Posted on 30/4/2004, 9:49 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
All these Planets have those floating heads around them (aka hackergotchi). Jeff gave me some instructions a few days ago, and I said I’ll write them up after having success with them – so I present the official jdub method. BTW, congratulations Jeff & Pia!
- Remove unnecessary bits out of the picture, so you just get the head
- Select by alpha (Layers, Channels & Paths dialog)
- Make a new layer
- Feather the selection (growing/shrinking before might be necessary)
- Fill with black – the black color thumbnail is mighty handy for this
- Then change the opacity of the channel, and move the shadow down to the right, to taste
I’ve found that the Drop Shadow plugin works okay as well, but its not as good as manual intervention. Estimated time for completing a head can be around ten minutes or so. Preferred size is 64×64, so scale it in The GIMP, otherwise replace 64 with 80 or so, depending on the head.
Update: Wouter Verhelst has another guide too: my head has graphics as well.
Posted on 29/4/2004, 2:16 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Looking to making the switch to Linux? Wanting to know more about Fedora Core and how to use it? Want to train your community centre folk to use Linux? I give to you, http://training.bytebot.net/ – ByteBot.Net Training Materials for Linux.
Fully based on Fedora Core 1, and almost exclusively teaching based on the GNOME Desktop, it covers some OpenOffice.org basics, troubleshooting, and more. It goes hand in hand with the OpenOffice.org Training Notes, released in February. No, this time I missed a good birthday to release it on :)
Posted on 28/4/2004, 11:19 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Cautionary tale as to why you should not mix repositories. Dag might have some fun stuff, but it doesn’t play well with fedora.us stuff, sometimes. I had already removed it from my yum.conf, and I also got rid of the stuff in /var/cache/yum. Came home (after watching Kill Bill: Vol. 2) to a machine that had gone off with the power failure. Horror, Galeon wouldn’t start!
Good thing ~/.galeon/session_crashed.xml is nice and readable so I backed that up. The daunting task of removing GAIM, Mozilla, Epiphany, and some other depends, and then re-installing them with pristine fedora.us stuff took a few good moments. I still have 12 packages with the dag tag, so I’ll work on solving that later.
Posted on 27/4/2004, 3:10 pm, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Well, everyone’s got a misconception of the new OOo Schools Mascot. It’s been blown out of proportion people, and there’s no point bombarding the marketing project – we’ve received quite a lot of crap for it. Here’s Bruce Byfield’s positive take on it; Sander’s got a more interesting way – lets feed the spammers! It will soon leave the main website, and just be moved off to the schools sub-project. Let’s leave it at that folk, stop the bombardment, use all this energy to make OOo better okay?
Lots of other things going on – fc2test3 is out officially; been using it for a few days already, its generally quite good. “Let’s fix Fedora” meeting was yesterday, talk became more active, new ideas are surfacing, only good things can happen (I’m overly-optimistic, some say).
And my-opensource.org will get its revamp soon enough – it now hosts its first HOWTO on Howto Configure QoS/Trafficshaping on Shorewall with Wondershaper. Rock. Ow Mun Heng should get a blog, and more should too; just added Kevin Francis to Planet MYOSS (which is now on Planet Planet as well as p.g.o’s planetarium).
Posted on 26/4/2004, 4:06 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
I really want to sync mail between the desktop and the laptop, now that I have a working desktop. So I gave MultiSync from CVS a shot (requires evolution-devel, openssl-devel on FC). Not bad, it does Contacts, Calendar and Tasks, but no Mail (and really, I don’t use the other features often). Multisync however has a cool Opie plugin, so if GPE is still at the status it is at (haven’t updated my iPaq in a while), I may just reinstall it with Opie for a bit. Very promising software, and when it reaches 1.0, they’ll apply for GNOME inclusion – good.
That said, Evolution is now synced, with the wonders of rsync! Small script kills evolution on both desktop/laptop, and starts syncing the important stuff over. For a ~/evolution of size 1.6GB, it completes in under twenty minutes – thats a pretty long wait if I’m going to do this about once or twice a day. Guess I’ll start deleting mailing list archives, and stop being a pack rat, since they’re usually available online anyways. Oh, and a fairly good guide on backing up Evolution.
Posted on 25/4/2004, 3:01 am, by Colin Charles, under
General.
Roblimo‘s recent piece, Getting good PR for your open source project sparked the recent IRC discussion today, where he came up with some tips for the FLOSS world to heed.
- Promote what you have – better hardware recognition, new menus, anything different from the rest – tell the journalists, they’d like to know. Remember, journalists are always looking for story leads, so write in and tell them – the worse that can happen is the story isn’t written.
- Sending letters to companies to switch to FLOSS isn’t wise; better show them via demonstrations and get LUGs to act. However, showing them financial benefit via letters, or offering cheap training might help – the word “FREE” has been over-used.
- Press releases and announcements might be run verbatim – don’t be alarmed.
- “Comparisons are good when you’re the underdog, but are usually not smart when you dominate a market”. Also make sure comparisons are honest, and keep in mind if the product is bad, big advertising will kill your product fairly fast. “PR is simply telling the world your product exists.”
- Assumption that folks understand open source or what your project is about isn’t useful. In fact, talking about the software rather than the fact that its open source might be better.
- Make your main point in the first couple of sentences, because thats when you catch the editor/journalist.
Daniel has a color coded log file. A lot of reference that roblimo made, was to The Care and Feeding of the Press, so read that if you want to be a PR afficiando. I don’t think I missed out on any particularly useful points from the discussion, but if I did, drop me a comment, thanks.