Sep 26 2011

Make your own Animation clip Using Stopmotion

The fundamental concept behind animation is ‘Persistence of vision’. An animated film is fundamentally a bunch of images changing rapidly on-screen, at a fixed frame rate- usually above 12fps. For making your own animation you don’t need to buy expensive and professional photographic or processing hardware or software, all you need is the following:

  1. A PC
  2. A webcam or a set of images
  3. Linux OS (I used Linux Mint, which is Ubuntu based.)
  4. Additional software- Stopmotion
  5. Some creativity :)

Here we go!

Step 1: Creating Storyboard

Storyboard shows the overall flow of film by means of images and text. Just make sketches of what you are going to do in your animation film.

Step 2: Installing Stopmotion

  1. Goto System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager.
  2. Search for Stopmotion.
  3. Select the package and install it.

Once installation is done, launch it from Applications > Sound and Video > Stopmotion.

Step 3: Selecting Materials, Setup stage, Begin Shooting

Select materials needed for creating images. You can use paper, pencil, colours, or anything. You can even use your small toys!  Then setup a stage for placing these all appropriately and also the cam. Then start webcam from the Stopmotion application, shoot your film, record frames frequently pressing space-bar.

You can either

  •  Start drawing an image. Take snaps after drawing each strokes until you finish drawing.
  • You can move the toys or images in front of cam in a creative way and take snaps frequently.
  • Draw separate images for each scenes and take snaps. (I’ve created a man walking, with his different footsteps as different images

Keep on saving your work from time to time.

Note that, you can also import images from your computer or can be drawn using Gimp.

Step 4: Post Production

Once all the frames has been captured, set the frame rate to 12 fps, and click the play button to preview your animation clip!

Now, you can export the clip as a video file as File > Export > Video. Later you can attach some audio file to it using video editors.

See how easily your animation film is created! Its the magic of Open Souse Software!!!

Here is a small animation clip which i created:

Sep 26 2011

Python script to find your current External IP

Here is a simple python program for finding the current external IP address of your system.




   import httplib 
   import string 

   conn = httplib.HTTPConnection("checkip.dyndns.org") 
   conn.request("GET","/index.html") 
   r1 = conn.getresponse() 
   conn.close() 
   if r1.status == 200:
      data1 = r1.read() 
   else:
      print 'Error connecting to the server!! Check your internet connection'
      exit() 
   startstr = string.find(data1,': ')+2 
   endstr = string.find(data1,'</b') 
   print data1[startstr:endstr]

Save it as filename.py and run it on your python shell.

Hope it helps you..

Sep 11 2011

Reveal your Terminal’s most used Commands

This small piece of code lets you know the top 10 most-used commands on ur terminal.

history | awk ‘{print $2}’| sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -10

We can also do the same using the following code:

cut -d\  -f 1 ~/.bash_history | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head -n 10 | sed ‘s/.*/  &/g’

Sep 3 2011

Installing XAMPP and WordPress

The easiest way to setup a website and to test it before publishing to the whole web is using XAMPP and WordPress.

XAMPP combines many different sofware packages like Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl, FileZilla FTP server etc. into a single package.

WordPress is web software with which we can create a beautiful website or blog.

1. To download xampp, click here.

2. Xampp is available as installer and zip file.

a. In the case of installer, simply run that .exe file according to directions. Then run xampp control panel from desktop shortcut or from start menu.

b. If it is a zip archive, first extract all files and place it in your computer’s root directory in xampp folder (eg: C:\xampp\). Then click ‘setup_xampp.bat‘.

Once you have the success message, click ‘xampp-control.exe‘ to get the xampp control panel.

3. Start Apache and MySQL services from xampp control panel.

xampp-control-panel

4. In your browser, enter the address http://localhost/xampp/splash.php and select language.

5. Now select phpMyAdmin from Tools. To create a new database, type the database name(eg: ‘wordpress‘) and press ‘create‘ button.

Xampp is almost ready now.

6. Now to download WordPress, click here

7. Extract zip file and place the wordpress folder in Root directory > Xampp > htdocs. (eg: C:\xampp\htdocs\wordpress)

8. Open wp-config-sample.php. You can see code like this:

/** The name of the database for WordPress */

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘database_name_here’);

/** MySQL database username */

define(‘DB_USER’, ‘username_here’);

/** MySQL database password */

define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ‘password_here’);

/** MySQL hostname */

define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

Now edit the file like this:

define(‘DB_NAME’, ‘wordpress’);

define(‘DB_USER’, ‘root’);

define(‘DB_PASSWORD’, ”);

define(‘DB_HOST’, ‘localhost’);

save this file as wp-config.php.

(for more details on editing wp-config-sample.php, click here)

9. Now go to http://localhost/wordpress/wp-admin/install.php and give required fields there. After login you can see wordpress dashboard. There you can add posts or pages to your site from there, can add plugins or chage themes and a lot more!!! everything from there should run smoothly !

10. To view your site, go to http://localhost/wordpress/

this site will be seen only on your computer. So, you can modify it according to your wish. After all changes, when your site is ready for publishing,

a. Buy a domain to your site

b. Find a server for hosting, create a database in it and upload the contents of ‘htdocs‘ folder

Your site will be completely ready now! :-)

Sep 2 2011

SOund eXchange in Linux

Wanna deal with audio files in linux? ‘sox‘ (Sound Exchange) is a powerful command for you. Here is some examples for sox command.

Let’s combine two audio files with a single command line,

$ sox -m first.wav second.wav combined.wav

with ‘-m’ flag, sox mixes two input files together to produce output file. here first.wav and second.wav are input files and combine.wav is the output file.

If you don’t have any wav files and if all your music is in MP3, Ogg, aac or ac3 formats, don’t despair; ‘ffmpeg‘ can fix this for you:

$ ffmpeg -i foo.mp3 foo.wav

If you want to extract a part of the audio file, use ‘trim‘ option. The syntax is,

sox input_file.wav output_file.wav trim [SECONDS TO STARTING POINT] [DURATION IN SECONDS]

For example,

$ sox input.wav output.wav 0 10

Try other options available for sox. Its really fun! :-)

By Praseetha KR • Posted in Linux
1
Aug 15 2011

How to setup your Website using WordPress

Tiresome of sitting hours on coding your website? Here is your dream tool…WordPress, with which you can create your own websites within minutes!!

WordPress is an open source blogging tool and publishing platform powered by PHP and MySQL. It’s often customized into a Content Management System (CMS). It has many features including a plug-in architecture and a template system. WordPress is used by over 50 million websites. It was first released on May 27, 2003.

Working with WordPress is easy and time saving. WordPress is not only helpful for creating websites, but also provide efficient maintenance of websites through CMS Dashboard. Let’s see how to setup a website with WordPress.

1. The first step of setting up of any website is buying a domain name (for example www.MyWebsite.com). You can get it from this link.

2. Now you need some space for hosting your website. You can avail such service from the hosting providers such as gofreeserve.com.

Hosting providers provides control panel facility after login, register your domain name and create a MySQL database there.

3. Next step is to download WordPress

4. Unzip and open downloaded folder. Edit the file wp-config-sample.php as follows:

step 1:  Provide MySQL database details (which is created in control panel of hosting provider) in the specified part of file.

 Step 2:  Click here to generate Authentication Unique Keys and copy to the specified lines in the file.

Step 3:  Add FTP details (obtained from the control panel) to the file before the comment line  “/* That’s all, stop editing! Happy blogging. */”

for example, let ‘MyWebsite.com’ be the domain name, then FTP details to be inserted into file will be as:

save wp-config-sample.php and rename as wp-config.php

5. With online file management service in the Control panel of hosting provider, Upload contents of WordPress folder to the htdocs folder of corresponding registered domain name  in the root folder (for example, /MyWebsite.com/htdocs/). You can also do the file transfer easily with the help of FTP clients such as FileZilla

5. Goto http://www.MyWebsite.com/wp-admin/install.php and install WordPress. Now your WordPress website is ready!!!

6. Type http://www.MyWebsite.com/wp-admin/ on browser address bar, Login to WordPress and get the Dashboard.

Using Dashboard, you can re-arrange widgets without editing PHP or HTML code; you can also install and switch between themes. The PHP and HTML code in themes can also be edited for more advanced customizations. You can download plugins which gives your website more facilities. Dashboard also helps in easy maintenance of website. You can post articles here, can delete or rearrange posts or pages and a lot more!


Enjoy :-)

Dec 14 2010

Hello world!

hello world, my blog has been born today! this blog is intended to share some of my views or ideas or thoughts or anything like that..