Thomas Jefferson
Sometimes we have a distorted idea about great people lived in the past…
On religion…
“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, any more than our opinions in physics or geometry.”
“On the dogmas of religion as distinguished from moral principles, all mankind, from the beginning of the world to this day, have been quarrelling, fighting, burning and torturing one another, for abstractions unintelligible to themselves and to all others, and absolutely beyond the comprehension of the human mind.”
“If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? … Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.”
“Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because, if there be one, he must more approve the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear.”
“Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no god, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you.”
On Taxes…
“If we run into such debts as that we must be taxed in our meat and in our drink, in our necessaries and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements, for our callings and our creeds, as the people of England are, our people, like them, must come to labor sixteen hours in the twenty-four, and give the earnings of fifteen of these to the government for their debts and daily expenses. And the sixteenth being insufficient to afford us bread, we must live, as they do now, on oatmeal and potatoes, have no time to think, no means of calling the mis-managers to account; but be glad to obtain subsistence by hiring ourselves to rivet their chains around the necks of our fellow sufferers. And this is the tendency of all human governments. A departure from principle in one instance becomes a precedent for a second, that second for a third, and so on ’til the bulk of the society is reduced to be mere automations of misery, to have no sensibilities left but for sinning and suffering. And the forehorse of this frightful team is public debt. Taxation follows that, and in its train wretchedness and oppression.” Yes, we did produce a near-perfect republic. But will they keep it? Or will they, in the enjoyment of plenty, lose the memory of freedom? Material abundance without character is the path of destruction.”
Thomas Jefferson, 1816
Third President of the United States 1801 -1809, Drafter of the Declaration of Independence, Founder of the University of Virginia
Corte d’Onore – Rivista Scout per capi ed educatori
È pronto il primo numero della nuova serie di Corte d’Onore. Nel sito si trovano un po’ di articoli della prima serie (in costante aumento), e informazioni per abbonarsi…
Banknotes, photoshop won’t open them
Photoshop alert with banknotes
A very cool feature in Photoshop CS I never heard about: if you try to open a scanned banknote you’ll get a warning telling you are likely doing something nasty!
Is this another reason to prefere open source software? GIMP is available for download 
Simple and free photo editor for Windows
I often look for free (as in beer) photo editing tools for Windows, because often friends need little corrections that are ridiculous to be performed with a real software like PhotoShop or the GIMP.
What I ask is:
- simple interface, not too candy and – if possible – not customized but plain Windows-like window!
- small loading time
- fast image browser
- Basic RAW import capability (what to do if your friend gives its SLR photos?)
I tried Google’s Picasa, but still they insist not to save your changes (rotation, cropping etc) in order to preserve your original image. Fine: but what if I’d like to open the picture with another program (and I DO) or if I want to copy those pictures to friends USB keys? Picasa it’s good, but with a closed mind ad hoc architecture.
IrfanView looked to geeky, Paint.NET it much too heavy.
I found PhotoScape that looks so good. Interface it’s a little bit too candy, but has severa features easily accessible.
Uhm, honestly… I don’t like the interface at all (why cropping tool is not just the standard icon to click on?) but it’s still the best tool I found.
Mom now uses Ubuntu
An old Acer (laptop), that was non so cutting edge when new and is now lacking Wi-Fi and space key (and other features!), needed some clean up. In these cases the first thing to remove is Windows XP, of course, and I installed Ubuntu 8.10.
Things went almost perfectly: each piece of still-working-hardware was recognized, but some problem with the mother board halts the PC when shutting down.
Beside this a stable, human and clear desktop was ready. Some benefits of Ubuntu for really beginners like mum:
- Mum started immediately to surf the Internet without problems (Firefox is always Firefox ), probably at first didn’t realized she was using a completely different Operating System.
- The default installation comes with OpenOffice and several essential minor programs (PDF reader, ZIP archiver…).
- Set it and forget it: it’s easy to automate photo download from camera (with F-Spot), MP3 player managment etc. In particular I liked the fixed mountpoint (e.g.: /media/nikon/) instead of a random available drive letter (e.g.: H: today, E: tomorrow…).
- Your favourite places allow you to easily browse documents and other relevant positions, without having to care which partition or drive you are actually writing in… (/home/user/documents and /home/user/photos could be – and are – on different partitions!)
- Remote desktop. In case of troubles… it’s amazingly easy to open a remote session VNC-like.
Being quite an old PC, I disabled unnecessary desktop effects and tryied lighter software. For terminal emulators I came up with interesting alternatives.
Now it’s time to learn some GNU/Linux, mom 
Batch rename in Windows
In Linux simple tasks can be automated with scripts. In Windows we need some software to perform such batch operations.
I found an excellent free software for renaming several files, even using regular expressions. Its available at this web site: http://www.bulkrenameutility.co.uk
As often happens, a geek made this… The GUI is awful and complex (scripts are much easier and user friendly!). Maybe one day some ‘automator like’ application will appear in Windows and MS user will become a little bit more independent in performing automated tasks…
Nevertheless this tool is so useful you’ll want it in your USB key.
Batch rename windows: Screenshot
Banknotes. Think different!
The USA have little experience of internal wars, but they are in the middle of a strange battle between science and creationists. What we believed impossible (that a minority of retarded guys could interfere in the public understanding of science) is reality, thanks to the media, the Internet, and the holy ignorance…
And while the US dollar banknote still have the “In god we trust” motto… in the UK things are different.
Great Britain is still great.
Cropping, why it is so important
When taking a photo, keep wider than you actually would. If you leave a little bit more space around your subject you’ll be able to crop it after, with higher precision than with you camera (expecially with moving subjects!).
If you really want to see why, I found this nice example on the Internet:
Cropping: the better side of yourself
Dolomites panoramic photo
I spent a weekend in Palafavera (camping), and took this 360 panoramic photo from Passo Giau.
You can download the full resolution photo from my flickr account.
Finally released… CorelDraw X4
I’m still not sure if this is a good news. But the awaited (at least by me!) CorelDraw X4 is out!
Maybe my recent progresses in Inkscape will be vanished by new power tools of this proprietary suite… or not?
