Beyond the blackboard

Another feel-good film about education, after 'Être et avoir' and 'Binta and the great idea'. The story, which actually happened in 1987, is set in the US where, apparently, children of homeless people did not get automatically accepted into public schools. A newly qualified teacher is put in charge of a single decrepit classroom attached to a homeless shelter to educate the children of the shelter's clients. There follows a struggle to connect with the children and their parents, to obtain more/any resources from the educational establishment etc. Happily, the struggle yields results, starting with small improvements and gradually an environment  is created where the children can get a proper education. Thanks to Chus for pointing me to this delightful film.

☆☆☆☆

Left Luggage

A very mediocre Dutch film. The story is set in Antwerp during the 1970's. A modern areligious Jewish girl becomes a nanny with a Hassidic family. The obvious clash of cultures ensues but she ends up making peace with the family through her love for one of the little boys, who subsequently dies. In addition, her own family of Holocaust survivors has its own problems. The story is brought very superficially and most of the characters seem almost caricatures. Not recommended.

☆☆

Journal de France

This documentary shows, on the one hand, Raymond Depardon travelling through the French country side to make beautiful pictures using an old-fashioned camera. On the other hand, it also shows extracts from old (since the 1960's) films in which has was involved.

It is all very beautiful and may cause some nostalgia. Recommended.

☆☆☆☆

Odette Toulemonde

If you liked 'Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain', you don't mind sentimentality and kitsch, then you will certainly love 'Odette Toulemonde'. It's a great fairy tale-like story set mostly in Charleroi, a small city in the Wallonian rust belt. Catherine Froth is perfectly cast as the main character Odette. The story is by Éric -Emmanuel Schmitt, who -- just like the writer in the story -- although successful, is not taken too seriously by the Parisian literary establishment. Thanks to Chus, I found and immensely enjoyed this beautiful film.

☆☆☆☆

Binta & the Great Idea

This delightful short (33 minutes) Spanish film is available on YouTube, with English subtitles. It is set in Africa (Senegal), with the dialogues in a mix of French and a local language. While the film clearly attempts to promote some worthy causes such as the importance of the education of girls, it does so in an amusing way. Somehow, it reminded me of 'Être et avoir' but 'Binta & the Great Idea'  is much more upbeat and funny. Thanks to Chus for recommending it to me.

☆☆☆☆

Mauvaise Passe

Although a French film, it is spoken almost completely in English. With a French accent, naturally, since the main character is a French guy who leaves his family "to find himself" in London. There he ends up becoming a gigolo and we see several transactions during which he sometimes mumbles French sentences, presumably to excite his English customers.

I normally like the work of the lead actor Daniel Auteuil, e.g. in Le huitième jour. However, in this film, he is not convincing. Also, the story is rather thin and predictable and I was never interested in what would come next or how it would end. Easily forgotten and not worth watching.

☆☆

Reducing the size of jpeg files

I had a series of images taken with a camera that needed to be sent via email. The pictures were stored in rather large jpeg files. Each file was between 1.5 and 3MB. To avoid Gmail's size limits (25MB at the time of writing), and a long wait while the files were uploaded, I decided to try to compress the files to a maximum of 400K each, even if that meant giving up some of the quality. The solution is, of course, to use Imagemagick, the Swiss army knife of image processing.  If you don't have it yet, you should install it. In Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install imagemagick

For simple conversion jobs, Imagemagick's convert program is very easy to use: it figures out the desired conversion by the suffixes of the argument file names:

convert scanned-text.jpg scanned-text.pdf

will work as expected. So, to do what I wanted, all I needed was the correct option to tell convert that it needed to reduce the file size of the image:

convert image.jpg some-option image-small.jpg

Unfortunately, there are a lot of options. To save you searching, here's the one that did the job:

convert image.jpg -define jpg:extent=400KB image-small.jpg

And on the screen, there was no noticeabe loss of quality in the smaller versions of the image files.

Tu seras mon fils

An excellent film set in the bucolic Bordeaux wine country. Unusually, the film is about a father who wants to get rid of his devoted son and adopt an alternative using the interesting device of (French) Simple Adoption.  Niels Arestrup puts in an excellent performance as the evil father. One cannot but feel sympathy for the rejected son, who reminded me of a disowned puppy. Luckily, there is a surprising happy end.

☆☆☆☆

Itty Bitty Titty Committee

This 2007 US film is described  as "feminist" and "lesbian-related". It tells the story of a young lesbian falling in love with another lesbian who is involved with a militant feminist "Clits in Action'" -- hilariously abbreviated as 'C(i)A' -- group.

After a while, the relationship is in trouble and it is only saved trough the execution of a cunning plan that involves manipulating the output of a regional television station to show the Washington Monument dressed up like a penis.

The film sometimes gives an amateurish impression and I found it rather boring.

☆☆

Providence

I don't think a film should need a manual to be comprehensible. This one by Alain Resnais does. Worse, it is also pretentious, pointless and boring although Dirk Bogarde is rather good. I didn't even finish it. To avoid at all cost.

gscan2pdf crop

Gscan2pdf (version 0.9.32 on Ubuntu 12.04) is my favorite scanning tool. It is both user friendly, e.g. scanners are detected automatically, but also powerful, supporting integrated OCR, scanning multiple pages from a feeder etc.

It also supports cropping the scanned image but the procedure to do that is rather unintuitive. Having had to figure it out twice, I decided to put the simple solution in this post for future reference.

Assume you want to scan an image that is smaller than a full page, e.g. the cover of a pocket book.

• Scan the image.
  


• Use the rectangular selection tool to select the area that you want to keep.
  
  The confusing bit here is that you just draw the rectangle but there is no mouse button or menu item to 'fix' it.
  
• Select 'crop' from the drop-down menu under 'Tools' in the title bar.
  
  
  

That's it. Thanks to 'crop' the resulting pdf file will contain only the area you selected, as shown below.

PDF without cropping

PDF with cropping

Crustacés & coquillages

A delightful 2005 French comedy.

It is set in Ensuès-la-Redonne on the Côte d'Azur, during the holiday period, so nice views are thrown in.

The film can be regarded as a contemporary instance of boulevard theatre where, in this case, the question is not only who's doing it with whom but also who is gay or not.

One quote from the teenage son to his broad minded mother, played by Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, who is trying to tell him that it's perfectly OK to be gay: Elle a quoi, ma sexualité?.

A happy ending and a happy viewing.

☆☆☆☆

Kelly + Victor

This British romantic drama from 2012 can be summarized very easily:

boy and (pretty) girl meet, have weird sex involving (almost) strangling and cutting, separate, and have sex again. Only, this time the boy dies, having been strangled once too many.

Boring.

☆

C'est pas parce qu'on n'a rien à dire qu'il faut fermer sa gueule

This 1975 French comedy has an appealing title. Unfortunately, that is about all that's funny about it. It's hard to believe that this attempt at humor dates from a time when Monty Python was a well established series.

The film is so bad that I did not manage to watch all of it, so perhaps I missed the best part. In the story, a couple of aspiring burglars want to make a hole in the wall of a public toilet in order to reach a safe in the adjacent building. Hence they keep changing disguises to enter the cubicle multiple times, each time smuggling some debris out. That is funny for two or three times but it becomes unbearable if the same sketch is repeated, with great detail, 16 times. I didn't count them: oddly enough, the disguises are listed here.

It's not the actors fault: Bernard Blier, Michel Serrault and Jean Lefebvre have all participated in much better comedies such as (in the case of Jean Lefebvre) Le Gendarme de Saint-Tropez.

Don't waste time on this.

☆

Converting from a DVD VIDEO_TS directory

The file system on a DVD usually has a directory called VIDEO_TS whose contents looks similar to the following example:

  VIDEO_TS.BUP  VTS_01_1.VOB  VTS_02_1.VOB  VTS_04_0.IFO  VTS_05_1.VOB
  VIDEO_TS.IFO  VTS_01_2.VOB  VTS_03_0.BUP  VTS_04_1.VOB  VTS_05_2.VOB
  VTS_01_0.BUP  VTS_02_0.BUP  VTS_03_0.IFO  VTS_04_2.VOB
  VTS_01_0.IFO  VTS_02_0.IFO  VTS_03_1.VOB  VTS_05_0.BUP
  VTS_01_0.VOB  VTS_02_0.VOB  VTS_04_0.BUP  VTS_05_0.IFO

The video files have a .VOB suffix. They are simply MPEG2 files. Due to a restriction on the maximum size of a .VOB file, longer video sequences are spread over several .VOB files. In the example VTS_01_0.VOB, VTS_01_1.VOB and VTS_01_2.VOB make up a single video sequence, e.g. a film or an episode of a TV series. To find out which sequences in VIDEO_TS represent the film or an episode, it suffices to look at the sizes of the .VOB files: the longest ones correspond to the 'real thing'.

me$ ls -l *.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me   18542592 Jan 12 23:16 VTS_01_0.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me 1073739776 Jan 12 23:45 VTS_01_1.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me  447463424 Jan 13 00:07 VTS_01_2.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me   49453056 Jan 12 17:54 VTS_02_0.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me    2201600 Jan 12 14:58 VTS_02_1.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me    5548032 Jan 12 14:58 VTS_03_1.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me 1073739776 Jan 12 23:52 VTS_04_1.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me  340936704 Jan 12 23:59 VTS_04_2.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me 1073739776 Jan 12 23:47 VTS_05_1.VOB
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me  423309312 Jan 12 23:55 VTS_05_2.VOB

Clearly, the relevant video sequences here are VTS_01_*.VOB, VTS_04_*.VOB and VTS_05_*.VOB while VTS_02_1.VOB and VTS_03_1.VOB probably contain auxiliary video that has to do with e.g. the DVD menu.
To convert the film or episodes to the more efficient H264 mp4 format, one can use the avconv program. Since mpeg2 files can be simply concatenated and avconv can take input from a pipe, one would think that the following command would convert the VTS_01_*.VOB files to a much more compact 01.mp4.

cat VTS_01_*.VOB | avconv -i pipe: 01.mp4

Unfortunately, that does not seem to work: the resulting 01.mp4 does not contain the audio track, and I have been unable to find out why. The following works, though:

me$ cat VTS_01_*.VOB >01.VOB
me$ avconv -i 01.VOB 01.mp4
# how much space did the conversion save?
me$ ls -l 01.VOB 01.mp4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me  396286644 Jan 13 21:49 01.mp4
-rw-rw-r-- 1 me me 1539745792 Jan 13 21:48 01.VOB

which also shows that the .mp4 version takes only about 25% of the space of the original.

Ubuntu: putting accents and other decorations with a standard keyboard

One easy way to obtain accented letters, as needed for several languages such as French, German etc., is rather simple: e.g. to obtain ë, just type the sequence

<compose-key> <"> <e>

where '<' and '>' are used to indicate a key (you don't type those). Which key is taken as the <compose-key> depends on your keyboard settings. The default is <AltGr> but you can change, or verify, this by changing the 'Compose key position' under 'Options' in the 'Keyboard Layout' section of the 'System Settings'.

It is worth noting that <AltGr> is called 'Right Alt' in the list of options for the <compose-key> setting.

To my dismay, this didn't work anymore after an update that also updated the kernel to version 3.2.0-58, in the 12.04 LTS (Precise Pangolin) release.

Searching for a solution, I stumbled on this old post on the excellent askubuntu site:

Recently 12.04 introduced a bug in keyboard handling. The workaround is to use the following code in a terminal:

setxkbmap "en","fr"
where en and fr represent the keyboard layouts you use.

One step further is to run this command on startup by clicking the top right cog wheel and choose startup applications.

The strange thing is that this helpful post dates from June 2012, while my problem appeared only in January 2014.

In any case, I followed the advice.

First there was the problem of finding out what the short names for my keyboard layouts are, since, sadly, 'System settings' only gave the verbose names: 'English (US)' and 'English (US with euro on 5)'. Luckily, a list of all available keyboard layouts can be found in the xkeyboard-config manual which lists all available layouts.

Thus, from

man xkeyboard-config

I learned that the short names to be used by the setxkbmap command were "us" and "us(euro)", respectively. It then remained to incant setxkbdmap to tell the system which layouts we want to use.

setxkbmap "us","us(euro)"

and things went back to normal. Perhaps, it's an old bug that, because of popular demand, has been re-introduced recently.

Ten Canoes

Although Australian, this excellent film needs English subtitles because all characters in the main story speak Aboriginal languages. This main story is told, in English, by an elder Aboriginal to a youngster of the group while they build canoes and use them to go hunting in a swamp. This part is shown in black and white. The actual story that is being told is also shown, but in color, doing justice to the beautiful nature in the Northern Territory.

The result is very poetic and has a dream-like quality, in keeping with the Aboriginal culture it illustrates. This is all the more remarkable because there is no music in the soundtrack.

☆☆☆☆

Where the Green Ants Dream

This film by Herzog looks like a stylized documentary. It shows the attempts by the Aboriginal people of Australia to stop a proposed mining development on their land. Some of the sequences have a dreamlike quality, due to the excellent sound track and the impressive landscape of the outback.

Of course, and not for the first time, the Aborigines loose. In fact, Australia has behaved in a disgusting manner towards its original inhabitants. Worse, as described in this article, this almost genocidal treatment is still going on, under all recent (including the current) governments.

So, in a sense, the film paints too rosy a picture of the 1984 (when it was made) situation, or things have gotten worse since then. As John Pilger writes: 'Apartheid' is alive and well in Australia, one of the richest countries in the world.

☆☆☆☆