xplanetFX renders high quality wallpapers of mother earth on your desktop. An extensive GUI (GTK) provides a lot of features and settings. Various templates place the planet inside different scenes and make shure your desktop never gets boring again. With realtime light, shadows and clouds!

traGtor is a graphical user interface for the awesome conversion tool ffmpeg. With multi streams, presets, multi language and a lot of other features traGtor is a handy tool for converting all audio and video formats through ffmpeg. traGtor is based on GTK and Python.

Calf studiogear is an extensive and high quality plugin pack for professional audio production under Linux. It provides a lot of synthesizers, effects and signal processing for the use with LV2 audio production suites (like Ardour) or as stand-alone through JACK.

Calf with all of its new features and processors isn't officially released by now so you have to grab the GIT-repository from sourceforge.net until we are ready for a stable release.

» calf.sourceforge.net

guess is a tool to launch (and kill) different setups of programs. It was invented to startup all needed synthesizers, audio suites, MIDI sequencers and stuff with the correct source files on the right desktop for a single audio production with just one click.

xplanetFX - series: Mit xplanetFX ganze Bilderserien erstellen

oRainge Theme: GTK-, GDM-, Metacity-, Icons-Theme

oRainge gDesklets: Sprechende Uhren, Kalender, System-Widgets (manual)

photogen:c SVG-Icons: Diverse High-Quality-Icons im SVG-Format

traffick: Serverumgebungen testen. Durch skalierbares Threading erzeugt traffick Unmengen an Suchanfragen und Webseitenaufrufen, um ein hohes Maß an Vorratsdaten Netzwerkauslastung zu simulieren.

GIMP Plug-In “Moderated Blur” for Tilt Shift and Depth-Of-Field Effects

stuff (de) guess calf traGtor xplanetFX

xplanetFX 2.2.12: nicer atmo, specular size and render time, bugs

Donnerstag, den 24. Februar 2011
Version 2.2.12:
* Atmosphere creation rewritten (no falloff to border and no 'hot spots' on 0°,
  90°, 180° and 270° anymore, nicer color and blur)
* Specular creation rewritten (lighting gets dodged in a single layer instead of
  two and is a little bit smaller. Reduces specular render time ~30%)
* Switched h/q cloud enlargement from "scale" to "resize" and added a better
  filter type for clouds enlargement (Welsh) to produce less artifacts and blur
* Adjusted sharpening of resized clouds
* Bug in corona section in daemon: don't sign integer values if offset gets
  negative (corona was displaced if it's position was outside the canvas)
* Same bug in the atmosphere section of the daemon

xplanetFX 2.2.8: new effect – atmosphere

Montag, den 14. Februar 2011
Version 2.2.8:
* Added new effect: atmosphere draws a subtle blue gleam over lit edges of the
  earth (its impact on render time is comparable to the corona. The effect is
  very similar, too but it is located above the earth, not around it. Its main
  intention is to soften the edge between earth, clouds and corona)
* Specular icon modified
* Splash modified
* Show splash through gobject.idle_add to force drawing on the screen even if
  the gtk loop is busy already

xplanetFX 2.2.6: realtime preview on view tab

Samstag, den 12. Februar 2011
Version 2.2.5:
* New feature: realtime xplanet preview of the earths view on the view tab
* New feature: Drag'n'drop of crosshair on the view tab
* Improved appearance of crosshair on the view tab (was hardly visible over some
  areas and covered the target below)
* Speed up of view widget: worldmap and grid are cached on a surface and redrawn
  only on expose event
* Bug in the worldmap: implemented equidistant cylindrical projected map
  (was isographic and therefore inaccurate away from the equator)
* Edited orbit widget background to fit the xplanetFX earths style (and to have
  a thinkpad below ^^)
* Behavior of some events: added blocking states to some event handlers
  (prevents earth previews and cursor from jumping around and keeps some resets
  less cpu intensive)
* Edited the splash a little bit

Version 2.2.6:
* Bug in draw_view: crosshair was inaccurate by 0.5 pixels
* Added the moon to the xplanet preview

Gimmickry with the template capabilities

Montag, den 7. Februar 2011

I played around a bit with different textures – inspired by the new positioning widget. The result is not totally shitty so I upped it to the theme pool. Perhaps it gets adult one day…

xplanetFX 2.2.0: GUI update & new features

Montag, den 7. Februar 2011

I believe it’s treatable.

Version 2.2.0:
* Heavy rewrite of the GUI:
    - Way more consistency between tabs (paddings, sizes, ...)
    - Stripped the view settings from the settings tab and put them to a new one
    - summed all display related options
    - Preview widget now shows more (pseudo) realistic preview of the earth
      (with corona, clouds, specular, post f/x and stars; it's not latest state
      of the art but at least gives a clue about what u are doing)
    - Preview widget got better positioning grid with some values
      (state of the marker button is saved now and it got a new icon)
    - Position widget was pimped with colour, a grid and micro numbering
    - Language went back to settings again
    - Consistent save, refresh and close buttons
    - New function: button to center the earth on the screen
    - Splash screen
    - New application icon
    - stripped theme and style names from thumbview
* Consistent BLURFACTOR depending on screen resolution and earth size
  (all blurs should appear the same in every resolution and with every earth
  size)
* Stars have a nicer corona in h/q mode
* New feature: seamless corona size (old values are recalculated automatically)
* New setting: corona blurriness editable
* New setting: starfield can be zoomed
* Added some more shadows (contrast curve on shadow layer decreased)
* Shadows blur slightly depends on distance of clouds now
* Overall render time decreased about 10% due to the following modifications:
    - Changed overall rendering queue from bottom (background) to top (post)
    - Stars get edited and composed in one step
    - Corona gets rendered on a small square and is blurred, repaged and
      composited in one step
    - Shadows beneath clouds are modified and composited in one step
    - Moon mask gets negated and applied to shadows in one step
* New feature: call a script _before_ the render cycle
* Added orbit setup to CLI --setup interface (oops .)
* Added checks for new values in --setup (backward compat)
* Changed the color of the corona a bit (updates all templates)
* Bug in some templates: set magnify=0 for [moon] in xplanet-clouds
  (moon was rendered in cloud overlay)
* Changed japanese localization name to 日本語
* Changed czech locaisation name to Česky
* Changed french localization name to Français
* Added wrapper functions for drawing contrast icons
* Cleanup in program folder: all icons and images went in subfolders
* Added preinst to clean up icons in program folder
* Added postrm to remove everything related to xplanetFX (except users folder)
* Bug in on_togglebuttonDate_toggled and on_togglebuttonOrbit_toggled:
  they are depending. Either date or orbit.
* Extensive resorting in create_widget_objects and save_config
* no widget writes directly to config, gets collected on save (made problems
  with instant saving of language, autostart and marker state)
* Bug in draw_preview: preview size must always be smaller than canvas size
* Bug in flipview: marker frame didn't respect the alpha part of marker color

xplanetFX 2.1.1: greek language file

Sonntag, den 30. Januar 2011

This is the tenth language file for xplanetFX – greek language by vagrale13 from the greek ubuntu community. Thank you very much, dude!

Version 2.1.1:
* Added greek language file - thanks to vagrale13!

Oh and I reduced the contrast of the star field a bit again.

xplanetFX 2.1.0: Render a star field on the background

Sonntag, den 30. Januar 2011

The nerd fraction demanded the original star field as the background behind the earth – here it is folks, together with a new theme using this feature by default. Nearly every other theme has an update now, I added the option to disable this feature by default in all themes with overlays and non-spacey backgrounds.

This version comes with a massive cleanup in the home folder – the backgrounds folder is cleaned up on every theme change. Having all themes installed and activated once this could mean about 120 MB of disk space free for more pr0n.

To gain some space for the new feature in the GUI I spent some more graphical stuff with changing icons.

Tipp: test the new feature with the dragon theme.

Version 2.1.0:
* Added new function to render real star maps on the background
  (if post f/x enabled, a little glow is added)
* Added python script to generate contrast-enriched star map from original
  bright stars map @ http://cdsarc.u-strasbg.fr/viz-bin/Cat?V/50
* Added cleanup: backgrounds folder is cleaned on every theme change
  (saves up to 120 MB disk space)
* Theme change speedup: only neccessary backgrounds and overlays are copied
  (saves some disk space, too)
* Special f/x buttons have icons now (needed space for stars button)
* Little speedup in post f/x: blurring and composing in one step
* Added SEARCHMAPURL to default config file
* Set LOGGING=1 in default config

xplanetFX: new theme „nebulae“

Mittwoch, den 26. Januar 2011

…and more of this outer-space-science-fiction-star-wars-obi-wan-beaming-shit…

xplanetFX: new theme „Milkyway“

Dienstag, den 25. Januar 2011

Tim, the translator of the dutch language file, tipped me over to a fantastic milky way image on wikimedia.org. Thank you a bunch bro! So there’s new fodder for the space style enthusiasts available on the website and in the themepool inside xplanetFX.

xplanetFX 2.0.21 & 2.0.22: czech and dutch language, bugfixes

Montag, den 24. Januar 2011
Version 2.0.22:
* Added dutch language file - thanks to Tim van der Kodde!
* Added czech language file - thanks to Martin Pavlík!

Version 2.0.21:
* Daemon renders to a interim file in the cache first which is copied to the
  final destination afterwards (instead of working on the final image. Looks
  better when xplanetFX got killed while rendering and hopefully ends the bug
  'black wallpaper on first start')
* Names of final images in ./output changed to xplanetFXn.png
* changed default configuration to lon:0, lat:0, showorbit:1, orbit:-60
* Bug in default configuration of GUI: SEARCHMAPURL was missing in dictionary
  _DEFAULT_SETTINGS
* Bug in dameon: render to file failed after cleanup in 2.0.20