Acme Sprockets

Linux provides a robust operating system and rich environment. While I use a Windoze XP-based laptop at the office, and a MacBook Pro for iOS development, my primary home system runs Linux (Ubuntu 10.04 at the moment). It has everything I need including office applications (OpenOffice), software development tools (Java, Eclipse, PHP, Ruby, C/C++, Perl, etc.), databases (Oracle, MySQL, and PostgreSQL), home finances (Gnucash), photo management tools (Digikam, Gimp), etc.

OK, I'll admit it... I'm a Flickr addict. One concern I've had, however, has been in posting my high-resolution images with full EXIF and IPTC tags. What I've ended up doing is processing my image files through a script that:

• rotates (if necessary), re-sizes (to max of 1024 pixels), and mildly sharpens the image
• adds a black border with the file name and copyright at the bottom
• adds a watermark
• adds a copyright to the metadata (EXIF)
• strips all (IPTC) keywords from the metadata

After tiring of my 19" LCD monitor, I recently treated myself to a Dell 3007WPF monitor -- that's 30" of LCD goodness! However, I had to resort to manual configuration to get the full 2560x1600 pixel resolution; the Suse configuration tool wouldn't let me get it into the full hi-rez mode, even with the Dell support disk with monitor profile. But, no worries, this is Linux and it is trivial to configure manually. Here's all it takes...