Coredump

My car got sideswiped yesterday. Worst, the driver neither had insurance nor a license. We had to go through the hassle of filing a report with the police, complete with photo evidence of the accident. I only had my phone with me, which unfortunately isn't very feature rich (it's an old Android phone flashed with CM7, but I digress...), so there wasn't any timestamp on the photos. ImageMagick to the rescue! ImageMagick can extract basic EXIF data from images, as well as annotate them on the fly. I used the following script: for img in IMG*.jpg; do fn=$(basename ${img} .jpg) convert ${fn}.jpg ${fn}.exif tstamp=$(strings ${fn}.exif | grep -E "^[0-9].*\:.*") convert ${fn}.jpg -fill red -gravity South -pointsize 72 -annotate +0+5 "${tstamp}" annotated_${fn}.jpg rm -f ${fn}.exif done So it went from this: to this: Ugh! That scratch would have to wait.

I don't have a Mac anymore, and we don't have any Windows desktop at home (yes, we're a Linux-desktop household, yay!), so one itty bitty issue is syncing the iPad, which has become the mobile entertainment device du jour . Good thing there's libimobiledevice , a worthy project that "talks the protocols to support [Apple] devices." The software library doesn't depend on any proprietary library, and doesn't require jailbreaking -- it Just Works (TM). Hooray for open source! Unfortunately, we're still on Fedora 15 (Lovelock) -- yeah, I know, it's end-of-support already, but I'm a bit queasy about upgrading to "Beefy Miracle" -- and its libimobiledevice version doesn't support iOS 5 out-of-the-box. So I did what any self-respecting Linux user would do: build my own package from upstream. (Well, maybe not all Linux users would do that...) It was the usual download-configure-make-make install combo. Then I found out that...