Trivia - A Google a Day IV

Which boxer starred alongside Sylvester Stallone in the 2006 movie "Rocky Balboa" as Mason 'The Line' Dixon?
Antonio Tarver

What is the only bone in the human body that is not connected to another bone?
Hyoid

When NBC decided to replicate "The Office" for American television, who was the network's first choice for the role of Michael Scott?
Paul Giamatti

What boyhood friend of Paul Cezanne's is featured "in a Straw Hat" in Cezanne's painting c. 1870-71?
Gustav Boyer

At his retirement in 2006, what tennis legend was the most recent of only five players to have won all four Grand Slam titles?
Andre Agassi

What robot helped recover the black box from the 1999 disaster that occurred sixty miles from Nantucket Island?
The Deep Drone

Vincent van Gogh was the houseguest of a physician who treated him in his last weeks at Auvers-sur-Oise. What is the name of the painting van Gogh gave to the doctor to thank him?
Blossoming Chestnut Branches

Technically, what city is the world's largest in terms of square miles?
Honolulu

What is the term for an area of peatland that forms in a climate of high rainfall with a low evapotranspiration that allows peat to develop over large expanses of undulating ground?
Blanket Bog

What is the name of the first vessel that shipwrecked Jonathan Swift's main character, a traveling doctor, on an island out of proportion containing the Blefuscudians?
Swallow

Graphic Design - Gimp Example

So this is just an example to help solve the issue of the layer boundaries in gimp messing with editing images. Let us start with two pictures, a picture of Yoona from Girl's Generation and Psy doing his Gangnam style.

First we use the normal editing techniques, in this example, the picture is not clearly defined enough for the magic wand tool/fuzzy select tool so we can't use that to quickly get rid of the background on the image we want to superimpose on to the other. So we can just use the lasso tool, and invert to get a rough selection of what we want to get rid of.

Then we have to create an alpha channel so that we can make our background transparent.

Then we cut the section out

Then use the erase tool to get rid of the extra background space and crop the picture. As you can see the layer size is clearly defined here.

This is where the issues begin. As you can see by the yellow box, the boundary of that layer is much smaller than the actual picture because we copy and pasted it in. 

This becomes a major problem if we want to enlarge the picture like so. In order to remove that background simply select the layer that you want to work in and change the visibility to that layer only.

 This results in an inaccurate boundary when we try to view the picture as a composite.

So in order to get this to work properly, all we have to do is select the layer with Psy, and create a new layer from visible by right clicking on the layer and selecting the new from visible option.

This readjusts the size of the layer to that of the whole image so that you can now scale properly, and so we finish this up by anchoring the layer after scaling. The reason why you need to anchor the layer is because the way scaling is coded into gimp is that a temporary manipulatable layer is created. This means you aren't actually on the main layer you are trying to work on until it has been anchored.

And here is the final result! Psy photo bombing Yoona.

Computer Science - Gimp Unwanted Feature

While using GIMP, I realized that sometimes there'd be times in which the layer I was working on was't well defined.

Notice how the yellow box doesn't quite line up with the edges. What is happening here is that the yellow box defines the boundaries of the current layer you are on. Unlike as in other image processing software such as photoshop where the boundary size is fixed to the canvas size that you define for the entire image.

This is to allow for different layer sizes so that you can minimize the amount of data each layer requires. The reason for this is because Gimp's functionality was designed on much older computers, and so minimizing the size of the image could be seen as a feature. However, none of its modern competitors have incorporated this feature because it significantly adds to the complexity of manipulating the image, with little to no benefit since the computing power of the average computer has gone up significantly. I will go over an example of an easy way to change how you use gimp in order to more easily use gimp, especially when copy and pasting is done, which completely messes with the boundary of a layer.

Trivia - A Google A Day III

Who played the role of the husband in the 1951 television series with a second episode entitled "Lucy Does A TV Commercial"?
Desi Arnaz

Inside the star Lucy in the constellation Centaurus directly above Australia is the world's largest what?
Diamond

Which of Golf's Open Championship courses has the postal code CT13 9PB?
Royal St. George's Golf Club

According to the legend, who was led to the landmass beneath Australia by Te Wheke-o-Muturangi?
Kupe

Colonel Tibbets flew a B-29 that he nicknamed after his mother. What was the code name of the bomb dropped from this plane on August 6, 1945?
Little Boy

The name of the post-war home of the president of the C.S.A. is French for "beautiful to see". If you visit this national landmark, what will you see directly across the street?
Gulf Of Mexico

Once known as the Erythraean Sea, this body of water connects to the Persian Gulf by way of what strait?
Bab-el-Mandeb

In whose name is the memorial hall that is located on the former site of Zhonghuamen Gate at the southern end of Tiananmen Square between Zhengyangmen Gate and the Monument to the People's Heroes?
Mao Zedong

What famous Renaissance playwright originates from the area known as Warwickshire?
Shakespeare

The author of "Ten Days That Shook The World" is the only American to be buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis. What American playwright was a close friend of this author?
Eugene O'Neilla

Trivia - A Google a Day II

Whose grave in Forest Lawn - Hollywood Hills Cemetery in Los Angeles is marked with a tombstone that reads: "She did it the hard way"?
Bette Davis
Bette Davis was an American actress who was able to play a huge range of characters.

What would you buy a ticket to see at 1380 Port of New Orleans Place in New Orleans?
Mardi Gras Floats

Ozymandias is an example of what poetic form?
Sonnet
A sonnet is a 14 line poem that follows a specific rhyme and structure. William Shakespeare wrote many famous sonnets both in and out of his plays. 

What was the given name of the drummer for the band that topped Billboard magazine's list of all-time top Hot 100 artists published in 2008?
Richard Starkey
Ringo Starr also known as Richard Starkey was the drummer for the Beatles.

What power of God does Edmond Dantes claim to possess in Alexandre Dumas's "The Count of Monte Cristo"?
Providence

Which former NFL quarterback was born on the exact same day as the actress nominated for an Academy Award for her performance in "Agnes of God"?
Jim Kelly
Agnes of God is a play that tells the story of a novice nun who gives birth and insists that the dead child was the result of a virgin conception. The actress's name was Meg Tilly who was an Oscar-nominated actress and published novelist. 

What crater on the moon is the same distance across as the journey from Walt Whitman's 1884 house to Atlantic City, New Jersey?
Copernicus

General George Washington's victory at Yorktown turned the tide of the American War of Independence. Under what monarch did the commander defeated at Yorktown serve?
George III

In what county is the highest of the coastal mountains that ring the low plains at the center of the island that is separated from Great Britain by the Irish Sea and the North Channel?
Kerry

Kerry is a county in Ireland.

Who wrote the lines "child of love and light" that accompanied Richard Rothwell's portrait of Mary Shelley when it was shown at the Royal Academy in 1840?
Percy Shelley

Trivia - A Google a Day I

This is just a log to keep track of random trivia from the game a google a day.

What is the name of the crank that attaches to the side of a Victrola?
A Winding Key
A victrola is a product of the victor talking machine company which produced phonographs, and phonograph records.

What city would you visit to tour the only royal palace found in the United States?
Honolulu
In Honolulu the Iolani royal palace was used as the official residence for  the reigning monarch of Hawaii.

What disease is caused by the bacterium Vibrio cholerae?
Cholera
Cholera is an infection of the small intestine that causes watery diarrhea and vomiting. 

Which former world heavyweight champion won the first 40 fights of his professional career losing the 41st to Muhammad Ali?
George Foreman
George Foreman also was the spokesperson for his foreman grill.

Who is the only player to have scored three goals in the final of the World Cup?
Geoff Hurst

What bay separates East Egg from West Egg in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel "The Great Gatsby"?
Manhasset Bay
The west egg and east egg areas of the city were inspired by long island.

Although its name is a misnomer and probably a British corruption of the original Spanish name "Las Chorreras", what Caribbean town is likely the place where Christopher Columbus first set foot in the New World?
Ocho Rios

What band sang the song with the lyrics that served as the inspiration for the name of the company that produced the show in which Mercedes McNab played the part of Harmony Kendall?
Yes

What name does the protagonist give himself when his desires for inappropriate relations overtake him in Nabokov's 1955 novel?
Humbert the Hoarse
The novel is Lolita.

In 1917 during WWI, with whom did John Dos Passos enlist in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps?
E. E. Cummings

Computer science - Open Finder from Terminal

When developing on a mac this will help make things a bit easier to manage. When in a terminal all you have to do to open the finder from the command line is use

open .

as shown in the following, it will open up finder in the current directory your terminal is in.