Aranea/blog

I love my XBMC, this media center plays any kind of media file without any hassle. But recently my old xbox gave up on me, so I was forced to upgrade to a new Media Center setup .

I did not want to buy a new OS to run my new hardware so I decided to try the linux version of XBMC. After consideration I went for XBMC Live since my experience in linux is pretty basic, and I wanted everything “just to work”.

Running the Live CD was pretty straigtforward. After a few minutes my new media-center was installed on the hard drive. Everything worked flawlesly, except for my xbox 360 wireless controller. Since XBMC is beïng run from your couch, a wireless controller is pretty much a big requirement.

This tutorial describes the stepts I went trough to setup an “Xbox 360 Wireless Controller” on my XBMC Live from a Windows based machine.

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When I’m on vacation I always try to look for a great photo moment to grasp the feeling of the location on a single image. However mostly, it fails to deliver.

I think that a good picture of a landmark must contain as much information available around it. For example, when trying to photograph the Eiffel tower I tend to shoot the whole surrounding.

Now with my cheap camera I can’t really switch to a wide angle lens, but thanks to some clever software writers we solved this problem without having to carry a backpack of camera material each trip we take. (win!)

Enter autostitch! This tool allows you to stitch your collection of images together to combine in a massive wide angle photo.

Wide angle shot over a bridge in Venice

The photo above seems to be token in one shot, but in reality they are just a composition of different photos shot from one single point.

Venice waters, composition without Autostitch

So, how does it work? You just download their latest demo from their site and run autostitch.exe. Choose “File” –> “Open” and select all the images you want stitched together.

The tool will perform some crumbling and when it’s finished you get yourself a nice pano.jpg inside the images folder (It’s that simple).

You might notice that some images where not used inside the pano image, this is mostly because the images didn’t quite match. Just visit the Options to fine tune your settings so you can get a perfect result.

When you got your  settings just right it’s time to enlarge the output size to get a high resolution image, this will cost a lot of time though. So it’s better if you change this setting right at the end.