A blog of my random adventures with technology.

After using Gallery2 for a few years, I’ve decided to move my photos to Flickr. Currently I only have a couple new galleries up from the Chester County Restaurant Festival and the most recent Guerilla Drive In.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/ahotw/

More galleries will be moved over soon.

With more and more people solely using their computers for web browsing only, Google will be doing the natural thing and announced Google Chrome OS.  I’ll assume that it will just be a matter of time until the EU tells them they can’t bundle a browser with their operating system… or is it the other way around?

After purchasing a Dell Mini9 a couple weeks ago, I decided to use a photo from my climb at Nelson rocks for the desktop.

(Click the photo for full 1024×600 goodness.)

If you’d like this for your larger screen (or smaller) let me know and I’ll prepare one for any other resolution from the original.

A short drop was all it took to break the filter that was on my camera…

Thankfully, the damage was limited to just the filter and lens cap.

Earlier today, Freenode started to block all access to their networks from Mibbit.  This allegedly stems from people using Mibbit to evad bans, along with poor communication and responsiveness from Mibbit’s administrators.  As a solution for this issue, Freenode released their own web based IRC client.  After watching #freenode for most of the day, I have to congratulate the Freenode staff for continuing to answer questions, even if they were the same ones, all day.

Based on my observations, here are some of the common questions and concerns:

• Will Freenode be blocking access from any other client? No.
• Does this have anything to do with Mibbit being closed source and Freenode using open source software for their web client? No.

And I’ll toss in one more with my own answer:

• How am I supposed to have my special setup wherever I go? Use something like: screen irssi

Mibbit had their own answer to all of this.

Tomorrow I will be attending the first Southeast Linuxfest in Clemson, SC.  I’ll post more tomorrow.

The Rectangle Select Tool in GIMP is a lot more powerful than it first appears.

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The next part of this tutorial covers Mode & Opacity.  These two options combine to provide a decent amount of simple, yet powerful layer manipulation in GIMP.

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When working on any project in GIMP larger than a few simple tasks, layers become vital to keeping one’s sanity.  For starters, layers allow for quick changes and easy edits.  The more comfortable you are with layers, the more you will find that they are useful.  Through this multipart tutorial, I plan to share as much as I can about the power of using layers.  This first part is a fairly basic one to get everyone comfortable with the basic use of layers.  Even though it is called “The Interface”, I don’t plan on going too deep until later parts of the tutorial. Continue reading →