Interested of freedom of speech? Then say no to ACTA!

Museums, images and non-institutional digital heritage

What do people want from museums? Better metada, better search algorithms? Nope. They want to download images, videos and sounds. Don't believe me? Well, have a look at the Europeana survey 2011: Over 90% of respondents agree that ability to download materials would be "useful" or "very useful".

I gave a little provocative presentation in CIDOC 2011 about museums, images, Google and people outside heritage institutions. My main point was that people want to participate in creating of digital heritage in their own terms, not museums. There is already a very active digital heritage field outside of heritage organisations which often overrules official digital heritage in search engine visibility, usability and coverage. And since search engines (Google) are the main entry points to the internet, official digital heritage is struggling with its visibility. Non-institutional digital heritage is here to stay and museums must decide if they want to be part of that or not.

You can find my slides and full paper from here: http://opendimension.org/ida/papers.php

Are you sure?

Mendeley shows the right way to ask if you want to remove your data!

Nokia and Microsoft, it's a deal!

Oh, this is a sad day!
Probably there is no Nokia in future. It might be called Microsoft's mobile unit...

As a Finn, I'm so sorry.

VIM code completion

Hidden treasure: Ctrl + n in insert mode completes variable names etc. Oh joy!

Disabling auto exposure in Logitech 9000 pro

Auto exposure was ruining my attempts to use OpenCV successfully. Then I found guvcview. It gives option to disable auto exposure and set values manually.

Installation
In Debian based systems:
sudo apt-get install guvcview

Using threads in Blender game engine

I just made an experiment of using threads in Blender's game engine. Even though using threads in Python does not necessarily make code any faster (see GIL), in this case using thread(s) has a really big difference.

AFAIK, rendering and execution of python scripts are running sequential in BGE. This is a bad thing if you have to make some heavy lifting in the script. Whole game engine have to wait until the job is done ruining your FPS. By using threads, the heavy lifting can be done parallel (or at least semiparallel) to main rendering loop.

The script can be found from Blenderartists.