It must be the holiday’s again, for I am in the mood for hacking on GIMP paint tools again. Updated
bug “add support for color jitter in the paint tools” and .paint tools should support “smudging” as they paint.
Some examples of various states of those and other hacks at adrian.gimp.org/patches.
Collaborations built from the ground up
Excellent article from the News And Observer about ways open source and free culture concepts can be applied outside of the software world.
This months Red Hat Magazine has a podcast about Red Hat High that I helped with a few months ago.
I got the linux box talking to the phone over gprs. I had to remember enough of how these weird things called “modems” work to be able to configure it properly.
Trying to get the license plate bracket on the bike fixed before I leave Thursday. Need to track down a replacement tail light. I’ve got one on order, but it might not make it here in time. Got a replacement bracket rigged up, but would prefer a better constructed bracket.
I finally decided to upgrade from my phone from a craptastic nokia to a craptacular motorrola razr.
It does have some nice improvements though. Like useable gprs and bluetooth. I got the osx box syncing to it, and able to get to the internet using it as a bluetooth modem. Took a few hours, but finally found the info I need on the cingular site. Though, the cingular docs on how to connect from osc actually have you firing up a terminal and typing in AT commands at one. Thats pretty awesome. Found a better way elsewhere.
The linux box is next. I got it talking to it via a usb bluetooth dongle, but couldn’t really test anything since I still don’t really get any GPRS connection at home.
Next up is getting the blog to accept phone posts. It seems to work for text, but something goes wonky with images. I really need to update the version of wordpress anyway, since it seems like 1.5.x is now unsupported. I’ve had to hack up the themes and whatnot to make the captcha stuff work, but hopefully thats not an issue in 2.x.
tuxmobil.org seems to be the place to go for linux/cellphone/etc issues.
I got bored and decorated one of my laptops.
Process was:
– doodle onto paper with pen
– scan paper with scanner
– clean up scan with gimp
– import scan into inkscape
– autotrace doodle into a vector image
– resize as needed
– print onto “window decal” inkjet paper
– apply
Of course, for those images, some of those steps were separated by years.
I finally decided to give inkscape a try at importing and vectorizing some of my doodles.
It did a much better job than I expected. It choked on some of the larger doodles, but then, I can’t really blame it for choking on say, doodle31.
Take a look at some of the example traced svgs. That just includes the SVG’s that do not crash firefox ;->
Which reminds me that I need to catch up on the doodle scanning. I think I’m one or two dozen behind.
I spent a good chunk of this week helping teach a class on music and audio production for Red Hat High, a week long camp for rising 9th graders.
I was very nervous before the class started, as I assume we were under prepared and the students would have trouble with the tools. But that was not the case at all. A few minutes of instructions to get the basic, and they were off running.
The first day or two were mainly getting the students introduced to the tools (Audacity and Hydrogen).
Then after that, we were onto the projects. One of the parts of the camps was that the students are to present what they did over the week tomorrow to all their peers (and parents?). So each student was to prepare 2minutes of audio for the project. They could do pretty much whatever they wanted to. Some wrote pretty sophisticated song patterns in hydrogen, and overdub vocals or freely licensed loops with audacity. Some folks did interviews, or “talk shows”. Pretty high quality output for a week of only a few hours a day (9am-noon everyday).
It was interesting discussing some of the various issues related to copyright and reuse of music with the students, who generally don’t really have to think too much about this.
Spent a few hours today doing a collage/mix/remix of the students work for the presentation tomorrow. I think I managed to learn more than a few things about the tools this week.
We had a pretty good student/teacher ratio (15 students, and typically three teachers [myself, Greg DeKoenigsberg, and a few other folks]). But one things for sure, teach a class of 9th graders will wear you out.
I’ve signed up for BarCampRDU.
I’m not exactly a local tech celebrity, and I don’t really do anything interesting with technology, but what the heck.
There are certainly topics I would be interested in participating in, but not that much I would consider myself an expert in. Could talk about work stuff, but *yawn* system management *yawn*.
I see Jay claimed the last open spot before the waiting list ;->