Richard and I would like to take a moment and thank all of those who have made a donation to the Screencasters. You are very generous. Donating isn’t a requirement and we rarely ever mention doing so. Don’t want to pressure anyone. We just wanted you to know that we appreciate it. For those of you who haven’t donated…well…don’t feel bad. I rarely donate money myself…honestly. Personally, I wonder where my money goes anyway. I think it disappears as quickly as I make it. Pretty sure, though, that if my wife sold a fraction of her shoes that I would have a lot more money…money that I could donate to FOSS projects. So really, it’s her fault.

Anyway, we are never really sure what to do with this money so it just sits in PayPal and grows over time. It makes for nice emergency money. Although, we have a few good ideas how we could put this money to use. Richard thought about purchasing a diamond tooth to replace the one he lost playing hockey last year (Dude, wear a face mask) and I thought about one of those Flavor Flav clock necklaces to replace the small one that I wear that goes completely unnoticed. Perhaps we’ll still get those things but we had a better idea: Shirts for Ohio Linux Fest (OLF).

We double-checked with the Inkscape board members to make sure that we were able to use the Inkscape icons on the shirt without breaking any rules. I would like to thank Ted Gould especially for being extra helpful. He’s a pretty smart cookie from what I have gathered. That goes for the rest of the board members too. They are all rock stars in my eyes. Thank-you very much.

The idea for this shirt came from a shirt that has been on Jinx forever. We thought it would be fun to make a spoof of a very popular t-shirt. Amazon has a slightly better graphic of the shirt.

Although Richard is unable to attend since he’s getting an 8-track stereo installed in his personal jet that weekend (Oct 11), I’ll be there to give away some shirts to some lucky folks. Yes, I said give away…as in free. Who wouldn’t want a free shirt anyway? Hell, I’d wear a shirt with Pruritus Ani FTW in bold letters across the chest if it were free. Wearing a Screencasters shirt couldn’t be as bad as that, could it?

So if you make it to OLF this year and you’re lucky enough to spot me then you might be fortunate enough to walk away with the gayest coolest t-shirt of all time. I only have a limited amount so they may go fast. Now…if I could only get Richard to set up a CafePress or SpreadShirt store for the Screencasters then perhaps the rest of us could have one too.

Wow! What a real honor it is getting added to Graphics Planet and LinuxPlanet Blogs all in the same week. It’s nice to be associated with such great people. Although, I hope that doesn’t mean that we have to be interesting because that’s too much pressure.

Does anyone still read this blog anymore? If so then I posted a new episode, Episode 071. Please make me feel better by watching it.

Having reached the nice round number of 70 episodes, it seems to be pretty good timing that longtime viewer zombiebrainz had a great idea and some initiative and started the Screencasters Flickr Group (at http://flickr.com/groups/screencasters).

The idea is to have an easily accessible place for viewers and fans of Inkscape and our screencast to share some of what they have produced using Inkscape with or without the help or inspiration of our screencasts. It should be a good place to check out what others are doing, get some comments on your own work and maybe even find some inspiration (something I know I’m always looking for).

Anyone can view the Flickr group, but to contribute (upload stuff, leave comments etc.) you have to join Flickr. If you’re not already a Flickr member, you can sign up for free right here.

Shortly we will add a link to the Flickr group over on the right hand side of the sit. To check it out right now click here.

For those of you unfamiliar with Flickr, keep in mind that you will actually upload your images to your own account. You have full rights to those images to whatever extent you choose when you upload it. The group only aggregates that content for people with a common interest and provides a way for us all to communicate and see what others are doing. The group doesn’t control your content. You can remove it whenever you want.

Almost finally, if you do upload some content, feel free to geo-tag it if you want so that we can get a feel for exactly how global our audience is getting. Of course, like just about everything we do, it’s completely up to you. Whatever floats your boat.

Although zombiebrainz told me that he needed no pimping or link-love for coming up with the group and the idea, we’d be remiss not to acknowledge him. Visit zombiebrainz’s blog at http://zombiebrainz.blogspot.com/, and for those of you into the Twitter-thang, you can find him at: http://twitter.com/zombiebrainz. Mucho thanks to him.

Thanks to all of you for watching, subscribing and commenting. We’re having fun doing it.

About a month since my last screencast, Episode 070 is finally ready. I almost feel like I should apologize for taking so long between my last and most recent tutorials…but I don’t want to. Luckily Richard recorded a pretty cool Episode 069 to take the pressure off of me. If you haven’t seen his latest screencast yet then watch it now. It’s awesome.

Episode 070 has been in my head for a couple of weeks now. Unfortunately I had zero time to record it. I thought it would be a perfect tutorial for a beginner. Plus, I have been itching to make an openSUSE 11.0 style graphic using those rad looking green and dark gray colors. The artwork in episode 070 was inspired by Jakub (jimmac) Steiner’s countdown banner that he made for the openSUSE 11.0 launch. I have always been a big fan of Jakub’s artwork. I wish I had a fraction of his artistic talent.

There are plenty of case badge graphics on the Internet but there isn’t a lot of information regarding how to print them on a sticker. I wanted to do this on the cheap so I opted for Avery labels which most offices have a lot of. It worked pretty well for me. I was able to cover up that nasty looking “Designed for Microsoft Windows XP” sticker on my openSUSE 10.1 server. I opted to leave off the version number on my custom badge so I wouldn’t have to change stickers when I update the OS. You might think this is a silly project but I had a little fun doing it. As long as I’m happy that’s all that matters. Maybe I’ll even make a badge for my Ubuntu server. Hey,  a jimmac inspired visual refresh for Ubuntu would be great…dontcha think?

Episode 069 is now posted. In this one I create an Airline Safety Card style illustration from a photo. Phew.. that was a mouthful.

This one went suprisingly long, I tried to go quickly through the slightly tedious parts, but I think it went pretty well. Hope you enjoy it.

Well, I did it. I bought one. I joined the millions who already own an Asus Eee PC. I must say that I am impressed with this little cub of a laptop. I wasn’t sure what I was purchasing since I hadn’t seen one in “real life” before. I felt like I was taking a risk. Although, when I opened the box and flipped it on for the first time I was surprised at how useful it really is.

I’m not really a big laptop user actually. I have a full size laptop but honestly I rarely ever turn it on. I use it mostly for testing distros. The last major thing that I did with it was make the original Screencasters website over year ago. Why I chose to do it on my laptop I’m really not sure. Just remember sitting at the kitchen table hammering out the html and css code. I’m mostly behind my desktop these days. Rightly so since I’m most productive on it.

So why did I buy a new laptop then? Well, I told myself that I wanted something small to bring to the Ohio LinuxFest in October. I didn’t want to lug around my beastly 9-10 pound laptop that has ultra shitty battery life. That’s what’s nice about the Eee PC…it’s size. It’s about the size of a book and it fits easily in my messenger bag. Battery life is so so. I think I get about 2-1/2 or something. I haven’t timed it so it’s a guess. I can probably make that go a little longer by turning down the LCD brightness. Even so, the battery life is fine with me. Plus, it hibernates pretty well when the lid is closed.

Anyway, I was pretty surprised by how polished Xandros was on the Eee PC. Initially it has an easy desktop mode that is laid out pretty well. I was able to hop on my wifi connection rather easily too. Everything that Linux users are accustomed to on the average desktop distro are available. Even though you can use this as a regular laptop I’ll probably stick to cloud computing on it. Internet, Email, and SSH is what I’ll use the most.

With just a small hack I was able to get to the full KDE desktop too. That felt a little more like home to me. On the other hand, the easy desktop mode was just as useful. However, after using it for a couple of hours I noticed that some of the packages were pretty old. Firefox, for example, was a 2.0 release. :(  I didn’t very much like that. I wanted release 3.0. After a little research I decided that I was going to have to do a bit of hacking to get the latest version of Firefox. Also, I discovered that the Xandros repos were a little bare. That is why I decided to bite the bullet and give Ubuntu Eee a try. After listening to the last The Linux Link Tech Show guys go on about it, I figured that it might just work well enough for me too.

I wiped the hard drive by blowing out the 4gb recovery partition allowing me to have my full 16gb of hard drive space. The Eee PC comes with a Xandros recovery DVD so it wasn’t like I couldn’t put it back on if I needed to. It took about 30 minutes to get Ubuntu installed, not counting the 10-15 minutes that it took me to prepare my 2gb flash drive with the Ubuntu Eee ISO so that I could boot from it (the Eee PC does not have a CD-ROM so everything must go onto an external flash drive). Once I got Ubuntu installed everything just felt right. After I got the initial 200+ updates/patches and applied a few tweaks I had a beautifully working OS. Which, by the way, the Ubuntu Eee website is awesome. Lots of helpful information.

Bottom line…I love my new laptop. There are many different Eee PC models to choose from. I got the slower 900 but for $400 from TigerDirect it seemed like a pretty good deal and it’s plenty fast enough for me. It even runs compiz well (which I don’t run). I highly recommend it. You won’t be sorry.

Finally got around to posting a new episode. Hope that makes Don Waters happy. Episode 068 is all about making halftones. There are quite a lot of things that one can do with them so go crazy. Also, google “photoshop halftones” or “vector halftones” and you’ll get a bunch of ideas on how to apply them to various things.

Have fun.

So after work today I visited my local Wal-Mart for an eye exam. It was time for some new glasses and a pair of contacts. After arriving and filling out some paper work an older fella came out and introduced himself. Apparently this was my eye doctor. He wasn’t my regular eye doctor that I had come to know for the last three or four years. Apparently, he was on vacation so this fine gentlemen was filling in.

Immediately, I noticed that he had an OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) sitting in the examination room. I was interested in it because I had only ever seen them in pictures on the Internet. So I said, “Hey, an OLPC.” I think he was surprised that I even knew what they were. I asked him how he liked it and he filled me in on all the good and the bad and why he was using one.

Anyway, as the conversation continued, the new doctor asked me some personal questions regarding what I did for a living. I told him that I was a Design Engineer mainly and the IT administrator for a very small company. He asked if I ever did any programming in my line of work and I told him that I did but it was mostly just scripting since I wasn’t much of a “real” programmer. He found interest in that and asked what programming languages that I used. A little embarrassed about the first one I told him that I scripted in visual basic (VBS) and also used a little python (thanks to Mr. Richard Querin). I mentioned that python scripting is what I was really interested in learning more of because it seemed like the way of the future and allowed for me to use the code on Windows and Linux with very little changing. I also explained that I wrote bash scripts to automate some routines on my server as well.

Well, it turned out that this doctor is a software developer on the side who uses python for a majority of what he does. In addition, he uses Ubuntu wherever he can, especially at home. And the kicker is that he was well aware of many open source programs like Blender, Inkscape, and OpenOffice. If that wasn’t enough, I found out that his kids (who are probably around my age of 36, I’m guessing) are software developers too. They own a company in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, which is about an hour from me. His son is a big Blender user of all things.

We chatted for about 45 minutes about programming, Linux, software patents, open-source software, and education. Probably could have kept on talking but there were other patients that he had to attend to. He was very interested in the subject of teaching young children programming, namely python. This is why he had an OLPC. Apparently, him and his children were writing software for it. I thought that was absolutely brilliant.

So that’s my story. Here I am in Small Town, Indiana at my local Wal-Mart and I run into a person like this. He was very interesting to talk to and listen to. Yes indeed, it’s a small world after all.

Episode 067 is live. In it I take a look at an SVN release of Inkscape and show off the new Spiro path functionality. I hemmed and hawed over the idea of this screencast. I didn’t want to screencast features that are still be cooked but I had a change of heart during the last 3 days. Just too excited about Spiro to keep it under wraps I guess. Plus there aren’t many places that one can find Spiro tutorials on the net at this time…so…here’s mine until some one can make a nicer one.

Enjoy.