Sometimes I’d look for alternatives under Linux (if possible, free) and I had seen a tool called Hugin. It looked complicated (at least compared to Autostitch’s select-pictures-hit-ok-there-you-go), and for some reason I never really used it. It probably wasn’t packaged for Debian or something like that.

A couple of days ago, though, I arrived from a trip where I took a couple of panoramas, and Autostitch had a quite suboptimal behaviour: it didn’t recognise one of my panoramas, and some others were completely destroyed perspective-wise. So I decided to give Hugin another go. And boy am I happy with it. It’s very easy to install in Debian, and although I had some problem with the path to enblend (apparently I had to specify the absolute path to it in preferences), everything worked fine. Selecting the points to join the pictures is not that hard, and actually has one advantage over Autostitch, namely that if it doesn’t recognise your panoramas automatically, you are giving “hints” about which points are the same in other pictures to Hugin, so it will work. Another advantage is that it has several ways of joining the pictures, which solved my second problem with perspective destruction :-)

Apart from the panorama pictures, I also had some videos… and one of them was recorded as “portrait” instead of “landscape”. So I needed a way to rotate the video. Fortunately, that was easy enough with mencoder (using command-line, though):

mencoder -vop rotate=2 MVI_2352.AVI -ovc lavc -oac copy -o MVI_2352.avi

I found the tip in some thread in Ubuntu forums, and had to look up the values for “rotate” in @mencoder@’s manpage:

0 Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise and flip (default).
1 Rotate by 90 degrees clockwise.
2 Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise.
3 Rotate by 90 degrees counterclockwise and flip.

The point is, I was really confused for quite a bit because, after reading the gpg manpage, I was trying things like:

gpg —no-default-keyring —keyring keys.gpg —import … # Wrong!

But that wouldn’t add anything to the keys.gpg, which I swear I had in the current directory. After a lot of wondering, I realised that gpg interprets paths for keyrings as relative to… ~/.gnupg, not the current directory. I guess it’s because of security reasons, but I find it really confusing.

The lesson learned, always use --keyring ./keys.gpg or, better, never use keys.gpg as filename for external keyrings, but something more explicit and “non-standard” like my-archive-keyring.gpg or whatever.

This is very easy to do in mutt, my mail reader of choice (for personal e-mail; I have found that, at least for work e-mail, Opera’s M2 works quite well too). You just have to limit to unread messages (pressing lowercase “L” and then using “~N” as filter), and then sort by subject (:set sort=subject). I have even created too “macros” in mutt to switch back and forth between “spam filtering mode” and “normal mode” :

 macro     index     Cs     ":set sort=subject<return>l~N<return>"
 macro     index     Cq     ":set sort=threads<return>lall<return>"

Let’s hope it doesn’t begin again tomorrow :-S