Month: April 2010

Bulk resizing images with ImageMagick

Another of those posts that are largely for my own benefit.

I’ve been spending a lot of time in various image editing programs recently (largely GIMP, but with a bit of Inkscape on the side). Yesterday it transpired that a folder of 24×24 images needed to be made slightly smaller as a matter of some urgency. I had a feeling ImageMagick would probably do the job (it usually does), but I couldn’t remember how.

It’s actually fairly straightforward. Navigate to the directory containing the images (via the terminal) and then enter the following command:

mogrify -resize 20x20 *.png

Which will resize all PNG files to 20×20 pixels.

This can obviously be altered to cater for different sizes and file types. So yes, ImageMagick saved the day again and I actually managed to leave work on time.

A week of doing nothing?

My day job currently involves a lot of development work, and not a lot else. As a result I’d pretty much decided that I would try and do different things while I was on holiday.

So yes, apart from a day of testing beta versions of Ubuntu/Mandriva, an hour yesterday reading about the basics of Ruby (and making Hello World), and an hour this morning reading through the Rhythmbox bugs that are getting hugged tomorrow, I’ve done nothing with my computer above the level of just using it.

This has left lots of time for general relaxation (which I’m rubbish at), interspersed with shopping (I now have more than one pair of shoes again), cooking (which I never tire of) and the first part of the tiding/de-cluttering which needs to happen before our new kitchen is fitted in the summer. There was also some family-based socialising, a wedding, and a great plumbing victory which finally fixed the flood in our kitchen (involving the realisation that the plumbing in our house is ever weirder than we thought).

There was also the less wonderful realisation that Bennett’s Bar turns into a trendy disco on Thursday nights that directly precede Bank Holidays. I’m glad I won’t have to have this realisation again.

I’m back to work tomorrow, and I’m actually looking forward to getting on with things. I’ve got a couple of hard deadlines coming up in regard to the release schedule of what I’m working on, so the time between now and 21st June looks madly busy (apart from May half term which I have booked as leave). I should also get round to organising some sort of release/birthday party, as the two are so close to each other.

I should also make a concerted effort to write blog posts more often than once a month.

Ubuntu 10.04 LTS and Mandriva 2010.1

Yesterday I spent a few hours testing the latest beta versions of my two favourite Linux distributions (Ubuntu and Mandriva). I often get torn between which one of these two I’m going to use, but generally plump for Ubuntu when some particular bit of software I want to use either isn’t available for Mandriva or I have to spend too much time making something work and not enough time actually using it.

So far my thoughts are:

  • Gnome 2.30 rocks, and has moved in exactly the direction I wanted it to.
  • Ubuntu’s version of Gnome is now a lot further from default than Mandriva’s, which makes swapping between the two a bit of a pain. BUT, with a bit of tweaking I can make them both almost identical (providing I use Clearlooks as a theme and do a lot of UI tweaking in Ubuntu).
  • I still try and make each new machine I install look as close to the default Gnome as possible. This is something I might have to reconsider, as both of these distros look a lot better when they look like themselves.
  • Epiphany 2.30 might possibly be ready to actually use as my default browser.
  • I don’t like dark themes. They give me a headache and just look wrong.
  • The way Ubuntu integrates social networking is miles ahead of anything else I’ve seen.
  • I really like Ubuntu’s default background, which is not pink.
  • The new Ubuntu theme does look a lot like Mac OS X, but I think the change was needed. Mandriva still looks like it did 4 years ago, which is not a bad thing but which makes it difficult to work out which version I’m using.
  • Both distros boot far more quickly that anything else I’ve used. Rebooting Ubuntu only took a few seconds on physical hardware.

I think that’s all for now. I do have a few screen shots which I might do something with later.