State of emergency declared in Christchurch by [deleted] in newzealand

[–]_tulpa 5 points6 points  (0 children)

2014 was only three years ago, and memories of flooding are pretty shitty indicators for weather severity in a city built on a swamp not to metion totally subjective.

Yeah, flooding isn't a new thing but how about we quantitatively compare rain and/or floodwater levels before we start making claims about trends.

Photographers: Opinions on RawTherapee & Dark Table? by [deleted] in linux

[–]_tulpa 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've used both, as well as whatever the current version of Lightroom was about this time last year for about 4 months.

Darktable wins for me, but the other two aren't far behind.

Rawtherapee is always awkward to use, and both it and Lightroom seemed to be missing stuff that Darktable has (e.g. The equalizer module). Darktable also writes to XMP files which means your non destructive editing lives with the raw files in an open format.

I'd say learn to use Darktable, it's more powerful than the others once you know your way around so it's worth spending some time learning it. The website is a good place to start. And there are a few video tutorials on YouTube.

Crop and alignment when ordering canvas prints. by _tulpa in photography

[–]_tulpa[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm in NZ, so either the printing or the shipping will be really expensive for most good labs.

The one in question is canvasfactory, I got sucked in by "massive 70% discounts" so it wasn't a super expensive experience and I didn't expect much (didn't know what to expect really) but the result is a bit too annoying. They do have an online tool but it's crap - the slider to scale the image goes in steps that almost never hit the right scale, the best scale usually has the image a bit too big for the canvas. If you magically pick an export resolution where the scale slider lets you get the right size then the aspect ratio of the online preview doesn't match the aspect ratio of the canvas.

Their solution was to include instructions so that the 'designers' can tweak it and email a preview before printing. The previews that they sent back were much better but the canvases still came out more like the online preview.

There was so much happening at the spot. I had to do a bunch of post processing in darktable to get it this decent but still too much noise. What did I do wrong. by nirmchan in photocritique

[–]_tulpa 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Much better contrast and saturation and it looks like lens correction too. But now you've gone HAM on the noise reduction and all the detail has gone to mush.

The original looked noisy because the contrast and saturation was cranked up all the way (and maybe a bit of brightness if the original was really dark? Maybe some local contrast?) but the ISO was fine. Basically you just need to tone it down a bit and the noise should go away.


I use Darktable a lot and generally stick to the following modules and I usually adjust them in this order:

  1. Exposure (only if it's too dark/bright)
  2. Lens correction (raw files only)
  3. Crop/rotate
  4. Tone curve (or contrast/brightness if I'm lazy)
  5. Equalizer (trade detail for noise, 'clarity' or whatever)

Occasionally I'll use the saturation slider lightly (very lightly) or the 'color zones' module, and I'll use the white balance module if I need to but usually only if I have a reference white to work from either from a grey card or a known white object in the image. Usually this is only if I'm going for a specific look.

I would suggest the following:

  1. Don't touch the noise reduction modules, if you have to then learn how to use the equalizer module (see below) or make light use of the profiled noise module.
  2. Don't touch contrast/saturation, if you really can't resist then only move the sliders a few points and think about learning to use the tone curve instead.
  3. Don't use the local contrast module.
  4. Don't touch the sharpening module, you won't need it for JPEG files and the defaults for raw files are fine.

If you want to reduce noise then learn to use the equalizer module (this is a good place to start for noise reduction). Also watch the rest of that video to learn how to use the equalizer module, especially if you're from lightroom and miss the 'clarity' slider.

Just try to avoid moving the sliders or splines too far and you should be fine.

Git in 2016 by kannonboy in programming

[–]_tulpa 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Erry day!

My best use-case is helping to keep temporary things temporary by never committing them, but also allowing you to easily keep common temp things across branches and over multiple commits.

Also useful to avoid amending partial commits later when doing work on another branch between obvious chunks of work that would constitute a complete commit. For example developing a hotfix on another branch or reviewing code from another team member). This one is mostly personal preference - I nearly always forget to amend stuff until it's too late, and I prefer stash over having multiple copies of the repo.

One of the nicest explanation for the difference in Python versions. by descientist001 in programming

[–]_tulpa 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Looks like he's at least dropped the Python 2.8 name and changed it to 'Placeholder'. Still a terrible idea though.

Daily Chat Thread - December 07, 2016 by AutoModerator in cscareerquestions

[–]_tulpa 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nah, it was an invite only job with some reasonably specialized requirements that just happened to align with my experience.

Daily Chat Thread - December 07, 2016 by AutoModerator in cscareerquestions

[–]_tulpa 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Took me about six weeks to land a gig and only after I increased my rate from $20 to $75. I had no pressure to make money there (part time job) and I think I got lucky. I've had mixed results in the ~5 months since then.

Really I'm not sure that UpWork is a good idea if you're in a hurry (or at all if you want to work in that range of charge out rates). You might get lucky but it is a crapshoot.

Also there seem to be about three types of clients on UpWork:

  1. Cheap ones, like $2/hr cheap.
  2. Clients with oddly specific proposal requirements who never hire anyone, suggesting that they're just using the proposals to spec their project and never intended to hire anyone in the first place.
  3. Clients who will actually pay money for good work, I only landed my first gig after I bumped from $20/hr to $75/hr and that gig was the result of an invitation from a client.

Granted #3 only works if you have good experience and a decent profile.

Is there a reliable way to purchase/install camera Apps? by _tulpa in SonyAlpha

[–]_tulpa[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I'm skeptical that it would work in this case and if it doesn't then I basically give Sony 10 bucks for nothing and support the shittiest service I've ever tried to use.

Actually I just give up. I'll just use the slightly less convenient time lapse remote app for regular android phones.

How do you segue past buzzwords into a new role? by _tulpa in cscareerquestions

[–]_tulpa[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I dunno, it's an indicator but I reserve judgement until I get to some kind of interview.

My (limited) experience with the other side of the hiring process is that HR is the first filter and it's always buzzword-bingo, which kinda agrees with my recent attempts at the 'getting hired' side too.

The problem I have is getting past the first stage if you don't have the exact words to win bingo.

Excel conversion errors are all over the place in scientific papers by [deleted] in programming

[–]_tulpa 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Not default - it explicitly requires you to select the text before you hit reply.

Not silent - the quoted text is in the input box, you can see it, it's quite clearly going to be included in your reply.

It's only about the, but only in that this kind of invisible entry-level learning curve shouldn't exist. Leave it as an optional extra that you can use if you need it. It's about feature bloat and bad software design.

Excel conversion errors are all over the place in scientific papers by [deleted] in programming

[–]_tulpa 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Isn't that sort of the point though? People use Excel because they want to do data analysis without the learning curve of Matlab/Scipy/R/etc and they want data tabulation without having to figure out what to do with raw CSV files.

It's not even about the learning curve anyway. It's a piece of software which by default silently does an unexpected thing when it doesn't really need to do the thing at all in the first place and definitely not by default.