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.

☆☆☆☆