web browser was causing the problem. Unfortunately, it did not work either, but with a different error message "The connection was reset" at the same URL.

I started an online chat with tech support at Superbuy.my. Their advice: try again later, which I did after a 30 minutes wait. Regrettably it did not work either. Thinking that the site may be having some technical problems, I just gave up for the day.

On the following day, I tried again. Same thing, it did not work. I then started thinking to myself:

Metamorphosis: Caterpillar To Pupa

At The Right Place And Right Time

This was totally unanticipated. Last week, I was lucky enough to witness a caterpillar morphing into a pupa. It was only by chance that I saw this happening. Lucky me for being at the right place and the right time when this happened.

I have been keeping tabs on this particular caterpillar for a couple of days prior. In fact, just an hour or so earlier, it still looked very much like a caterpillar. And all of a sudden about 30 minutes later, it began changing into something different - a pupa.

Here is my account of what transpired.

This is how the caterpillar looked like a day earlier 14th March 2016. Except for the white patches on the sides, it looked very much like any other Tawny Coster caterpillar during its earlier stages after hatching. This photo was taken at 9:37 A.M. on 15th March 2016. Still looking very much like how it was the day before, except that the white patches have grown larger.