I’m a long time Photoshop user. I started in high school in journalism class and I’ve been through several versions up to CS2 today. I love Photoshop to death. However, I run Linux now, and dual booting would suck. Qemu doesn’t cut it eaither and I don’t think Wine handles CS2 very well at all.

There is a program called GIMP, GNU Image Manipulation Program, for Linux that is equivalent and I’ve tried many times to come to grips with it’s different interface. I used to despise GIMP, well, I still despise GIMP, but at least now I can work in it.

Here is my first piece of decent work to come out of gimp. A nice, shiny, flare-y, striped glass web 2.0 bar. It was a good learning experience and I thought I’d share it’s beauty.

I messed with F-Spot today. Or rather, from about 1:30 to 2:30 this morning. For those too lazy to follow the link, F-Spot is a photo manager, much like Picasa or that iPhoto garbage. Anyway, you can sort, view, crop, enhance and tag the living daylights out of your photo collection with it.

I really like the interface, it’s very intuitive and much like Picasa (or vice versa, I dunno which came first). The tags and filtering are great, and provide nice visual cues for your sorting. There are also numerous editing tools and they seem to work at very respectable speeds, and lossless no less.

My problem is that my pictures are a real mess of folders, and very few are tagged with the correct date and time in the EXIF info. It looks like I’m going to have to go through adding a folder at a time and weeding out dupes and stuff. That might take a while, but I think it will be absolutely worth it. I’m gonna get some sleep now.

From the depths of my hard drive emerge “Snake And Rock”! These are some little comics I made a year+ ago. Looking at them now they don’t seem as funny as they were then, but hey, I’m nostalgic, so here’s the whole run of ‘em (10!!). Alas, they do not fit on this layout. Go read them here.

I’m in a Linux distribution! Well, sorta. A wallpaper I made is the default background in an alpha build of fluxbuntu. If you go get nBuild1-Revision2 from fluxbuntu.org that background is of my design. Also, if you just go to the fluxbuntu.org page it’s the background in the screenshot.

It’s kinda neat, I posted it to the forums as an alternative to the boring white default and they added it to the distro. Too bad I’m at school with no way to burn the disc and install it to my laptop. Maybe I’ll download it and make a QEMU style USB version. Then I’d have to buy a USB stick… This isn’t working out. Oh well.

P.S. This is a good, light distro btw. My current fave for my old PIII laptop.

So I’ve got this real old Pentium III laptop. It’s a *shudder* Gateway no less. What makes it worse is that it ran Windows XP stock. Thats insane, the thing moved like a rock, e.g. not at all unless you kicked it. I’ve tried multiple different Linux disto’s on it over the last year or so, and they were always a tad heavy, or a tad too stupid feeling (I’m looking at you IceWM). The exception was FluxBox, which I experienced on the nUbuntu livecd about a month ago.

So, today I found fluxbuntu, and it rocked my world. No more gnome or XFCE for me, I’m going fluxbox. Loaded it up, and since it is an alpha, it isn’t all that pretty. So I made this nice background for it. Anyway, if you have a spare machine, check out the fluxbuntu Alpha, it’s pretty good (esp. for an alpha ;)