Lucy Atkins charts our changing relationship with Orcinus orca, from "demon dolphin" to cuddly icon; Ruth Scurr on the lives and unlikely friendship of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn
Books
Orca: How we came to know and love the ocean’s greatest predator by Jason M. Colby
John Evelyn: A life of domesticity by John Dixon Hunt
The Curious World of Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn by Margaret Willes
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Michael Caines on the little-known romantic William Gilbert, a “man of fine genius” (according to William Wordsworth) who had “unfortunately received a few rays of supernatural light through a crack in his upper story”; Daniel Beer tells the tale of the Gulag at Solovki, a converted monastery known as “the Paris of the Northern concentration camps”, a place of brutality but also of resistant culture and ideas; finally, Laurence Scott considers the cultural history of shoeshining, from Dickens to Police Squad
Books
William Gilbert and Esoteric Romanticism by Paul Cheshire
Intellectual Life and Literature at Solovki, 1923–1930: The Paris of the northern concentration camps by Andrea Gullotta
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Forty years since the controversial Spanish constitution of 1978, Rupert Shortt, Hispanic editor at the TLS, discusses the painful evolution of democracy in Spain; Siobhan Magee considers our problematic relationship with farmed animals, namely dairy cows, and crops, such as palm oil; Dwight Garner, a literary critic at the New York Times, offers glimpses into his commonplace book, in which four decades of favourite quotations converse with each other
Books
The Cow with Ear Tag #1389 by Kathryn Gillespie
Palma Africana by Michael Taussig
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Last year I got an amazing surprise in the mail. It was an awesome calendar of a handpicked selection of results from the years PlayRaw images.
Chris (@chris) put together another fantastic calendar for this year (while juggling kids, too) and it’s too nice to not have a post about it!
It was a really awesome surprise to recieve my calendar last year - and I wish I would have planned a little better to be able to grab a photo of the calendar hanging in my office (it’s my work desk calendar - it never fails to remind me that there’s more fun things to life than work - also that I need to up my processing game… ).
This year Chris has done it again by assembling a wonderfully curated collection of images and edits from the various Play Raws that were posted this year. I’ve plagiarized his post on the forums to put together this post and get some more publicity for his time and effort!
If you get a moment, please thank Chris for his work putting this together!
You can download the PDF: 2018 Play Raw Calendar
Here are the images he chose for the calendar and the edits he included:
| month | image title | photographer | editor | license |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 0 | Monkey Business | jinxos | andrayverysame | CC BY-SA |
| 1 | Glaciers, Birds, and Seals at Jökulsárlón/Iceland | BayerSe | McCap | CC BY-NC-SA |
| 2 | Shooting Into the Sun | davidvj | Adlatus | CC BY-SA |
| 3 | The Rail Bridge, North Queensferry | Brian_Innes | Jean-Marc_Digne | CC BY-SA |
| 4 | Sunset sea | Thanatomanic | sls141 | CC BY-NC-SA |
| 5 | Vulcan stone sunset | asn | kazah7 | CC BY-NC-SA |
| 6 | Venise la sérénissime | sguyader | Thomas_Do | CC BY-NC-SA |
| 7 | Dockland side view at night | gRuGo | CriticalConundrum | CC BY-NC-SA |
| 8 | Eating cicchetti with ghosts in Venezia | sguyader | msd | CC BY-NC-SA |
| 9 | maritime museum | wiegemalt | yteaot | CC BY-SA |
| 10 | Alfred’s Vision | jinxos | msd | CC BY-SA |
| 11 | Crescent Moon through silhouetted fern fronds | martin.scharnke | gRuGo | CC BY-NC-SA |
| 12 | Everything frozen | asn | McCap | CC BY-NC-SA |
A preview (also shamelessly lifted from Chris’s forum post):
These Play Raws are a ton of fun and one of the great aspects of having such a generous community to share the images and allowing everyone to practice and play. I am constantly humbled by the amazing work our community produces and shares with everyone.
Thank you to everyone who shared image and participated in processing (and sharing how you achieved your results)! I have really learned some neat things based on others work and look forward to even more opportunities to play (pun intended).
Fun side note: the Play Raws are actually something that began on the old RawTherapee forums. When they moved their official forums here with us it was one of those awesome things I’m glad they brought over with them (the people were pretty great too… :)).
It is a yearly tradition for us to post something giving thanks around this holiday. I think it’s because this community has become such a large part of our lives. Also, I think it helps to remind ourselves once in a while of the good things that happen to us. So in that spirit…
We are lucky enough (for now) to not have huge costs, but they are costs none-the-less. We have been very fortunate that so many of you have stepped up to help pay those costs.
For the last several years, Dimitrios Psychogios has graciously covered our server expenses (and then some). On behalf of the community, thank you so much! You keep the servers up and running. Your generosity will cover infrastructure costs for the year and give us room to grow as the community does.
We also have some awesome folks who support us through monthly donations (which are nice because we can plan better if we need to). Together they cover the costs of data storage + transfer in/out of Amazon AWS S3 storage (basically the storage and transfer of all of the attachments and files in the forums). So thank you, you cool friends, you make the cogs turn:
It is so amazing not to have to worry about finding the capital to support our growing community; we just expand things as necessary. It is super great.
If you’d like to join them in supporting the site financially, check out the support page.
As of today, we have 3135 users, so we’ve continued to grow at a very good rate! Welcome to all the new users.
As you can see from our discuss stats, we’re approaching 500k page views per month:
And our yearly community health is very positive:
This year we added the gphoto project to our list of supported applications! gPhoto is an awesome library for interfacing with your camera. It is used by darktable and entangle to allow you to shoot with your camera attached to your laptop or other device. We’re thrilled that they’ve joined us on the forums!
Natron is a compositing application mostly used in 3D/video compositing. The main developer was looking to give the project more of a community focus, so of course we were happy to provide them their own spot in the forum for their users to communicate and collaborate.
For another year, @darix continues to keep our stuff up and running! Do you ever notice outages? No?! Me either, and that is due to his daily diligence. We can’t thank him enough for his dedication to our community.
The originator of it all, thank you for the initial push to create this community where we are not divided by which application we use. And for your continued good will towards everyone here, your welcoming spirit, and passion. We’d never have done it without you! And for all the great things to come!
The community is the sum of parts + all the extra love that comes from all of you! Thank you so much continuing to stick around, share you knowledge, and spread the great community. It keeps me motivated, creative, and challenged and for that I am very thankful.
A handful of TLS editors gather for the yearly process of picking through contributors' Books of the Year selections, and nominate their own books to remember; Serhii Plokhy, the winner of this year's Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction for 'Chernobyl: The history of a nuclear catastrophe', speaks to the TLS's History editor David Horspool
Selected books
The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey
Charles de Gaulle: A certain idea of France by Julian Jackson
Normal People by Sally Rooney
Murmur by Will Eaves
Circe by Madeline Miller
Talking To Women by Nell Dunn
Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss
The Collected Letters of Flann O’Brien, edited by Maebh Long
Grant by Ron Chernow
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[Article updated on: 2019-12-09]
All photographic lenses have several types of errors. Three of them can be corrected by software almost losslessly: distortion, transverse chromatic aberration (TCA), and vignetting. The Lensfun library provides code to do these corrections. Lensfun is not used by the photographer directly. Instead, it is used by a photo raw development software such as darktable or RawTherapee. For example, if you import a RAW into darktable, darktable detects the lens model, focal length, aperture and focal distance used for the picture, and it then calls Lensfun to automatically correct the photograph.
Lensfun uses a database to know all the parameters needed to do the lens corrections. This database is filled by photographers like you, who took time to calibrate their lenses and to submit their findings back to the Lensfun project. If you’re lucky, your lens models are already included. If not, please use this tutorial to do the calibration and contribute your results.
Let us assume your lens isn’t covered by Lensfun yet, or the corrections are either not good enough or incomplete. The following sections will explain how to take pictures for calibration. It will also show you how to create an entry of your own. The best is to provide information for all three errors but maybe you only need distortion then this is fine too.
Before you start to calibrate new lenses or report missing cameras please check the lens database first! The list is updated daily. If your lens is already support then everything is fine and you just have to update your database.
If the lens is not supported or doesn’t provide all corrections you could add the missing data following this tutorial.
Before we start you need to take a lot of images for the three errors we are able to correct. This section will explain how to take them and what you need to pay attention to.
For all pictures you should use a tripod, turn off all image correction and disable image stabilization in the camera and in the lens itself! Also make sure to that all High Dynamic Range (HDR) or Dynamic Range Optimizer (DRO) features are turned off. All those options could mess up your calibration.
For distortion you can to take pictures of a building with several parallel straight lines. You need at least two lines, one should be at the top of the image (Nearly touching the top of frame) and the other line at about a third down from the first line. The following example demonstrates this.
The lines must be perfectly straight and aligned. You can twist and rotate the camera, but the lines must have no imperfections. Common mistakes are using tiles or bricks: to your eye they may be “straight”, but it will cause calibration defects. The best buildings turn out to be parking houses (US: parking lot, EN: garages, car parks) or modern glass buildings like fruit-technology stores.
For a fixed focal length lens, you only will require one image. For a zoom lens it is recommended to take 5 to N pictures where N is max focal length minus min focal length. You must take an image at the minimum focal length, and the maximum focal length. You can move (step backward on forward) between shots to keep the 1/3rd rule above consistent.
You should shoot at your lenses sharpest aperture - this is often f/8 to f/11. Setup your camera on a tripod. Shoot at the lowest ISO (without extended values). This will be 100 or 200. Disable any inbody lens corrections. Every vendor has a different name for this process (Fuji is modular lens optimization for example). Check your camera manual and menus.
For TCA images look for a large object with sharp high-contrast edges throughout the image. Preferably, the edges should be black–white but anything close to that is sufficient. Make sure that you have hard edges from the center throughout to one of the edges. The best buildings, for taking photos, have dark windows with white or gray frames.
Here are some example pictures:
You should take your pictures being at least 8 meters away. For zoom lenses, take pictures at the same focal lengths as for distortion (5 to N). Make sure to capture really sharp photos using at least f/8. The best is to use aperture control, f/8 and ISO 100 on a tripod to avoid any color noise.
You can use e.g. a streetview service to find the right building in your town (big buildings, dark windows with white or grey frames).
To create pictures for vignetting you need a diffuser in front of the lens. This may be translucent milk glass, or white plastic foil on glass. Whatever, as long as it is opaque enough so that nothing can be seen through it, yet transparent enough so that light can pass through it. It must not be thicker than 3 mm and shouldn’t have a noticeable texture. It must be perfectly flush with the lens front, and it mustn’t be bent. It must be illuminated homogeneously.
I ordered a piece of acryl glass, opal white (milky), smoothly polished, 78% translucency, 3mm thick, 20 x 20 cm, which is about 8 Euro on Amazon.
However white plastic foil taped on a piece of ordinary glass for stability might be enough, if the plastic doesn’t have any texture.
I normally wait for a cloudy day with no sun, then the sky is homogeneously lit. Put the camera on a tripod and point it to the sky. Put the glass directly on the lens (remove any filters). In some places where sunlight is different you may need to shoot indoors. You should experiment to make sure your images are evenly lit (except for vignetting obviously).
Make sure that no corrections are applied by the camera (some models do this even for RAWs). Set the camera to aperture priority and the lowest real ISO (this is normally 100 or 200, don’t use extended ISO values).
Switch to manual focus and focus to infinity. This is the most critical step!
For zoom lenses, you need to take pictures at five different focal lengths. You only need pictures for five focal lengths because for the other steps it gets interpolated. For a prime lens you need to take only pictures for the single focal length.
Take the pictures as RAW at the fastest aperture (e.g. f/2.8) and at three more closed apertures at 1 EV distance, and also at the most closed aperture (e.g. f/22.0). These are often marked on your lens’ aperture ring, or on your electronic display.
If you have for example a 16-35mm lens with aperture f/2.8 - f/22, you need to take pictures at 16mm, 20mm, 24mm, 28mm and 35mm focal length (Remember you require the min and max zoom values). For each for those focal lengths you need to take five pictures at f/2.8, f/4.0, f/5.6, f/8.0 and f/22.0. This makes 25 pictures in total.
For a 50mm prime lens with f/1.4 - f/16 you need to take 5 pictures at f1.4, f/2.0, f/2.8, f/4.0, and f/16.0.
For taking the picture the middle of the area needs to be as bright as possible, but not overexposed. This can be easily +1.7 to +2.0 EV.
If your camera has a zebra setting, turn it on and set the zebra mode to ‘100’. If you start to see the zebra, then take the picure. The profile is created on a RAW file and the zebra is shown for a developed picture. So we aren’t overexposed yet. In the control mode in my camera which shows overexposure everything was fine.
The following steps are to get really fine grained vignetting corrections. The gain in accuracy is really very small! I probably only makes sense for prime lenses used for portrait or macro photography. However this is not required, the above it absolutely enough.
Lensfun is able to correct vignetting depending on focal distance. Thus, you can achieve a bit more accuracy by shooting at different focal distances. This means you will have to take pictures at 4 different focal distances.
The first focus on the near point (The near point is the closest distance that can be brought in focus). The next focal distances are the near point multiplied by 2 and by 6 and finally focus at infinity.
Example: For a 85mm prime lens with the near point at 0.8 m. You have to take pictures at 0.8 m, 1.6 m, 4.8 m and infinity.
There are two ways to perform the calibration.
Lensfun allows an upload of data to the project, and they’ll do the program work for you. They’ll also review your images to make sure they are correctly taken.
Or you can do it yourself with the lens calibration script from the lensfun project.
The script needs the following dependencies to be installed on your system:
You can download the lens calibration script HERE or get it as a package for the major distributions HERE.
Once you have downloaded the tool create a folder for your lens calibration data, change to the directory and run:
Login$ lens_calibrate.py init
The following directory structure has been created in the local directory
1. distortion - Put RAW file created for distortion in here
2. tca - Put chromatic abbreviation RAW files in here
3. vignetting - Put RAW files to calculate vignetting in here
Follow the instructions and copy your raw files in the corresponding directories.
For each focal distance you captures pictures you have to create a folder.
Lets pick up the example from above. For a 85mm prime lens we took pictures at 0.8 m, 1.6 m, 4.8 m and infinity. For this lens you would have to create the following folder structure in the vignetting directory:
vignetting/0.8
vignetting/1.6
vignetting/4.8
vignetting/inf
The folder inf is for the focal distance at infinity.
Once you copied the files in place it is time to generate the pictures (tif files) for distortion calculations. You can do this with the ‘distortion’ option:
$ lens_calibrate.py distortion
Running distortion corrections ...
Converting distortion/_7M32376.ARW to distortion/exported/_7M32376.tif ... DONE
A template has been created for distortion corrections as lenses.conf.
Once the tif files has been created, you can start Hugin.
Torsten Bronger created a screen cast to give an overview about the distortion process in Hugin. He uses an old Hugin version in the video. The following section of this tutorial explains how to do it with Hugin 2018. You can watch the screen cast first if you want, you can do it here (Vimeo).
If you start Hugin the first time, the windows you will get should look like in Figure 8.
First select on the menu bar Interface -> Expert to switch to the Expert mode. You will get a windows which should look like as in Figure 9.
Once in the export mode click on Add images (Figure 10) and load the first tiff from the distortion/exported folder.
By default the lens type should be set to Normal (rectiliniar) for normal standard lenses. Make sure that the focal length is correct and set the Focal length multiplier, which is the crop factor of your camera. For full frame bodies this value should be 1. If you have a crop camera you need to set the correct crop value you can find in the specifications. Next click on the Control Points tab (Figure 11).
This is the tab to set the control points so that we can tell the software what are our straight lines we are interested in. In this tab you have to make sure that auto fine-tune is disabled, auto add is enabled and auto-estimate is disabled! If this is the case zoom the image to 200% (you can also do this by pressing ‘2’ on the keyboard).
In the zoomed images you have start at the top edges. On the left go to the top left corner and to the top right corner on the right. The first straight line, from left to right, should be visible. Select the first control point on the left edge of the picture on the left page and the right edge on the right (Figure 12).
IMPORTANT: Once you have the first control point selected in both images. Select Add new Line in the mode dropdown menu! This will add the two control points as line 3! Now continue adding corresponding control points in both pictures till you’re in the middle on both sides.
Tip: The easiest and fasted is to set control points in the middle at the tiling line. This reduces the required mouse movements.
Now zoom out by pressing ‘0’ and check it if everything has been added correctly (Figure 13).
While you are zoomed out, find a line which is about 3rd into the image from the top to repeat adding a line. Zoom to 200% again, select the first control points and again Add a new line which will result in line4 (Figure 14)!
Zoom out by pressing ‘0’ and check that you have two lines, line3 and line4. Now move on to the Stitcher tab (Figure 14).
In the Stitcher tab you need to select the correct Projection for your lens. This is Rectilinear for standard lenses. Once done switch to the Photos tab (Figure 16).
At the bottom under Optimize select Custom parameters for Geometric. This will add an Optimizer tab. Switch to it once it appears (Figure 17).
Select the ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ lens parameters and click on Optimize now!. Accept the calculation with yes. Now the values for ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ will change (Figure 18).
The calculated correction values for ‘a’, ‘b’ and ‘c’ you can find in the tab need to be added to the lenses.conf. Open The file and fill out the missing options. Here is an example:
Example:
[FE 85mm F1.4 GM]
maker = Sony
mount = Sony E
cropfactor = 1.0
aspect_ratio = 3:2
type = normal
maker is should be the lens manufacturer e.g. Sonymount is the mount system for the lens, check the lensfun databasecropfactor is 1.0 for full frame cameras, if you have a crop camera find out the correct crop factor for it.aspect_ratio is the aspect ratio for the pictures which is normally 3:2.type is the type of the lens, e.g. ‘normal’ for standard rectilinear lenses. Other values are: stereographic, equisolid, stereographic, panoramic or fisheye.If you have e.g. a 85mm there should be an entry for the focal length which is set to: 0.0, 0.0, 0.0. You need to change the values in the lenses.conf for your focal length with the calculated corrections from the Optimizer tab (Figure 16).
[FE 85mm F1.4 GM]
maker = Sony
mount = Sony E
cropfactor = 1.0
aspect_ratio = 3:2
type = normal
distortion(85mm) = 0.002, 0.001, -0.009
No problem, if you want to skip this step then you can created the lenses.conf manually. It should look like the following example:
[lens model]
maker =
mount =
cropfactor = 1.0
aspect_ratio = 3:2
type = normal
The section name is the lens model. You can find it out by running:
exiv2 -g LensModel -pt <raw image file>
The other options are:
maker is should be the lens manufacturer e.g. Sonymount is the mount system for the lens, check the lensfun databasecropfactor is 1.0 for full frame cameras, if you have a crop camera find out the correct crop factor for it.aspect_ratio is the aspect ratio for the pictures which is normally 3:2.type is the type of the lens, e.g. ‘normal’ for standard rectilinear lenses. Other values are: stereographic, equisolid, stereographic, panoramic or fisheye.You can skip this step if you don’t want to do TCA corrections.
This step is fully automatic, all you have to do is to run the following command and wait:
$ lens_calibrate tca
Running TCA corrections for tca/exported/_7M32375.ppm ... DONE
However it possible to calculate more complex TCA corrections. For this you need to run the step it with an additional command line argument, like this:
$ lens_calibrate --complex-tca tca
Running TCA corrections for tca/exported/_7M32375.ppm ... DONE
You can skip this step if you don’t want to do vignetting corrections.
To calculate the vignetting corrections it is also a very simple step. All you have to do is to run the following command and wait:
$ lens_calibrate vignetting
To get corrections for lensfun you need a lenses.conf with the required options to be filled out (maker, mount, cropfactor, aspect_ratio, type). And at least one of the corrections steps done. If you have this you can generate the XML file which can be consumed by lensfun. You can do it with the following command:
$ lens_calibrate generate_xml
Generating lensfun.xml
You can redo this step as many times as you want. And you can just rerun it if you add an additional correction.
You may want to fine-tune the lens model name in the generated lensfun.xml
file. Lensfun normalises names before any matching, so you have some freedom.
For example, upper/lowercase can be changed arbitrarily. Any single f is
ignored, so you may change 16-35mm 2.8 into 16-35mm f/2.8. If there was a
tele converter involved, you must add “converter” into the name so that Lensfun
does not try to derive allowed focal lengths from the lens name.
Ordering of parts in the lens name is completely unimportant for matching. As
are single punctuation characters. You may even add things (e.g. 16-35 into
16-35mm) but be conservative here. Never drop anything what exiv2 reports!
If you want to use the generated lensfun.xml file to test if the calibration you created works, you can copy to the local lensfun config folder in your home directory.
cp lensfun.xml ~/.local/share/lensfun
Make sure your camera is recognized by lensfun or you need to add an entry to the lensfun.xml file too.
To contribute your calibration data data for your lens to the lensfun project, execute the script with the following command:
$ lens_calibrate ship
Created lensfun_calibration.tar.xz
Open a bug at https://github.com/lensfun/lensfun/issues/ with the data.
This will create a tarball with all the required data. Now go to
and open a bug using the following subject:
Calibration data for <lens model>
And for the description just use:
Please add the attached lens data to the lensfun data base.
Attach the lensfun_calibration.tar.xz to the bugreport.
Feedback for this article is very welcome. If you’re a lensfun developer and read this please contact me. I would like to contribute the script to lensfun and further improve the article. I still have unanswered questions.
Mary Beard joins us to answer the question: Is it accurate to call Donald Trump a fascist?, while the TLS's fiction and politics editor Toby Lichtig discusses how the President is presented, in books and on film; and Julia Bell looks back on her Oxford entrance interview - with no fondness - and wonders: "Was it a trap or a test?"
Books
Fear: Trump in the White House by Bob Woodward
The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis
Nobody hates Trump more than Trump by David Shields
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To mark the centenary of the end of the First World War, the TLS's History editor David Horspool talks us through books, exhibitions and events that commemorate cataclysmic slaughter and scars that endure to this day; it’s easy to think of privacy invasion as a peculiarly modern phenomenon, but it has its own history dating back to the American Civil War – Sarah Igo tells us more; finally, the food writer Bee Wilson discusses two new cookbooks that capture a “fresh mood of experiment in the kitchen”
Works discussed
Pandora’s Box: A history of the First World War, by Jörn Leonhard (translated by Patrick Camiller)
Robert Graves: From Great War poet to ‘Good-Bye to All That’, 1895–1929 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson
Making a New World (across the Imperial War Museum, London, and the Imperial War Museum North)
Plus reviews and original pieces published in the TLS, including “What did Tommy read: The complex mental worlds of soldiers on the Western Front” by Bill Bell – go to the-TLS.co.uk for details
Sight Smell Touch Taste Sound: A new way to cook by Sybil Kapoor
Lateral Cooking by Niki Segnit
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As Mike Leigh's film of the Peterloo massacre of 1819 is released, Clare Pettitt revisits the history; Marina Benjamin offers a personal and literary account of the threshold between sleep and wakefulness; following the publication of a second volume of Sylvia Plath's letters, Hannah Sullivan looks for fresh insights into the poet's work, life and death; finally, Sam Riviere reads his new poem, "Sushi Tuesday"
Works discussed
Peterloo, directed by Mike Leigh
Insomnia by Marina Benjamin
The Letters of Sylvia Plath Volume I (1940-1956) and Volume II (1956-1963), edited by Peter K. Steinberg and Karen V. Kukil
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Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
Elaine Showalter on a history of obscenity and censorship and the largely futile efforts of a US Postal Inspector; Ladee Hubbard on five years of Black Lives Matter and the myth of an egalitarian, post-racial America; Kassia St Clair on women, weaving and the rewriting of history
Books
Lust on Trial: Censorship and the rise of obscenity in the age of Anthony Comstock by Amy Werbel
The Fire This Time: A new generation speaks about race, edited by Jesmyn Ward
My Brother Moochie: Regaining dignity in the face of crime, poverty and racism in the American South by Isaac J. Bailey
The Golden Thread: How fabric changed history by Kassia St Clair
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Keith Miller joins us to discuss everybody's favourite Renaissance man; the TLS's Fiction editor Toby Lichtig meets Anna Burns, the winner of the 2018 Man Booker Prize for her novel Milkman; this year's Nobel Prize for Literature, meanwhile, remains suspended following charges of serious sexual misconduct and cronyism – Richard Orange reports on the mess that has engulfed the Swedish Academy
Books
Living with Leonardo: Fifty years of sanity and insanity in the art world and beyond by Martin Kemp
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Mary Beard reflects on the peculiarities of Homer's best-loved, many-sided epic; Neel Mukherjee on the scandalous survival of the Indian caste system; following the recent party conferences, James O'Brien offers a wry overview of Britain's political mess
Books:
The Measure of Homer: The ancient reception of the Iliad and the Odyssey by Richard Hunter
Ants Among Elephants: An untouchable family and the making of modern India by Sujatha Gidla
How To Be Right ... in a World Gone Wrong by James O'Brien
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Michael Caines joins us to discuss female liberation in genteel Cheltenham; we look ahead to an Odyssey extravaganza, with Ted Hodgkinson from the Southbank centre; Paul Muldoon brings a salutary note of optimism to US politics and history with his new poem "With Joseph Brant in Canajoharie"
Books
Votes for Women: Cheltenham and the Cotswolds by Sue Jones
The Odyssey translated by Emily Wilson
Selected Poems 1968-2014 by Paul Muldoon
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Lorna Scott Fox joins us to discuss the fiftieth anniversary of Mexico's Tlatelolco of 1968, a travesty still shrouded in obfuscation; the TLS's History editor David Horspool discusses Thomas Cromwell with Diarmaid MacCulloch, the author of a new, definitive biography; and finally, Rozalind Dineen offers a round-up of interesting new podcasts
Books and podcasts discussed
México 68: The students, the President and the CIA by Sergio Aguayo
Thomas Cromwell: A Life by Diarmaid MacCulloch
The Teachers Pet (The Australian)
West Cork (Audible)
The Ratline (BBC)
In Our Time (BBC Radio 4)
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Andrea Ferrero, or as we know him Carmelo_DrRaw, has been contributing to the PIXLS.US community since April of 2015. A self described developer and photography enthusiast, Andrea is the developer of the PhotoFlow image editor, and is producing AppImages for:
Andrea is the best sort of community member, contributing six different projects (including his own)! He is always thoughtful in his responses, does his own support for PhotoFlow, and is kind and giving. He has finally started a Patreon page to support his all of his hard work. Support him now!
He was also kind enough to answer a few questions for us:
PX: When did you get into photography? What’s your favorite subject matter?
AF: I think I was about 15 when I got my first reflex, and I was immediately fascinated by macro-photography. This is still what I like to do the most, together with taking pictures of my kids. ;-) By the way, you can visit my personal free web gallery on GitHub: http://aferrero2707.github.io/photorama/gallery/ (adapted from this project).
It is still a work in progress, but you are welcome to fork it and adapt it to your needs if you find it useful!
PX: What brought you to using and developing Free/Open Source Software?
AF: I started to get interested in programming when I was at the university, in the late 90’s. At that time I quickly realized that the easiest way to write and compile my code was to throw Linux into my hard drive. Things were not as easy as today but I eventually managed to get it running, and the adventure began.
A bit later I started a scientific career (nothing related to image processing or photography, so I won’t bother with more details about my daily job), and since then I have been a user of Linux-based computing clusters for almost 20 years at the time of writing… A large majority of the software tools I use at work are free and open sourced and this definitely has marked my way of thinking and developing.
PX: What are some new/exciting features you develop in Photo Flow?
AF: Currently I am mostly focusing on HDR processing and high-quality Dynamic Range compression - what is also commonly called shadows/highlights compression.
More generally, there is still a lot of work to do on the performances side. The software is already usable and quite stable, but some of the image filters are still a bit too slow for real-time feedback, especially when combined together.
The image exporting module is also currently in a state of work in progress. It is already possible to select either Jpeg or TIFF (8, 16 or floating-point 32 bits bit depth) as the output format, to resize the image and add some post-resize sharpening, and to select the output ICC profile. What is still missing is a real-time preview of the final result, with a possibility to soft-proof the output profile. The same options need to be included in the batch processor as well.
On a longer term, and if there is some interest from the community, I am thinking about porting the code to Android in a simplified form that would be suitable for tablets and the like. The small memory footprint of the program could be an important advantage on such systems.
PX: What other applications would you like to make an AppImage for? Have you explored Snaps or Flatpaks?
AF: I am currently developing and refining AppImage packages for GIMP, RawTherapee, LuminanceHDR and HDRMerge, in addition to PhotoFlow. All packages are automatically built and deployed through Travis CI, for better reproducibility and increased security. Hugin is the next application that I plan to package as an AppImage.
All the AppImage projects are freely available on GitHub. That’s also the best place for any feedback, bug report, or suggestion.
There is an ongoing discussion with the GIMP developers about the possibility to provide the AppImage as an official download.
In addition to the AppImage packages, I am also working with the RawTherapee developers on cross-compiled Windows packages that are also automatically built on Travis CI. The goal is to help them provide up-to-date packages from the main development branches, so that more users can test them and provide feedback.
I’m also open to any suggestions for additional programs that could be packaged as AppImages, so do not hesitate to express your wishes!
Personally I am a big fan of the AppImage idea, mostly because, unlike Snap or Flatpack packages, it is not bound to any specific distribution or run-time environment. The packager has full control over the contents of the AppImage package, pretty much like MacOS bundles.
Moreover, I find the community of developers around the AppImage format very active and open-minded. I am currently collaborating to improve the packaging of GTK applications. For those who are interested in the details, the discussion can be followed here: https://github.com/linuxdeploy/linuxdeploy/issues/2
Philip Horne and Frances Wilson join us to discuss Henry James, the not-always masterly Master who gave us novels as apparently divergent as Washington Square, with its clear, tight prose, The Ambassadors (prone to accidents of publication) and The Golden Bowl, which spills pleasures of an altogether more sinuous nature; plus, details of a little-known trip James took to California, which – unexpectedly, perhaps –“completely bowled” him over
Books
Generous Mistakes: Incidents of error in Henry James by Michael Anesko
The Cambridge Edition of the Complete Fiction of Henry James: The Ambassadors; Edited by Nicola Bradbury. The Portrait of a Lady; Edited by Michael Anesko. The Jolly Corner and Other Tales, 1903–1910; Edited by N. H. Reeve (Michael Anesko, Tamara L. Follini, Philip Horne and Adrian Poole, general editors)
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Roz Dineen on the time-stained image of the artist-addict, The Recovering by Leslie Jamison, and whether “stories about getting better [can] ever be as compelling as stories about falling apart"; "David Foster Wallace would send me letters and I wouldn’t answer them. He would send works in progress with forlorn notes. 'You’re under no obligation to read or to pretend you’ve read the enclosed,' he wrote on one piece. I didn’t." – David Streitfeld recalls being David Foster Wallace's "worst friend"
Books
The Recovering by Leslie Jamison
In The Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close encounters with addiction by Gabor Maté
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