Arno's Art

Open Sourced Black History Month

2012-02-01T10:47:00.001-05:00

We take a break in the normal push to acknowledge and comment on the thing known as Black History Month. My bone to pick is when other cultures in this conglomerate of immigrants called the US display their heritage, there is a recall of ancient times and the unbroken trail to get here. When US Black folks do the same we only talk of the boat that brought us and what we did since we got here. There are no ancient times, but then again we weren't immigrants either. Much has happened to wipe the memory of our past from our knowledge banks, common conversation and replace them with disconnected snippets of truth, half-truths and out right lies. At first the idea was to make us slaves, then subservient citizens, then reluctantly allow us to blend in till we don't care anymore. I know, I have a blended family, it is a good deterrent from seeking the truth.

Truth seeking is a hard game, names and times change so often it is easy to get confused. Academic ego poisoning has turned fact researchers into racist dogs. Imagine discarding truth because it doesn't support what you arrogantly and erroneously believe. They find it more glorious to say we invented it rather than we learned from others and developed it further.

Fact finding takes a thousand eyes from many sources. Common threads abound and what was recorded in one country is also recorded in a different way in other involved countries. Sometimes it a cultural link, a language, a practice, or an event, a series of events. For me it is backward questions. How did we get to the boat, the field from where I was captured? What was I doing there? Where was I before that? Was I indigenous or migrant? Were we fleeing war, persecution, drought, on trade routes? Were we carrying products or were we the products? Who were we in every exchange and name change? What did we encounter along the way and what did we leave behind when we moved on? What is the span of time these things took place? Can a people still be considered a people after such a long span of time? We are talking 2000 years and multiple generations, blending with other peoples, us and others forgetting who we were/are.

It started with the very thing I was supposed to be ashamed of, my skin, and a picture from the Bible. Moses put his hand into his bosom, pulled it out and it was leprously chocolate brown. No, it was already brown and turned leprous, as white as snow. I also found the famous De Vinci and Michaelangelo competed for a commission to paint Roman (white) faces on religious artwork (the Renaissance). No animosity toward anyone today, we've all been lied to. Many believe the lies, live out the lies, regard the lies as truth. No need to check it out, right!? And when the truth is revealed, there is rage, the change is monumental and how dare you challenge what we all have accepted as true, you are lying and cursed and deserve to be killed, blasphemy, blasphemy!! The white guys in the Bible were really brown guys!? I could be a Hebrew, the pieces seem to fit. The world history and biblical prophecies concerning the descendants of the Children of Israel seem to fit. It is a prophecy that we would be enslaved, forget and be forgotten and our ID would be assumed by others.

Yeah, we invented the oil jiggy, the hair curler upper and the electric traffic cop.

please, overcome your FOSS asumptions

2012-01-31T18:08:00.000-05:00

What's driving the home grown and grass-root digital arts effort. You'd think it's the same thing that's driving the professional digital art world, after all that is the standard, right. Well yes and no. Yes, the art world as we know it is entrenched, most get schooled for jobs down the road and the notion of art preservation has paved the way to museum walls. On the other side of the coin is portable art, disposable art, art on every object bought and sold by humans to humans. Well............ it turns out that, and we are talking software here, that Free Open Source Software (FOSS) can do the same things that commercial software can do.

Poor Johnny can't draw on his PC because his Photoshop trial version time limit has been reached. Purchasing power has not been bestowed upon him. Maybe he can get another trial version or get a crack (oooh Johnny?) to turn his Photoshop clock back. Meanwhile, his friend and friendly fire rival neighbor has been drawing steady for months, no sweat, with Open Source Software. Now multiply this incident by your classroom of art hungry digital art students. The waiting for resources vs the getting down to draw (with the same tools) today. GIMP today, Photoshop tomorrow or when ever. I am tell'n ya, save the Photoshop for advanced work towards the professional if ya want to go that way.

Meanwhile in a garage across the street from the well established but restricted budget school of sport and ARTS cuts, a dozen art frenzied kids are slinging pixels. Older PCs, XP and Linux powered with Open Source softwares in a low budget operation. That's what I see anyway.

I have a more powerful laptop as I told you all, it is running Ubuntu Linux 11.10. I don't care for the Unity desktop and installed the Gnome Shell and I love it. Having more resources I tried to install XP as a virtual machine. It worked at first, then got messy and I couldn't recover. Instead I have installed Wine, billed as not an Windows emulator, allows you to run some Windows applications in Linux. I've tried this on my old laptop, it didn't work well at all. Now with better processor, more memory, Wine works really well, so far (I'm cautious). I don't want to run every free art app I can find, they don't all work in Wine and who's got that much time or bandwidth. You can only get good at or find useful just so much. The big Windows app I wanted was Google's SketchUp. There is a free version and a feature rich paid version. You can find open source software that does similar but Google's SketchUp is established, has resources, pre-built models and lots of fans. Sketchup works well in Wine, but I am guessing you got to have enough RAM memory and a descent processor. SketchUp is well explained, easy to learn and can be as advanced as any professional CAD system. I would have made SketchUp a Java app like SweetHome3D. SweetHome3D is a Java app that runs on any PC with Java. You draw a floorplan and it draws the walls in 3D, then you can put 3D furniture in there.

So art on the PC can be doodles, paintings or CAD, 2D, 3D and it's all about the tools, not how the tools are packaged. It can be done in Free Open Source Software at low to no cost, nuff said.

why fi, when you can face to face

2012-01-28T09:40:00.001-05:00

I was a teenage artist, doing my thing and looking for an avenue. I wasn't an "art student" or under tutorship in some program. Most of my artist pains were from being alone. None of my friends were into drawing, it was Motown and girls. One day at school I went into the "other" student lounge during lunchtime. A group of guys were huddled around a table and butchering some Motown tunes, street corner crooning style. Then they hit on a tune just right and the harmony shook the room. Immediately the other kids gathered around the table, ears wide open. It was sweet, live, impromptu. Then the crowd went back to their places, they missed the interesting part. The guys then whipped out their specialties, a couple of poets, a couple drew black super hero comic book characters, one drew custom cars, a couple were into fantasy football via those plastic men on buzz boards. I brought out my sketchpad and showed my house drawings. I got oohs and aahs and critique and encouragement right then and there. I didn't even have to ask can I join, I was in. Couldn't sing, but I was in. Thus I took my talents as far as I could in that time frame, challenging my self to have something new and better to show the group. Then my family moved to a different part of the city. The new school had no such group to hangout with. It was back to lonely artist pain.

In college I was awash with stories of Silicon Valley, the tech culture. Folks there literally worked out of their garages. Tech people hung out together to trade stories, theories, to boast-n-brag, to find collaborators, make deals, etc. Today folks don't have confidence in the possible idea, or trust in other like minded persons. Other persons are adversaries, competitors, conspirators. To work with others today you need a prenuptial and a stack of disclaimers.

The cellphone is a wonderful connection device, but it is a stall, a virtual stall. Like being in a cubical, toilet, elevator, or closet, you are virtually private. There should be a law never look at a person on the phone. How many people live on their cells? Maybe I should open a "no why-fi zone" restaurant, in fact no media in it. Hey, rno's got a new place where people actually talk to each other face to face. Woe, do people do that any more? That's gotta hurt to watch eyes, moving lips and body language all at the same time. Dag, that's like being married, that's too close. You think I am funny? My wife no longer yells up the stairs after me, she calls me on my cell.

Hanging out is an art. Finding like minded souls is a bliss. They are your toughest critics and your strongest encouragement to get your art done and out there. This is the grass-roots that makes it all go.

The difference is where you are standing

2012-01-23T09:45:00.001-05:00

Stand in the middle of a field and dream a little. Then walk to the edge, take the whole field into view. The change in perspective should be profound. Using the arts to revive a town should not be based solely on the success of another city but also on the potential of the town you're in. This is because the players, the landscape and the times are different. It is not about bringing a franchise in called artist revival. There needs to be serious grunt work. Some give up practicing the arts in order to support the arts. There is a lot to happen behind the scenes to make art visible. Turning art from school projects and pastimes into businesses or any kind of economic engine takes numbers of art interested and art involved persons.

When I was in college there were a number of businesses that sprang up on campus. An old carriage house turned into a swanky pizza and wine restaurant, a shop that sold posters and dorm room decor. My favorite was a hole in the wall restaurant that had steamed brown rice-n-veggies, bean soups and open-faced sandwiches. There were coffee shops and book shops. I don't believe any of them were franchises. They had uniqueness, were not scripted, polished, canned, homogenized and sanitized.

We have generations that don't hangout like in the past. Online global networking gives the illusion of being connected to anybody and everybody, but when we only meet via this media all the safety conventions and cultural seasonings of face to face are lost. We must recover local networking and reach out from there. We have abandoned union halls, veteran halls and cultural center halls all over town. Declining numbers of old folk still go to these places but the young folk don't identify with cultural/race the same way their elders do. If you don't locally gather at a church, school or a rec center, life is isolated. Work is not a social activity, not like in the past.

We have a computer user's group in town, mostly older folk. Young folk aren't interested in computers the same way. There has to be some faddish thing for young folks to get excited. They are hooked on the games not the hardware, playing around not doing something practical. I bet you a smart phone group would be a hit, but I also bet you couldn't get young folks into one room for a formal organized club meeting.

Art is still a hands-on activity, handling the physical world and making the world a more livable place. Art can be simple or complex, performed by a young person or an older person. Talent aside, art is a great agent of therapeutic results and academic possibilities. Art still has a shape-shifting definition in both the object itself and the beholder. Art is faddish and timeless at the same time. Art slips into places where social, political, religious and economic stubbornness have all but closed the door to what is still good about us that we care to share with each other. Art is still locally produced and shared. Home grown.

pretty carp to being outstanding in your field

2012-01-21T10:30:00.000-05:00

If Mac users are hungry whales, MS users veracious sharks (duh duh, duh duh...), then Linux users in mass are drooling penguins. I try to herd them past the Koi tanks, "For Show Only, Not for Lunch" I say. They drooled so bad everyone was slipping-n-sliding-n-falling. Hard to get predators to read the liner notes, Koi are fresh water fish you salty dogs. Koi are a cultured lot, the cream of the Carp, not a glorified Guppy. Besides I think predator taste buds are in their stomachs, they don't even chew their food. Slow down, saver the flavor!..........and dibs on that.

What has this to do with art, digital and otherwise. Here in my post-lost of industrial base town. We are trying to revive via the help of local artist. We have discovered that competition for recognition and rewards and resources have reduced artist to individual feeding frenzy crazed I am somebody worthy to be paid well and dang near worshiped maniacs.

Let me make it plain. Town or neighborhood recovery requires grass-roots effort. The grass on top that is visible to all needs cut/trimmed regularly. This controls the grass and the WEEDS. The roots that are invisible (underneath) are what remains and sustains. Artist are used in recovery work because they have a work-flow that is integrated into their lives. Often their work needs and living needs are the same needs (work in the home). This creates a tension which fuels local economy, social networks, community concerns and resolutions, cultural identity or character of the community, etc.

To start, artists need to communicate, collaborate, establish the community, grow commerce, then compete. Competition is about friendly fire not destroy all comers. Why because some artists are supremely gifted and some not. Then some artist are well received and some less. If you create a healthy environment, all the milk is enjoyed, the froth, the cream, the milk, the milk mustache supports the napkin industry, the milk residue fuels the dish detergent industry, yogurt and cheese and milk flavoring, latte and lactate free. Besides the industry of art itself, artist possess a work ethic. Somehow if a town languishes too long, the work ethic drains away. Easier to steal from your neighbor than work for your own sinks into many towns.

Jobs are scarce near where I live, I keep my chin up while I look for work by doing art projects. Keeping busy wither getting paid or not helps keep the work ethic alive. I get up, get busy, plan, work at it, finish it. I joined with other artist doing the same thing. We struggle with where we are going with this. We hope for other artist joining in to become aware of a community of necessity, establishing the roots on the bottom while cultivating the grass on top. Once the grass is growing strong, weeds can be tolerated and managed. Before then weeds overwhelm, drain the nutrients and look like hell. Please note, there are not enough weeds to make bio-fuel and challenge the oil industry. If heavy industry comes, OK, if not we will roll with what we have and be successful with that.

dead trophy fish or koi

2012-01-20T08:26:00.001-05:00

How do you art? I have my ways. As much as I want to draw on a computer the same as I would on paper, that is not my pattern. Being a draftsman for years does something to you. I am used to drawing with instruments, using templates, keeping a library of reusable parts and symbols and recycling drawings. I usually don't do sketches on the computer because it's not reflex enough, fluid enough. Pen and paper is so.........natural. When I come to the computer I am fitting together pieces of ideas, tweaking, editing, altering, arranging and formatting. So yes, scanning is a big part of what I do. I will draw something, scan it, save it for later. When I review the scans I find a use for the scan.

I used to get guilty over my process till I watched someone do a block print from beginning to end. Then I saw them ink up in other colors, combine the block with other blocks, even alter the block. My computer is similar to that block, I can print over and over the same file or make a new altered file from the old file, saving both the old and the new, then reuse them, combine them. I say the process is my art, the outcome is your art (that is the part I show you).

Now let's flip the fillet from man eating fish to show fish (like koi). You know many cities try to use artist to revive and recover old neighborhoods. This works fine if the artists are a community. They rent spaces to artist for studios and living that need remodeling, many times spaces that other people would turn their noses up at. The art of making space livable and living there is fraught with legal wrangling and physical alterations. This is all weathered if the artists are a community and not a band of squatter gypsies. The difference is the level of giveback to the larger community.

Artist need to acknowledge themselves, then each other and become economic partners instead of competitors. You need places to hangout, a newsletter (grass roots thing), resale shops, galleries, art services, etc., etc., etc. Above all independent thinking must make space for group concerns. It's not just you, it's your neighbor too. We fight for credit, glory, power, money, all to get ourselves elevated at the expense of other community orgs in the same hood. Wrestling for control, political advantage, a name for ourselves and to have the prominent ego might be fine down the road, but you don't want to start off like that. Artists work hard at their arts, but they must be unencumbered from the pace of competitive madness. It doesn't take that much to live. This is why artist can recover a community where others can not. Recover the community first, fight for economic advantage when you have a community that can deal with it later.

fish heads and fish tales

2012-01-16T08:41:00.000-05:00

The concept of what is art is vague to many. Those in the various arts might have general assumptions about what others call art, but ask them about their own art workings. Ah, there's specific and personal involvement.

I was talking to a friend at a gathering, she introduced me as an artist to her friend. The friend exercising her concept of art and of artist, immediately invited me to do a portrait of her and her family. I almost blurted out "Go buy a camera!." Calmly I explained, I do digitally manipulated drawings of patterns for use in interior design and decor. I saw the frustration on her face so I recanted and said 'I do abstracts.' The conversation was over, she was sure she understood and frustration was now on my face.

So if you are an artist, forget the business card. Print up some post cards with a sample of your work on them. There will then be no misunderstanding. Show-n-tell works for kids and especially adults. One picture = 1000 words, two pictures will blow them away!

Admiration and envy plagued me for years. I let ones I admire influence my work. If I envy them I steal from them, wanting to be them, do their work like them. So, I don't intensely study another's work. Overtime I become familiar by glancing here and there, gleaning and understanding. I figure out what my own interest are and what my own directions are.

The biggest thing is to review my own history of sketches. I took all my sketchbooks and scanned them into my computer, a little each night. Then I used Picassa or Fotoxx or another photo management software to review. It's like your life flashing before your eyes, what insight! There is a nature of your own work that is your work, a character. You might not like it, but if you understand it, embrace it, you can then adjust it, improve it or just use it. It is not going to go away, it's you. Tell yourself, 'It's not a flaw, it's a feature! Then say 'Others don't see this much of me.' You tell others what you want to tell them. If then they want more they will have to know you personally or see a retrospect of all your works.

caviar in the sack lunch

2012-01-14T08:37:00.000-05:00

I love the comedy routine where the guy pulls a gourmet dining spread including a lit candelabra out of his gym bag to impress a chick. My vision of a roving artist is similar. There is a physical trade off. My graphics laptop is hefty, wide and along with it's power adapter fits in a large laptop bag. Then I put my graphics tablet, CD case, tool kit in a smaller bag. This is fast to set up and use but transporting it all is giving me muscles. I can get an hour of battery life or unplugged drawing done if I don't use the CD drive too much and off-line. Newer stuff is built to better specs and longer battery life. The pro photographers carry battery packs for potable lighting. Something similar for extended remote laptop usage would be wonderful.

Portability is of prime importance along with size of screen, power to get work done efficiently and battery life. Doing art in the studio is one thing, on the road, at the park is another. I envy the painter sitting beside the river, folding stool, easel, small canvas, pallet, casual moves, totally distracted by his work at hand.

Things you use have to fit. My standard mouse is too big, my daughter's laptop mouse is bug sized. My fingers had to adjust a lot to use it. Then I stumbled upon the iHome Laptop mice. They have a middle size, just right. I have a Wacom Graphire 2, ancient but it works well. Using the pen takes getting use to. I was a CAD drafter for years, using a mouse is normal for me.

Habits and patterns, the laptop can allow you to bend the rules. I move from house studio to the art center. Working in the car is space awkward, working in a waiting room is people awkward. If the weather is nice our city has a covered landing next to the river. It has picnic tables and is not occupied between events. Oh to quite my thoughts for two hours, no folks to attend to, no urgencies, no ego trying to get noticed. I have the isolation at home, to have it in the open air, that takes some personal adjusting for me. I spend a lot of time dodging, juggling and managing situations and people. It takes a while to settle down and do art. You have to slow the flow of differing influences. It is cool to do all kinds of stuff but starting and finishing means giving up the wealth of many for the poverty of one idea. I was overdosed on all the colors, then I narrowed my pallet, I immediately knew which one to choose.

100 beady eyes on a cracker, Not!

2012-01-13T15:58:00.003-05:00

Ok, we already settled that no matter which Linux live-cd/dvd for artist you use, as long as the applications you want are on it, you will be happy. Just have enough RAM on your system to do them justice, because graphics take RAM.

Using a jump or flash drive installation is awkward if your PC can't boot from an external USB drive. If you install these Linux for artist you might have a time installing new software or finding what you want in supported but older software repositories.

Getting past the above cautions results in your head cocking back and a loud raunchy laughter erupting from deep within. 'Hey, you're here, where's your equipment?' You whip out your disc, slide it in, boot, sit down, draw, save to flash, logout, eject, grab disc and run down to your car so you won't embarrass your self..........'LOL!' You forgot to roll up the windows.

PureDyne is a DVD, has a little of everything, is my favorite.

Dyne:Bolic 3 Beta is a CD and is half the distro that PureDyne is, size wise.

gnuArtist also is a DVD with a lot and also comes in a 'Lite" CD version.

Puppy PAW or Photo Artist Workshop is cool but the Linux itself is different. It is older and might be hard to find now.

Artist-X is a DVD's worth of artist apps.

Ubuntu Studio is a DVD's full of stuff. I don't have this one.

openArtist is also a DVD. I'm downloading this one right now.

Well get out your net search and checkout the home-pages and the specs. They are very similar to each other. Download and burn-it, then you too can put a complete art studio in the palm of your hand.

the caveat of caviar

2012-01-12T08:41:00.000-05:00

OK, now there's a drawback to using any of the made for artist live-CDs. You use it, you love it, you want to install it, then it hits you. Remember I told you to get off the update track and in fact to get offline? Those were made from the latest distros at the time, but because they often are a special rendition of an original or were made for the specific purpose they are not update-able now.

Some artist distros were made with scrips and tweaks on top of a distro version that is no longer supported. I have a box of live-CDs of various distros, everyone still usable but obsolete because they are no longer supported.

There is a solution to this delima. If you must install one of these artist distros, do it as a virtual machine, dual boot alongside of your regular updateable Linux. Dual-boot alongside of MS Windows or dedicate your PC as an artist tool and not be concern with changes, additions and updates OR use the live-CD as is and be happy.

The portable dilemma can be overcome one more way. Install a regular normal Linux of your choice on a huge honking but portable USB drive, add the apps you want. This is probably the best long run solution. It cost more than a couple of USB flash drive sticks, but the payback is huge honking also.

The live-CD offer having all the artist apps in one place, already to use. In the gallery, we have some older machines, no internet yet, no network yet. I know many folks who don't have DSL or cable so downloading is not happening. You can buy distro discs on line and be done.

Picture this, laptop, USB drive, graphics tablet and a extended power battery pack. You probably need an airport carry-on bag with wheels and a handle. You can setup anywhere. LOL by the time you put it all together, those tablet readers and net tablets will be ready to do the job. They are too small and power short for now, for me.

OK, I was there

2012-01-11T09:15:00.000-05:00

Linux for artist has been in the works for years. You have to ask, what's an artist and how much Linux do you need. The results are often a DVD full of stuff artist can use. Think of the movie 'the matrix' when they are loading up from the weapons racks. It's a funny effect to see racks stream off into the distance when they are just going to grab the stuff in front. Linux is like that, choice out the wahzoo. In the net search game when you say artist, you get recording artist. Then in the artist Linux you get audio stuff and some movie editing stuff. When it all said and done the visual graphic stuff is ad..........oops ran out of disc space.

Linux for artist projects try to accommodate various kinds of artist. Then there is that dilemma, live-cd/dvd or installed. If you install you can add/remove the applications you want/don't want. If you use the live-cd/dvd you take what you get. Being a visual artist mainly and foremost I want to see the standard Linux apps, Blender, GIMP, Inkscape and My Paint. After that other tools I might use. Some of the AV oriented Linux distros have some of the graphical stuff but not all of the main ones. Not a problem if I install the whole thing. If I live-cd we have a problem. Usually the standard graphic stuff included are not tweaked with extras but stock, off the shelf.

So look at the many, download and burn. If you can remaster one you like according to your taste, that is the best. My vote for the best out the box Linux for Artist is PureDyne. The size puts it on a DVD but it's a hair over a gig. This will fit on a modest flash drive. The Swiss Army Knife motif is cool, just enough to be useful but no over kill. Believe me I wanted a Swiss Army Knife in the Cub Scouts, my dad got me a knife with twice the hardware, twice the size and half the price. Hiking with that thing banging in your pocket and the other kids saying where's your tool kit.........

PureDyne is cool, no fancy and distracting eyecandy. XFCE desktop for chose it and do it get to work on the fly action. It sees your network and hooks you up, if you need it. PureDyne presents a stable environment with 'enough', wither live-cd or installed. I'm still puttsing around but it looks good so far.

honest, I wasn't there

2012-01-10T09:37:00.001-05:00

In the Linuxville downtown there is a landscape of tall and short distros. Each one almost a world in itself. Standing on the curb you see regular faces going in and out. Normally folks don't venture outside their chosen trek. I am a jumper, so I investigate because grass is always greener in the other side. Don't take my word for it, get a blade of grass, it really is greener on the other side. How do they get the greener side to face you when your looking at it is a mystery?

In the test kitchen I downloaded various Linux greenery. Mind you now, we are looking for Linuxes made for artist and favoring the visual graphic bent. I have a laptop on life support, one with a quirky graphics card and my desktop. Then I have distros: Dyne:Bolic 3 Beta, Pure Dyne, gnuArtist, Artist-X, Puppy Photo Artist Workshop, Racy Puppy, Dream Linux. There are others but they emphasize audio/video production.

These are all live-CDs or live-DVDs. This means they will run off the disc by loading and running in RAM. You must have adequate RAM for good performance. Dyne:Bolic and Puppy especially work the best with low RAM, but graphics are RAM intensive. You must have a PC that can boot off the CD and or Flash drive. Flash drives are wonderful because there are no moving parts to slow you down. There are procedures to make bootable Flash drives. The beauty of the above is that you can transform an average MS Windows PC into a Linux Artist workstation with two Flash Drives (at least 4 or 8 gigs each). And when you pull them out, it's still a MS Windows PC.

The distros have similar applications, I mostly look for Blender, My Paint, GIMP and Inkscape on the same distro. If you install the distro on one computer then you can add what you want, then construct a new Live-CD. This is called remastering. This is why there are so many versions of Linux. I will try to say things about what I found. But I want to set the user stage.

An artist tool set doesn't change much. If you got a good set that works for you why change it. The constant urge to upgrade to the latest has to be set aside. I would recommend getting use to working offline. Thats no upgrade fever, no online. Then using an unchanged live-cd distro if you can, remaster if you must. So, your tools are your tools and changing is squashed to a minimum. Distractions leads to no action. You can now put your art studio on two flash drives mounted in a violin case, gangster in and blow any PC into art production. Details are coming.

just like I wasn't there

2012-01-08T22:21:00.001-05:00

Here in wonderful downtown Linuxville there is always an opportunity to have an epiphany when you least expect it. I know it's been done but I will lay it on ya anyway. If you are an artist like me you will appreciate the possibilities.

Most of us are either hunched over a PC terminal, laptop or running around doing god knows what for others. You go to the library or school or your brothers/sisters, get to use their PC but your work is at home listen.

Get your Linux live-CD or DVD or Linux installed on your Flash drive along with an extra Flash drive/stick to save your work on. You put your disk in or your Flash, boot up, do your stuff, save it, remove the disk and stick, reboot and who knew you were there. What's cool is that there are distros designed for artist, like Artist-X, Ubuntu Studio, gnuArtist, Puppy Photo Art Workshop, Dyne:Bolic and a few more. You can also remaster a CD/DVD with apps of your own choosing.

Me, I am downloading several of the artist distros to use at the art gallery. We have a couple of older Windows PCs I will install the Windows versions of Open Source software. I know many are used to Windows. I will have the Linux Live-CDs handy to show the portable artist tools. You can take them anywhere you have access to and as long as the PC will boot from an external device you are good to go. Your friend don't have graphic apps, fine, you can run from the flash or CD and not effect their PC. Theory, but a real working theory. I'll give you an update, let you know how it goes, but I know you will beat me to it.

I just wanted to add, If you can stop the upgrade fever, you can use the live-cd till the cows come home. Most artist like their tools not to change for a while. And unlike most people I believe a PC doesn't have to be connected to the Internet to be useful. Offline, hurts but you can get some art done.

Meanwhile back at the ranch.

2012-01-06T14:36:00.000-05:00

Here in the Linuxville guide office things are busy. I am upgrading the old laptop from Xubuntu 11.04 to 11.10. It had died and was revived. It is officially at home on my work desk as a media player and web browser. The newer laptop is wonderful, except for the browser glitches. It handles my graphics apps well but the browser stuff........enough for the rehash.

At the gallery we are looking at several old PCs. They don't have to run the latest stuff, though that would be nice. We can use them to run slide show displays and play media files. I am getting some refresh in the MS XP world, but after all is said and done my Linux and open source disks are handy. There is a Mac, a G3 or something, never used one for any length of time. You see everybody has used and trusts Microsoft and Mac, even all the quirks. I have been a Linux user 10 years. Mind ya now, though I am a technician I don't go too deep, else there won't be time to do things like art. Fixing computers for others is endless.

What's next on the scope, networking. Here's the game. I have my big printer attached to the XP box so that the printer drivers and color management software are no problem. Also on my net are the Linux laptops. If the XP box is a print server then it will use the printer drivers on each Linux box instead of the XP ones. Linux printer drivers are OK for some printers but awkward for others. Ink level monitoring sucks for my printers in Linux. It might be better to just transfer files through a shared folder and print from XP. You got to keep it simple even if it takes a few more steps. OR hire Poindexter the neighborhood techno wizard to configure Samba and show you the big button to push.

Here's the problem, an all Linux network is not explained to well enough for the less informed to just do it. Then the Microsoft net requires domains, workgroups and other net hanky-panky. A mixed network requires dance lessons (Samba), carnal knowledge, ip addresses, port permissions or an application that makes it all easy. Gee Arnold, do you really do art on your computer? You spend so much time messing with the hardware. Yeah I do, but also I'm prone to show-n-tell. I think we should talk about displaying stuff on the net so that ones can't steal yo stuff so readily. Man, there is so much to learn.

Leaping Linux lemmings Batman!

2011-12-27T17:35:00.000-05:00

Don't try this at home, I'm a professional distro jumper. I was standing by the fence preparing to make a controlled jump and they came in a wave. I tried to stop them and incite some reason. They leaped past me into the wind and vanished from view. Countless numbers over the edge. Dang!

You've been to Distrowatch.com, they are fleeing Ubuntu in droves, going for the greener grass of Mint. Let me say this before the rest of you go flying into oblivion. Mint ain't nuttin but tweaked-n-green Ubuntu. It is made from Ubuntu. It doesn't have Canonical's Unity but has Gnome Shell or XFCE or KDE or Mate, whatever. Yeah, OK, it's very nice and better to some, but it's a short hop to Mint compared to Fedora. I am back to Ubuntu but have installed Gnome Shell, this laptop can handle it, it runs great.

They vanished from view because the grass is tall (needs cuttin), though it does look kind of cool (special grass?). I was jumping to test if there was improvement in video performance between Fedora, Mint and Ubuntu, there is not. From the looks of it the Dell M90 video card takes a lickin then quits tickin, doesn't matter the OS. There is a big graphics chip and a huge honking heatsink on top of it. Heat must be a problem. Seems most pronounced during web browser use. I get weird cursor action while trying to type this blog and also while trying to select a site in a search. And page overlapping when you scroll!?! If I set back it corrects itself but who is patient among us, click click aaagh! If I stop using the browsers, actually, Chrome works better than Firefox on this machine. No stampedes please, but Chrome does work better (rumble rumble rumble).

Printing is what it is. If you got one of those 4 ink printers like me then realize that it is harder to mix the 4 to get all the colors you see on the screen. A printer that sports 6, 8, 12 inks will get better color results when mixing inks. I do love my printer as most of my work is simple and it can do photos but the results are limited. But this is art and not photography, so there. My Epson Workforce 1100 prints 13" wide and up to 42" long if coaxed. I took a drawing file to OfficeMax, they have a 24" wide Canon with 8 inks. A 16" x 20" print on photo quality matte paper cost $12. The print quality is excellent and a 16 x 20 frame is reasonable also. A couple of tricks, make a bitmapped drawing at least 150 to 300 dots per inch depending on detail. Then print to file as a PDF. With vector work you don't have to worry about resolution, just print to file as a PDF. This works for me until something better comes along.

but don't mash it

2011-12-24T20:25:00.002-05:00

I was getting all settled into Fedora 16 on my laptop, the graphics card seems to produce screen glitches especially when using the menus in Firefox and a few other apps. This appears to indicate that overlapping windows and menus are a problem. Reluctantly I hosed Fedora and installed Mint. Mint runs a tad slower but without glitches. Mint has the same Gnome Shell but I noticed like I said before Debian application repositories have all the popular apps and supplies the video codecs that Fedora doesn't. I think Fedora supplies a Nvidia equivalent video card driver that is not as good as the real Nvidia drivers in Mint.

I partitioned the hard drive so that I can install another Linux without blinking. The home directory in it's own partition, the OS in it's own. I just reformat the OS partition when needed. The optimal thing would be a big USB flash drive for personal files. Then I could move the flash around to different Pc's. The secret is that the hidden files with your personal settings and configurations are in your home directory. If the new installation has the same applications it starts up already configured. This is handy for browser bookmarks, email addresses and multimedia codecs.

I am hedging about drawing, guess I'm not in the mood. So I have a Java app called SweetHome 3D. This app allows you to draw a floor plan in a 2D view while it draws the wall elevations in 3D in another view. Then you can add furniture and textures assignments in the 2D to appear in the 3D. The constructed views are not too good but if you run them through rendering software they become more photo realistic. I plan to model the art gallery space and come up with display ideas.

When you utilize used hardware you never know how much wear-n-tear you've inherited. I have many 'oh darn it' moments. Save your pennies, plan for the long haul and buy good stuff brand new when the opportunity hits. Back at the art gallery we are going to take some old PC's, set up a PC arts teaching platform and then begin to replace them with new hardware as monies are available. The point is that we start now, not wait. Why wait till we can get top shelf when the lower rungs are available. Yeah, we want Macs but PC's will do fine. I was in a company when it switched from pen-n-ink drafting to CAD on workstations. Then another company that transitioned through 2 upgrades of CAD systems. Waiting to pay for the best is overrated when used PC's and free Open Source art software is available now. Build your skills, transition if you must, get down tonite, get down tonite!

squeezing the tube

2011-12-21T12:22:00.002-05:00

I still don't draw on command, especially after not drawing for a while. My equipment is fine, it's me. I start the process by reviewing my collection of sketches and reference pictures. The perfect program for this is called Picasa by Google. If you find Picasa formatted for your version of Linux you are good to go. Another program I discovered is called Fotoxx, this is what I have now. Both of these apps allow you to view a whole directory of pictures. Real cool if you want to compare and manipulate. Photo management yeah, but digital pictures are like digital photos. Most photo management software organize by time stamps and tags, not directories and folders. Directories and folders work better for me.

If I don't rework an old idea I usually see something new to try. Of late, I've been more enthralled by how a picture is mounted. I'll buy some picture mounting hardware and figure out what to put in it. Yeah, I know, this is backward. Sometimes if you change one element of the finished picture before it's done......LOL! I change the frame, it's an architectural thing. If you are not careful the project becomes very big. Scaling it down and or scaling back is painful on the mind. For me also when I am thinking big or needing scale, I get stopped by how to get the drawing big. You can get a service to print it big for you but I can't guarantee print quality or the material to be printed on. What goes through the printer can't snag and that limits the kinds of material you can use. This may mean projecting your image, tracing it and inking/painting by hand. And you thought digital art was less work. It's that label thing, you call something something so that others can get a handle on it. I preface labels with 'sort of-kind of like' but ultimately 'mixed-media' graphics. I say that with great exasperation because it doesn't describe my stuff the way the word 'oil painting' does. Oooh, how does she do that with oils? Oh (only one 'o'), digital graphics, that's interesting! Hey, I want more o's when you see my work. This is why digital artist go overboard to dazzle and amaze. They think you only helped the computer do that. I pushed the mouse the same as she pushed that brush. I constrained the great and endless potential of the computer so that it will do what I want it to do. Do you think it's easy plowing a field with a race horse?

We had a boss that paraded with his cronies through the new CAD department. "Click, click, click and it's done!" Next week he hired two desktop publishing guys that we were supposed to train to work with us. They had no drafting experience or electrical knowledge. We trained and complained, they were let go. Art knowledge and skill applied with oil paint and brush, art knowledge and skill applied with a computer and printer. Not equal but different media and process. Us mixed-media graphic artist of the digital persuasion find the fine arts a mine field of varied acceptance. Publications, ads, web pages, no sweat, bill boards, no sweat. Fine art.........."computers can do a lot!" I guess the antidote is to sign the print by hand.

nerdvana, I feel it

2011-12-20T23:19:00.001-05:00

I went to thepenthouse/mancave/art studio. Dust bunnies scurrying about, PS/2 micestrewn about, PC carcasses stacked haphazardly and boxes of papers.The huge honking hard drive on my main machine sputtering andspitting out ancient code. My new printer under Linux can't resetitself with new cartridges installed. Like I said a new strategy isneeded. Under the shelf piled with junk I found the XP disc I hadlost. I couldn't sleep, my mind turning this new plan. I had to dothis.

First, reformat the harddrive of the old desktop to rid it of the mangled XP that was on it.Then install a fresh XP. Darn the Service Pack2 disc wouldn't read.Good thing it's still on the net. This machine will run the printersbecause drivers are easy to get for Microsoft systems. The Linuxprinting system works but mileage will vary depending on theprinters. An Epson Workforce 1100 is awkward.

Second replace thesputtering huge honking hard drive with a 60gig one. Lesson learnedis that Ubuntu will not run well and whistle with 1gig of RAM. So,install Xubuntu with XFCE and be happy. I do all this, I'm happy.

I moved the two supportcabinets left of the desk and put the shelves across them. Put the17” CRT on the XP machine because when tweaking for printouts it agood screen. The 15” CRT which XP can't handle well works great onthe Linux machine. I revise all the power cables, put the big printeron a stand next to the shelf on the left side of the desk.

My laptop is my roving artcenter, I can even take it to the library because the battery works.This is totally sweet. I can work where ever. Next is to communicatebetween PCs, install the printers and reference materials. I need acouple of tool boxes for my car tools, my computer tools and my arttools. The mancave is a former upstairs kitchen, the cupboards andcountertop are supposed to help organize, they don't. Too too manysmall parts and cables. I have an old tall dresser for paper andprint supplies. I will cap off the water supply and remove the sinkbut that is later.

I don't like to leave mystuff running all day, the meter is running. It's the accumulatedstuff running in a house that will shoot your wallet, run lean is mymotto. I think this setup will work better than what I had. I evenrestacked the spent PC cases and junk boxes. I am starting to get theurge to draw............see ya!

same curtains different house

2011-12-19T06:53:00.000-05:00

I'm in the new digs and it is different, sort of, kind of. Ubuntu has one philosophy and Red Hat has another. Ubuntu has become the base for many versions of the Linux OS to meet the criteria of different user/development groups. Including a Linux version that has all free software. For sure this is the philosophy of Red Hat concerning Fedora OS. What does mean to the user? Some very handy programs are not free in terms of license, or are free yet owned by a company, that is not open source. Some are propriety and are lent or donated by agreements. Some restrictions include political boundaries of countries. So Ubuntu tries to give you access to every program even the non-free commercial ones. Fedora sticks to the free open source policy. What this means is that certain things are not offered but available via third parties. The most obvious are media codecs and device drivers.

On my Fedora machine to get flash video and movies to play I did the Google search for codecs. I stumbled upon 'rpmfusion.org'. This site has some things to read and click to install and BAM, I had You Tube videos and could play other formats. This process is way better than previous. So dealing with all open source software and finding some extras outside of the Fedora standard repositories is the difference between Fedora and Ubuntu. Once educated, you know, you know!

The Dell M90 machine is smooth running and quiet. There are a few video glitches running Linux. This machine has Nvidia Quadro FX2500m video card and not a Linux specific driver. Linux is still a bad word around hardware manufactures. They don't do retro and are vexed to do new stuff. Being only MS Windows compatible makes them the bucks but Linux demand is not going away. A few annoyances, a few complaints but a good solid feel. Ooh yeah did I mention, this has the first finger-pad that works decently for me and that old Wacom Graphire2 works really well also? Better machine, better all over experience.

dude, you gotta let it go

2011-12-18T17:38:00.000-05:00

Well I'm finally going to give up the Gateway ghost. I thought remorse was bad when we lost a cat. But a good friend of mine, an IT specialist, recycled toward me a used laptop in a business upgrade. A Dell with descent specs and 4 gig of ram from the XP era 2007. Yeah it is not spanking brand new but descent is the keyword. As per agreement I reformatted the drive to remove XP and company data, installed Fedora 16, even while we speak, er a write or type. I feel all fuzzy and excited.

The first thing was to Google 'Linux on laptops' to get the opinion of many who have had experience with Linux on this make of laptop, a Dell M90. There were some video concerns but no real gotchas so far. We just gone from the bargain basement to the upper mid levels as this is a workstation. Red Hat has been a staple in the engineering field for years. Fedora is the cutting-edge for Red Hat but does not stray from the rock solid reputation. This visit is to reacquaint myself with Fedora and to get experience with another style of Linux. Actually the only reason I went to the Debian camp was because they had all the applications I wanted without hassles. Part of the whole user friendlier scene is to make application finding and installing better. I think Red Hat lagged on that front for a long time, now it's up to snuff.

I can't make a fair comparison between my old laptop and the new because the old laptop had a 1024x768 screen. The newer one 1920x1200 and the new Ubuntu and Fedora takes advantage of the expanded real estate. For instance in GIMP, overlapping windows on the old 1924 wide screen, descent size work space and dialog boxes on the 1920 wide screen. Then the amount of system RAM, 512mb vs 4gig, and also the larger video RAM makes for better performance. And best of all is my old Wacom Graphire2 tablet which jittered on the old, is rock steady on the new.

So now in the works is a new studio work strategy, if this new laptop proves it's worth. My desktop has Xubuntu 11.10 and the laptop Fedora 16 with Gnome Shell. All is sweetness and light here in the Linuxville Guide Chateau and the Glad new car smell candle is in the air. Now if I can use the wireless without effecting the TV in the livingroom my wife won't have to call me down from the mancave.

I give you the lowdown like this because many of us creative types can't wait to get all the latest new hardware and professional software. Making art while making due is what we often have to do. When and if we make the cut..........but until then, let's get on with it, now. Stay tuned.

new neighborhood

2011-12-18T09:38:00.000-05:00

With every new combination of hardware and software a new experience and/or a new set of problems emerges. My old Gateway laptop has develop some problems that won't let it complete the booting process. I reinstalled Ubuntu 10.11, then Xubuntu 11.10 and the same problem stopped the boot. Could be the used 20 gig hard drive or just that the Gateway is old and can't handle the latest and greatest Linux.

I've been a Ubuntu user since version 3. Ubuntu is Debian based, which means mostly the '.deb" software management system. There is more to it but that is the crux. Today I am loading Fedora 13. Fedora is Red Hat Linux and has RPM or the Red Hat Package Management system. The latest version is Fedora 16 but it kindly announced to me I don't have enough system memory for it. Fedora 13 is installing but since I haven't used Fedora in so long, I am weary of every thing on the screen. It is like moving to a new neighborhood that's really around the corner. Your friends say they will wait till you get settled in to see you and it all looks like a strange environment. Dag man, don't they get it? I need them to make me feel at home in my new digs.

It's just Linux, they are all the same, aren't they? So are cars and within the same brand name there is great variance, choice and options. My Chevy Impala comes in regular, sport, luxury, deluxe sport, luxury sport and bling to the max. Each development group that handles the various Linux has it's path. They chose a core set of values and parameters out of all the available choices. Linux continues to match both the user base and the hardware base while tightly wrapped around the core values. Add to this new innovations and improvements and that is Linux. So in the end, each distribution like Ubuntu and Fedora may handle the same operation slightly different, plus the apps that do the job may look different. If it looks new to you then you are weary of what's going on. They may use the same desktop but behind the scenes the plumbing is different.

How can it be different, well I had my Ubuntu spear and shield along with my street tux and sneakers. In this new hood they sport red Fedoras and look rather dignified cool and assured, no brag just fact. 'It does the same thing!', I go. Naw man, we is so hot we have to control it, else the ice will melt. Yeah, what ever. Anyway my old Gateway is on the way out and new technology is making it obsolete. I find it so amazing that I can still get it to work. That's the view from here, Linuxville, ya gotta love it.

turning the 'cough' corner

2011-12-15T13:27:00.000-05:00

I have drunk way too much water, tea, juice but the cold is finally starting to clear. I have done the distro shuffle on my main box, back to Ubuntu 11.10. I dislike Unity but it is not that bad. Just not handy enough or intuitive enough for me. Intuitive means it works akin to how I am wired so that it seems it was made for me. Otherwise you got to get used to a different way of thinking. This is why choice in Linux is so great. You can find what suits you or tweak to suit. Mint was great but again I don't have the resources to support Gnome Shell in comfort. Comfort means no glitches, hesitations or malfunctions due to low memory and/or older graphic card. All the newer stuff forces you to upgrade, you can't escape it. If you buy a new PC, also buy as much RAM memory as you can afford or will fill it. Sure as shootin someone will write software that demands it and your comfort level will drop. 2 gig of RAM on my desktop will make it run better and accommodate the present software.

Slowly wheels and wires are disappearing. Wireless mice and keyboards abound. I got a mouse with a finger rail instead of a mouse wheel, man did that take a while to get used to. If you invest, PC memory price is stable to the point that old memory cost the same as when first put on the shelf. High when new, high now that it's older and not restocked. Laptop memory is the same way. New memory for new PCs and laptops are a good bargain, cheaper than the old stuff, get it from the get.

My old Gateway 4026gz laptop is resurrected again. I got a used 20gig hard drive for $15. It does not boot from USB flash, darn it, has 512MB ram and has a missing keyboard key. Hey, your first hotrod still under the green tarp, at least mine is running. I put Xubuntu 11.10 on it and it is so cool. The battery needs replaced, the keyboard, I disconnected the fingerpad. I am going to take out the keyboard, put in a filler and buy a USB keyboard. I am not alone in driving my PCs into the ground. When I get stuff to recycle from others, there is not much left but a spent carcass and OT (old technology, what did you think?). I have 4 really old laptops and a half a dozen desktops, a trunk full.

I do have my eye on new or near new stuff. I am ready for a new Desktop and Laptop. I thought about the ipads and the screens are not big enough and the CPUs are not powerful enough for my work and horse play. I still like to install my own stuff and that cloud thing smacks of not controlling my own data. Cable PC anyone?
In any case if you don't need light dimming graphics for photography or 3D work or serious gaming, you could replace a desktop with a laptop. If they can boot from a flash drive then you don't have to worry about the size of the on board hard drive, but get that RAM. Still, make sure the graphics system is adequate.

old PC iss-CHOOOS!

2011-12-15T11:00:00.000-05:00

Hi all, been ill lately, graphics not on my mind, I went into the dungeon here at the Linuxville Chateau. It's the realm below the knees, where stacks of stuff have lingered since the DOS days. I gathered some relics from friends to recycle parts. My sister emailed me about her MS PC and malware. I had not done malware removal since I started using Linux 10 or so years ago. Here's the lowdown.

I open an old PC crypt, was immediately attacked by ferocious dust bunnies. I already had a head cold, you could imagine the sound of sneezing fits. My wife was ready to call 911. I got the vacuum cleaner and exorcised the little demons, from the PC, not me! Dust entrails on every device, wire and fans. A through cleaning and it was test ready. I plugged in all the perifs and booted. If I had my own original XP discs I wouldn't have faced this horror but it did give me a chance to practice Malware removal so I could report to my sister.

Being an old PC all the paid for anti-virus protection was done. I had to remove them via the Add-Remove software utility in XP. Then being an Open Source guy I whipped out my Open Disc. It is a collection of Open Source software for XP type PCs. I installed ClaimAV the virus scanner and ran it (takes for ever!). It identified the files of malware, trojans, trialware, games, ads, cookies that were bad and prepared a report in a text file. Then using the report I found the offending files via the file manager and deleted them. Then I obtained a free Registry Cleaner off the net and ran that (takes just shorter than for ever). Then I deleted all the personal data of the former master and all programs I weren't going to use. Finally I did the dreaded defrag (takes forever and a day!).

Well, now it runs well for an old XP machine. I normally would have reformatted and installed Linux, but XP is still useful for many things. I installed Open Source programs on it, free of course. MS Office and Explorer are gone, LibreOffice and Firefox are installed along with GIMP, Inkscape, Corel Painter Classic. The only thing that bothers me is the screen resolution and the CRT itself. The old HP monitor has had it's day and the videocard just doesn't adjust right in lower resolutions, all fuzzy. The highest res is sharp as a tack, but it's a 15" screen and I feel the rays if I get too close to read it. Hey. I'm an old guy. Blessed are they that have newer monitor, keyboard and mouse.

Yeah, I know iPads and smart-phones are the rage, but you can't run GIMP or Photoshop on that now can you, unless its cloudware? If your touchy screen can be the peripheral replacing the monitor, keyboard and mouse for the PC, that is cool. But it needs to be BIGGER for real work. Wacom already has devices like this, but they are hooked on art production and are toooooooo pricey for common folk, hummmmmmm! get your hack on!

la de da and yada yada yada

2011-12-06T09:56:00.001-05:00

Still in a seriously playful mood here. Once you got all the things about you ready to roll, think about what you want to do, how your art is to be applied. Note that you are not really in business until you got some customers. The same with art, you got to produce something for others to look at. That's the whole point, right? Yeah you can do it for your own amusement, but you put that much effort into it for your own enjoyment? Oh none will know about my secret life as an artist. No, you don't have to go commercial and all, but maybe a few close to you might appreciate a shot at seeing the inner workings of you whom they love or hang out with. Art isn't always about a job and to relax via art is very cool. But to hide it all away is a crime.

What is your art for, to decorate a home/office, make a statement in a museum or gallery, or be in magazines, or a web page, a comicbook or a greeting card or cubical workspace?

Art has a place and subject matter, it says something or nothing so much like an abstract design. When your art is in someone else's hands, who knows how it will be applied within their life, where it will fit. So make the jump into your art already.

When in school I lived to sketch. When I worked as a draftsman I had an epiphany. I was making prints of electrical drawings on various plotters, then it hit me. I was making little drawings into big prints, what if I did this to one of my sketches. I took a pen drawing, scanned it into a file at home and plotted it out big on vellum paper at work. I almost screamed with delight to see my little drawing so big. I did similar on my home printer and when I upgraded to one of those photo able printers that sealed it. A number of friends make artwork for web pages, but to make stuff meant for print like posters. I can't afford a big printer/plotter yet but there is Kinkos, OfficeMax and Staples stores that all have print facilities/services and can print posters.

How are prints received in the gallery where I display? Next to other media print sometimes appears to be a little hokie because that print could be a magazine page. What sets it apart is the material it's printed on and scale. Glossy photo paper, matte paper, card stock, canvas, all help make the print more than just a print. Printing is as much an art as drawing the art itself. Of course the better quality materials does help. And who's to stop you from altering/augmenting your print via traditional art medias? You can go on and on but I hope you know when to stop, frame it and display it.

hoop-la la land

2011-12-03T12:33:00.001-05:00

Welcome to hoop-la la land, the place where the rubber meets the road and get rubber melted all over it. No, it only looks like tar.

First thing is read the instructions for all the tools you use. A glancing look is OK until you got a question. Like that Abrams guy on "the yankee workshop" be sure to use the safety equipment, lol. Make adjustments to get things working right. Wait! GIMP and my Wacom Graphire2 won't play nice. I've got to dig deeper into that, I'll "Google" for help. In the meantime, my old Wacom does play well with MyPaint. For Inkscape the mouse is less stress. Hey, it's how I roll, you find what works for you.

My first desire is to not do finished art, but to be able to sketch ideas the same as I've done it in my notebooks. Pictorial notes, storyboarding, sketching, they become a mental bookmark. When I review my sketches often I remember everything I thought about concerning the sketch, including the mood I was in, music associations if I was really into it. I even get a rush of desire as if the original inspiration were present. I can then pick up where I left off. I also save ideas to reuse them and combine them with other ideas, hybrids are all the rage.

Well I mainly use Inkscape because vector drawing is similar to CAD programs like AutoCad. Check out LibreCad, I did and It's cool. Bit-map or raster drawing makes me feel like a traditional artist. My cursor is not constrained. This freehand sketching loosens you up.

For precision tightness you need pen practice. Check out this site http://clippingimages.blog.com/2010/06/20/graphic-tablet-exercises/ Now this is a tute by "Dusty Ghost" who's web site is down. The exercises will help you get a grip on your pen and mouse. Thanks to the folk on Clipping Images. Another inspirational and instructional site belongs to David Revoy http://www.davidrevoy.com/tutoriel.html ....he is awesome, dig deep, he's got some serious help for open source artist. And park your cursor over at http://linuxgraphicsusers.com/forum/ because we are drowning in the Adobe suite world and the little nation of open source artist needs an oasis, the forum is cool. No offense Adobe fans, what ever tools you have at is cool wid me!

OK, you got the hardware, the software, the gall, the time and the motive, all you need is the effort. Ain't nuttin to it but to do it. OOOh! There is this open source app called Tux Paint for kids. Don't let the kid thing fool you. It's got a few tricks of it's own and in the hands of a smart-aleck, unkid like magic can be made, lol, my grandkids hooked me up.

Play, grunt, serious play, that's art

2011-12-02T07:28:00.001-05:00

In college I loved music. I went into an orchestra room by myself and a few things became apparent. I was not a trained musician, each instrument required it's own attention and listening required much less work than making the music. I played the saxophone by ear, in my imagination I wanted to play jazz like John Coltrane. It was all glory, I didn't really want to put in the basic music lessons. I did join a drum troupe, played conga and made Trane like noises. Most of the crowd ate it up, but they were as clueless of the "art" as I.

In my so-called art training, we surveyed several kinds of art activities, hands on. Macramé and appliqué, wire and clay sculpture, life drawing and creative drawing. Then my study as an architecture student. I had liked drawing houses before, my rendering won me a scholarship, but not having basic engineering math hindered me greatly. I covered a lot of not taught in class study while working at the campus library.

All things added together, be inspired by glory but get the basic work done, the rudiments, the rote, the fundamentals, the ABCs, then hack it, improvise. I improvised it all. That is not the way to go, lol. As fun as that was, it's also hard. In the end, an artist uses what he knows, both training and vision make the artist. Had I.....well I would be a different artist, if not a better one.

On the computer I became a draftsman before an artist. Luckily, that was my basic training. Working on a PC requires a certain level of procedure, how do you get there from here. You need to know so many UN-intuitive things. Sitting there with a drawing program before you, it has all the tools and possibilities. Like being in that room full of instruments. If you have background, there is much you have already dealt with.

I place a lot of value on play, you got to play with it. Roaming, doodling, making a cyber mess and erasing it, doing it again. Play helps get you to know what to expect and builds confidence. The next great step is the tutorial and the project. Tutorials and/or a teacher gets you to follow a path (procedure) to get a project done. There is a lot to think about from expectation, to setup, to executing, to finishing. Doing art is all about playing but new info/experience takes it to a new level each time.

Serious play/performance/production is the goal, the best of my ability, not someone else's. There are better and worst than me, but I'm an original. When all the elements come through me this is what you get, no brag, no shame. It was funny I went to the music institute to borrow a practice room. I made my Coltrane like noise, the students walking by looked in and smiled, waved and thumbed up. I was just making noise like I heard. The music is more than that. Eventually I put the horn down because I didn't have the basics to move beyond the noise I heard. I could fool a few people, I couldn't fool myself. I enjoy the music, without the training I couldn't really play it, just the sound of it. You can fool some, but you know. Can't draw, pick up a camera, but there is an art there too. It's not the tools, it's your eye. Everybody has eyes but photographers see more precisely. You can't escape doing the work. Play becomes work becomes serious play........eh, it's an art.

Linux shell game update

2011-11-30T12:41:00.001-05:00

I'm not getting any work done because I like to blog and play with my computers. The latest thing is a tussle on a Linked-in Ubuntu discussion group. Just short of slinging colorful metaphors, we politely answer the question of hating the Unity and Gnome Shell desktops. There is then Mint Linux jumping to the lead on Distrowatch. Let me state for the record I tried and I'm tired.

I didn't like Unity, still you can like it if you want. Gnome Shell for me is much better but on my PC it only works off the Live-CD. Fedora ventured out first with a full Gnome Shell and it was cool on the Live-CD. I tried to install Gnome Shell on my Ubuntu 11.10 and it didn't work. I just don't have the Ram and Videocard for good clean usage. Enter Mint Linux. I didn't want to jump on the bandwagon, but having tried Mint before we go for it. The Mint Live-CD was the bomb as Gnome Shell worked flawlessly closer to what I am looking for in a desktop. Then I installed it and it didn't work. But never fear, Gnome Classic was there and also Gnome Classic without effects. Also Mate was there which is pretty cool as a menu system. So I got Mint but no Gnome Shell. If Gnome Classic goes away I got Mate which I like and can live with.

Funny thing with Linux distros, there are sticking points and standout points. Otherwise they are the same as the rest of their families. The Debian based distros are one way and the RPM based ones in their family and the family similar to Slackware. Now mind you, I don't promote distro-hopping as a sport, but if you don't fancy virtual machines or bootable USB drives or flash drives, then here is safe distro hopping. Divide your hard drive into several partitions, 20 gig is fine for each distro you install. Since I am not a nut, I did one 20 gig partition for my choice of distro. I do one partition to match the size of my system RAM memory as a swap partition. Then the rest of the drive as space for /Home directories. My /Home directory never changes, the same directory for what ever distro I install. I reformat only the distro partition and install a new distro without effecting my personal files in my /Home directory. The cool thing about this is the hidden files stored in the /Home directory are still there if you install the same applications, you don't lose settings or bookmarks or email or some configurations.

So what do I think of Ubuntu in second place to Mint? Distrowatch is about the number of search hits sort of like the Jason Bourne movie when the gov phishes for the word "Blackbriar" on international wire taps. It does not indicate installed systems. I heard about Mint, I had to investigate, I liked what I saw, told others, they did the same. Mint is being checked out in droves being made from Ubuntu stuff but lacking Unity desktop. It features Gnome Shell instead and it's own Gnome Shell extensions. I like it but I can't use it on my present system. Linux as far as popular use systems goes, is not focused on low end and older hardware as in the past. The standard has been raised. For me the comfort level is higher with Mint.

Don't forget both Ubuntu and Mint will improve because of all this attention and or the shift of conversation. Welcome to the world of Linux.

the machine for art and the man of art

2011-11-24T08:37:00.001-05:00

I have a scattering of pens on my desk, some papers. I stare at them intently wondering about my own art history. Every artist has a history, work that passed through their hands, ideas that they entertained, attempts, notes, urges, and finished works. Sometimes our training hinders us, sometimes it is what's needed, we make it work or we stretch it to extend our creative reach. Sometimes we explore new territory perchance a new technique will bring about new ideas or a new outcome. Darn it all, there is a core we can't escape, a sweet spot. The artist who draws all kinds of stuff but finds drawing/painting horses is a bliss/blast. OR the impressionist vs the photo-realist, the meticulous vs the slosher/splasher.

For me it is architectural forms, interior design, and decoration. I had a hard time accepting this as I compared myself to fine artist. Turns out my meager training has been about what I love all along, no need to think I'd like to be something else, or measuring up to something else. Turn envy into appreciation of others work. It's OK to appreciate and not have to do it yourself. When I scan the internet a great portion of fine art is about people, faces, figures. I feel more like a stage designer, setting the stage for people to perform on. I'm drawn to sculpture, lighting, and how a picture is framed, the shape of things. My stuff seems empty without people standing and acting in front of it. If I put people in the art then it would be locked. Though some viewers need figures in art to make a immersive connection, "What if I were in there."

The sweet spot sets the art motive into play, the art purpose, the art reason. You may venture to your limits but the sweet always calls to you. Could very well be a big part of your signature, that recognizable flaw that distinguishes each and every artist from other artist.

There is also the mirror effect. When you yourself survey over your own body of work and you see the character of your own hand, an annoying quality you want to change so bad, you will try different things to obliterate the flaw. News flash! That's not a flaw, it's a feature, it's who you are and HOW YOU ARE WIRED. It comes out in your work. Old stuff, you have to embrace yourself BEFORE you let yourself go. Else it will haunt you for ever. You put your hand to a work, did you somehow think what you created is separate from you? LOL!

Man has always made his mark from the first time he furrowed the dirt with a stick, a burnt stick on a rock. The implements today are so refined, the talents so well honed, yet the urge is the same, we make a mark and call it art.

the wonder of two PCs

2011-11-15T10:51:00.001-05:00

I sit here listening to my music in the background. I'm in a Pharaoh Sanders mood right now. Music is a great transport to clear away many of the thoughts that cloud the drawing process. It also inspires and adds it's own flavor into your work. Trust me head banging thumping and grinding is different than smooth and sweet. We are not immune to the environment we are immersed in. Nature calls, the wife calls, the cats want attention, the phone, the mail in the mail slot, the outside noise, the inside cares.........music soothes the savage beast, so I can draw. I don't want to concentrate too hard but be on that edge of vivid sleep. That is where is doesn't matter if I can't do it, I will not stop myself from trying. If I can get it roughly, in time I will get it out smoothly.

Why two PCs? First I don't have a dual quad core with a graphic card so potent-n-powerful it can be the hub of a 4 screen cinema and do the marquee too. Second I do have an older spare dust bunny generator PC that still works. If I set it up as a media player/reference display, I won't have to divert any power on my main PC to doing those things while I am drawing. Plus the second display means I don't have to page back and forth between work spaces. It's all good. Like watching a tutorial on one PC and practicing it on the other at the same time. Not so mad am I? Having pictures of some idea on one screen and you working the sketch on the other.

In your studio accommodate yourself, that is what it is for. I would like a large wide screen or a video projector. Now that's thrilling. Maybe venture into 3D graphics. Although computers can produce wonderful output, they shine in the brain assist. I scanned my notebook pages into my PC, onto CD, then I review them in slide shows. You will be surprised at what you can learn from your own work, what you can teach yourself. That program by Google called Picassa is a gem, an absolute gem. It will play each picture in a folder or selected set at the interval you choose. There is a collage tool I just discovered. You take a batch of pics and twist and layer and resize and reposition interactively.

Perhaps one day I might get an extreme hardware upgrade. Seems you can get laptops that do everything you want. Desktops seem cheaper for the same result. I rather have a light dimming desktop in my studio and a laptop that can do a lot but not be too expensive. I wouldn't want to carry around something I would have to be extra careful about. Hey look at that guy with his case handcuffed to his wrist. Must be a federal courier! Nah, that's Rno the digital artist!

art life after desk overhaul

2011-11-14T22:08:00.001-05:00

oooooh man, I know I'm jumping the gun but I've got to play around a bit.

OK, on deck is My Paint which is fast and furious for playing around. For serious painting, I'm not the one. You see I've been an Electrical CAD drafter for years and the only digital drawing I've done you see here. I've got stacks of paper and notebooks with scribbles but this is new. I do have a desire to adjust my pen and tablet to feel like I am drawing in my notebook. Actually there are many considerations to account for in doing real art, like what is the outcome, will it be printed?

You got to think ahead, especially with bit-mapped drawings because if your stuff isn't a good resolution and size it will be pixelated if you enlarge it. Of course drawing or painting things require a more trained eye and that persistant spirit. Most of us use the trial and error exploration method. We stumble upon stuff that is cool with us until we learn otherwise. I came across some tablet exercises on Deviant Art, I'll have to find the link. You got to get the machine out of the way so that your work is flowing out. You could do this with a mouse, yeah, good luck with that. A cheap tablet is fine if it works well, you can always upgrade. Linux users should for sure to get a Wacom brand tablet as the drivers for Wacom are in the OS.

Freehand drawing requires practice to make the cursor do what you want. Doing vector work with Inkscape is kind of like CAD and requires more nudging lines that putting down and erasing dots. Feel the pen on the tablet surface, learn to trust it. Adjust the software sensitivity of pen pressure. find comfort. For me the mouse works better with vector drawings, the pen with bit-mapped work is more natural. You may have to get ink, paint and charcoal scented candles to.......er, never mind.

You'll need some help like a cheat sheet of keyboard short-cuts for each drawing program you use. You can't remember them unless you use them. Like in My Paint "d" makes the brush smaller. One hand poking the keyboard and the other holding the pen, I can change brush size on the fly. Oops, I don't know what makes the brush bigger, where's my cheat sheet? Aah, "f" makes the brush bigger. So, think about the final output of your work and compensate up front. Planning ahead is very important. Save your work often, I learned this in CAD work. The biggest thing in playing around is learning what you can do and knowing what to expect trying different stuff. It's getting fun.

the non-digital part of digital art

2011-11-13T13:59:00.001-05:00

Here in the humble adobe of your Linuxville guide, looking through the near naked trees and oh my, my garage roof needs fixin. The penthouse studio is shaping up. I work on one of those pressed wood computer desk. Today the workspace just wasn't big enough. The writing/keyboard area is not big enough, the right side under the cabinet is useless and I keep banging my knee on the right side drawer. Let alone putting the flash sticks and CDs under the desk, I watch the dust bunnies become jackalopes and chase the cats around.

So, I raised the CRT on it's shelf and pushed my old wooden drafting table over the writing/keyboard area, against the front of the desk. Then put the all-n-one printer/scanner/fax/copier on the shelf above the CRT cubby and the PC box on the same shelf on the right end. I can see everything well. The reaches are still a stretch but I don't inhale dust bunnies.

The drawing table is just under counter height and just above the desk chair armrest. The table is big enough to rest my whole arms on when I type and use the digital tablet. Well, the Wacom Graphire 2 is an 8"x 8" plastic square, try holding that in your lap or a narrow desk area. I was thinking about 3/8" chip board for a drawing table cover. I could cut out recesses for the keyboard and for the digital tablet. That would be too static for me, my work situation changes as you can tell. My big printer sits atop an old dresser next to the desk, print supplies are in it's drawers. On the other side of the desk on a printer stand is my spare PC which I can load with reference stuff or run tutorials on. Running two PCs can be a headache if they are not similar. You don't want to do too many different things when you are working. Every operation requires your attention at some point.

Just like some people can sleep anywhere, some can draw anywhere. I am not so inclined. I am trying to set a comfortable spot that is flexible but doesn't change that much. For years I've been a vagabond artist in my own house. We are not talking dream studio, for that I would renovate the garage. This is a spare room I can use that is not in the traffic flow.

The table is light enough to move it if I need to and provides a drawing posture better suited for taming the graphics tablet. You say I am beating around the bush, and not drawing! Yes! This is all part and partial of the whole Gennie gig! Art is not a thoughtless process, perhaps a haphazard one, but not thoughtless. Besides, there are drawing tutorials galore but studio setup ones are rare. Getting your work space in order helps you to be comfortable when you work.

incredible incremental improvments

2011-11-09T15:31:00.000-05:00

If you are an unimpeachable penguinator like myself, who likes the well appointed display of desktop bling, gadgetry and and a flagrant flasher of the sweetened eye-candy only to find when you want to work, ya got to shuck the mess down to the penguin skivvies........Closer inspection of satellite photos of icebergs show the gray coloring due to thousands of top hats and tails strewn about in mass. Why dress then shuck is anybodies guess, but the notion of showing off is very strong among us. Who is their tailor? Do they recycle?

My last improvement was the Cairo-dock, I rolled with that until I noticed some response overload. Hesitation after a mouse click was quite apparent. I thought, I have 1 gig of main memory, it should be enough. I love the dock, it is so handy. The culprit is called compositing. All the newer graphic cards can do it, but the older ones will find it a challenge. There are alpha layers, shadows and animated effects that look so cool and steal away your work capability. Ever wonder how or if a bling encrusted banger brushes his teeth? Now that's a sight, yeah man, I'm down wid the paste dude, forget the whiteners, I got my metal polished to the gleam. It's why cops wear shades, bling glint could be mistaken for a muzzle flash. Hey, assume the position and quit cheesing.

So, I had to remove the Cairo-dock. Then I installed Docky. Docky was part of something called Gnome-do, a intuitive device that let's you type in a few letters and it anticipates what you are looking for. Sort of like a spell checker coupled to a search bar. That's not how I roll so I was glad to see Docky as a stand-alone dock application for just the dock stuff. Down to the skivvies, that's what I want. Simple and quick response and boom, I'm working. And it has options, some small bling to make it look cool. It doesn't slow down my system. It's like turning a top hat into a bathing cap and a tux coat into a swim suit (when wet).

Man, you guys always want visuals:

Of course Docky disappears when a window is overlapping and has the usual drag and drop the icon features. The point is to make the desktop wonderful yet responsive. Resources are precious to us of the lean means. Even if your PC is a Hummer (hums with power), this will help you optimize and become even more powerful. That is power that can be felt in your drawing mouse or pen tablet, smooth glitch free operation. Like a penguin gliding through water, I want you all to swim with the sharks yet not be lunch.

What's that thing in the pic? It's my rendition of an African thumb-piano or mbira done in Rhino-beta on a XP machine. Yeah, I came from there too. I'm as free as a bird today, water bird, er, extreme water bird. Penguins rule! Your Linuxville guide on the edge of the berg, bringing you the desktop play by play.

improvement I think

2011-10-29T21:56:00.000-04:00

It is my nature to try to make things better, here in the penthouse studio. This new Ubuntu 11.10 is OK but my hardware is older. I just have to get it to where I can fiddle a little. I removed XFCE desktop because there were some background conflicts that annoyed me. Sometimes when more that one window manager is on one Linux installation, if there is not a clear shutting down of the one not being used at the time, they leak into the one you are using. XFCE has it's window manager and Gnome and Unity has theirs. It is common to share code so that redundancy can be limited. I would get some features from Gnome leaking into XFCE acting funny. So having removed XFCE and installing Gnome Classic desktop I ended some background stuff.

It figures, you want details:

Now the dock on the side is called Cairo-dock and it does require a little compositing power and I do have it to be hidden when not in use. I have the app menu at the top and on the dock, status bar on the top and tasks and workspaces on the bottom. Believe it or not, it is faster than Unity and Gnome-shell. This eliminates two or three mouse clicks between grabbing the mouse and starting the application. Most times, one decisive mouse click allows you to keep your train of thought. In the mortal words of entrepreneur Ron Ronco, "set it and forget it!" There is nothing worst in the whole world than stopping what you are doing, doing a bunch of something else, then finishing what you started, all the while trying to remember what it was you were doing.

Why I talk all this mess? Because once you get your work space to where you want it, it is a breeze to use. In digital art you want to do things when you think about it. The OS and desktop should get out of the way, the applications should be snappy, responsive. The older Wacom tablets are fine if that is all you have, but get an optical mouse, but, but, no lose the ball mouse. I haven't had luck with wireless keyboards and mice. If that is fine with you, OK. The latest technology is not always the advantage. NASA even uses older CPU technology because they have wider circuit traces, generate less heat, very good in spaceships even if they have slower clock speeds.

I have a second old PC I can use for tutorial viewing while I am drawing. I discovered I do not multi-task well. In the past I set it up with Synergy which allows me to share a keyboard and a mouse between two or more computers. I just move the cursor arrow to the edge of one display onto the display of the next, boom, I control that one, and back, I control this one. Also on this PC I can view reference pictures from my stash or from the net. It is obvious to me also I like the tech side as much as the art side. Keeping it all simple, of course. I am just saying the older tech is cool if it still works, use it till it's dead.

what were you thinking?

2011-10-25T09:14:00.000-04:00

There are two kinds of artist, them that must recreate what they see and them that must see what they will create. I am the artist of the third kind. Coming from a drafting background and loving architecture, interior design, I am more prone to design the picture frame than the picture. But I did have some training or more correctly some classes in college. I took a teacher training arts class where we explored various media.

Macramé was big stuff, fabric crafts, then clay handling. I didn't get to throw a pot but hand building was cool and I did a bust of myself. Well it was a head that kind of resembled me. Wire sculpture was fun, I got to bend and soldier some brass rods into a wispy pseudo-futureistic form. Life drawing was awkward but eye-opening revelations of perception and proportion and accurate recording on paper, yeah and a naked body. On the Architecture side there was art history and lots of discussions about the industry and the class project. We had to take $5.00's worth of any materials and construct a seating unit to sit on all semester.

My own time was spent in the library, I was a shelver, a great job for me I scanned through many books I had no interest in. Architecture magazines galore, it was a wonder I got my work done. In my dorm room and in an apartment I had later I did acrylic painting, dabbling and smearing. I don't recall doing anything life-like.
When I left the campus life I became an electrical drafter. We worked with pen and ink on vellum and pencil on anything. Then computers came in. I was trained on CADD, Computer Aided Drafting and Design. I was into the task of engineering drawing. The art side didn't dawn on me till one day while running a plotter I wondered how a hand drawing would look plotted big. I drew something at home on paper and got it scanned in the PC, took the file to work. I felt sneaky and like a little kid about to do a crime. While I was plotting my regular stuff I slipped in my lined freehand drawing. My eyes got big with excitement, had to push them back in and hide my joy. It was hard to go into the plotter room after that. Big plots are the bomb man! I gotta get me one of these!

To gather it all together, you see that life shapes the kind of artist you are. All the experiences and other stuff that gets dumped into you. It all activates the art gene, that must come out. The fun part is when I get to laugh at ones who survived traditional artist training. They are often like war vets, good but boy did they take a beating. I've met the incurable crafters of the cute and cuddly, the "I've got something to say" clan and the "it's a job" commercial artist. Everybody loves what they do sort of, kind of, it's a blessing and a curse thing. You can not escape the coming out, the expression of the art gene, you will express!!!

ease of use?

2011-10-24T20:12:00.003-04:00

I heard the cry "ease of use, ease of use" out there among you icon clickers. Relax, please. Now repeat after me "I do not need to make a habit of using the command line unless I want to." And "I disavow any knowledge of the command line but reserve the right to recollect if I need to." It's a good thing we done this because I was going to breakout Imagemagic a command line graphics application that could make you the next Wizard of OZ. LOL we could be down here in the cave of wonders for weeks.

My main infatuation is that you too can turn your average to geek-busting PC into an art studio for a small sum, next to nothing in fact. Yes in Microsoft Windows too. Check out the Open Disc project: http://www.theopendisc.com/ These are MS Windows compatible open source programs compiled into a DVD iso image. You have to download it and burn it. The cool thing is that the risk of malware is not there. Not for the DVD image and not among the apps on the disc.

But hey, I'm a Linux guy, Ubuntu in fact. I will list the rundown of Apps that I am using.

Libre Office is an office suite a fork of OpenOffice.org

GIMP or GNU Image Manipulation Program is like Photoshop - bit-map

Inkscape is like Illustrator - vector

MyPaint is like Corel Panter - sims natural medias

LibreCad is like AutoCad, sort of

Then I have a collection of other apps to round out things like viewers and printer control apps, color pickers.

If you suffer from creative block once in a while. Put as many of your own sketches or reference pictures into a folder, then use a screen slide show function of a viewer to replay them. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, study them intensely or out the corner of your eye in a casual manner while doing something else (like cleaning your studio). I rigged an old standby PC for this. Add music or not. Things will start cooking again.

Use old technology like a pad of paper and pen to take notes of your thinking. Then scan them into your folder for mental viewing. Pay no attention to the man/mame behind the curtain.

cave of wonders

2011-10-24T13:26:00.003-04:00

We go today down through the catacombs into the cave of wonders. Most are afraid to go down there but if you remember to only touch the lamp, you'll be OK. I'll explain it in a different format so that you'll get it. Carpenters all over the world know you measure twice and cut once. So you read the formula, type the recipe, check that it is correct, then hit the return buttom. Simple.

We are talking about the terminal window or command line in Linux. It's sort of like the similar terminal window on the Microsoft OS but in a different neighborhood. OK, we all know you have been to trained to push the icon on your smart phone, tablet and PC, get over it. I will drag you through the process of this discovery. Cave of wonders, remember.

First I wanted to take a book that was a folder of scanned pages (JPG files) and turn them into a PDF document so that it was easier to handle and read. I tried a number of applications thinking it would be easy. No one application could do what I wanted to do. I was looking at converting and compiling and editing.

Second, when in jeapordy put your answer in the form of a question and Google it or Yahoo it or..... My question, (how to) "turn multiple jpg pages into pdf document in Ubuntu." Scanning down the results and bypassing all the add this application and that (you have to learn how to use each application!) there was the convert command. The person described what it was and how to use it. I took the folder with the files in it and copied it on my desktop, then opened the terminal, typed in his formula using my folder names instead of his:

cd Desktop   --   change to desktop
cd tim   --   change to "tim" folder on desktop
convert *.jpg timbuktu.pdf --   convert all the "tim" folders ,jpg files to a single pdf file named "timbuktu.pdf. Use a carriage return or enter key after each line. Remember the carpenter rule, the first time I did it, it did not work. Then I put a space between convert and *, it work more than fine and fast. When I opened the "timbuktu.pdf file there, low-n-behold, was my book in PDF format, no extra work on my part.

Linux has a lot of commands in it's cave of wonders, but we like GUIs and Icon. I problem is that the pretty covers are usually ganged functions for ease of use. The command line is often more articulate and precise. Either obtain a book on the subject or Google like I did. The convert command is built into Linux, we never knew it was there, now we do. Come on now, I saved you from installing and learning 3 different applications and don't trip over the flying carpet.

Just when you thought it was safe

2011-10-23T22:42:00.000-04:00

Ah yes the quiet retreat, away from the hubs and the bubs. The SATA hard drive on my upstairs machine "the penthouse" started having boot problems. I was trying to do stuff, it was acting funny. I thought maybe I should have done a fresh install of Ubuntu instead of the upgrade I did. It seemed like my CD drives were in on the excitement too. I swapped out the hard with a used one, the CD drives worked fine and the hard drive I now have works but is an older IDE drive. I reinstalled Ubuntu, this time a fresh install and I repartitioned the drive to have a separate partition for the operating system and another for my "Home" folder. And did I mention if I have to do this again I would only have to change the partition with the operating system on it. And of course I save my "Home" data from the previous hard drive on a 4 gig flash drive so that could reinstall that also. And finally it's all quiet again, order is restored, at last, and gosh that was a blast and now I am wondering what to do next.....oooh, I'm out of breath typing.

I went over to the art gallery today, the weather was nice. My wife allowed me to be talked into helping with the mural in progress on the back of the building. OK get on Facebook and click in Lorain Arts Council and look at the pictures. Yeah I am not the one holding the camera and I am not in the pictures. I am never there when a camera is there, go figure. Anyway if your penthouse/man cave/mame heaven/art studio gets to be too much, get out and do art in a different media under a different circumstance. I got paint on the wall now, outlining figures, painting over flaws, adding touches and feeling I did a lot more. Looks pretty darn good.

In one of the back rooms a sculptor was working on a sandstone piece. I've seen this guy dressed to the nines in a show, to see him in overalls making dust was a shock. We are talking developing more studio space, a darkroom, a video lab and even a dance/rehearsal/recital space. We do have a bistro, what we don't have is member volunteers in droves. We have a few faithful, so be it. I always have to be coaxed into deeper participation, lots of conflicts of interest and little pay. But darn cool it is and once I am there a while I don't want to leave. I think I am going to help with the Lorain Arts Council newsletter since I am blogging anyway. I'll race ya back to the studio, got to get some of my own work done.

It's gettin homey Homey

2011-10-21T00:54:00.000-04:00

I am settled in and the view is fine from here. There has been a desktop display war going on and a lot of Ubuntu users are effected. I don't have a pimped out machine so I can't test all the eye-candy and new "Shells". Canonical's Unity desktop has proved to be too much in the way for me and my video card has a hard time with the Gnome Shell. I think that says all that needs to be said.

I hate screens full of icons. You don't really remember what is behind them or at least you aren't really sure. Then there is too much space between them, you have to scroll down a page to see them all, plus sometimes two layers deep of search. This all equals too much thought between the first icon and the app you want to use.

I am going to add to what Linus T. said about operating systems. The OS should not get in the way of the user, neither should the desktop interface. So to that end I am not using Unity nor Gnome Shell. I have the standard Ubuntu 11.10 and added XFCE desktop. Here's a pic:

Just like Unity and Gnome shell I have a panel of favourites on the left side that hides when not needed. On the top the file manager is very handy, then on the bottom the menu, task-bar, work space, clock, etc.

Pretty much everything is one click away and faster than the shells. I don't want to work through desktop layers to get things done. This is a hybrid solution that works nicely for me. And I can change it around to look and work differently. I haven't even added tweaky-geeky stuff to achieve this, simple is cool.

I am also starting to play with the graphic tablet more to get the feel of it. This old mouse masher is used to doing vector type drawing. I'll have to work on some project to push my practice of digital freehand.

penthouse life

2011-10-19T12:07:00.000-04:00

From our vantage point let's zoom in. Oh wait, that's the back of the gov photo satellite, whoops, my bad! There's the dot on the glob, I mean globe, a land mass, then....Google Maps photo doesn't show my home there's a glut of trees.....aaaugh! Kids with laser pointers.

I'm getting settled into the penthouse life, a throwback in time.......no, not that far back. I have CRTs because the flat screen video driver boards are shot on my two displays. It cost as much to replace the boards as a new flat screen monitor. There's the hum of the PC box fans on the floor and racing electrons through circuits when the data to the CRT changes. All my art stuff is up here, drawing table, pens, pencils and exhumed technology laying around. The mouse table, the digital tablet and cat hair like clouds or rolling tumble weed. One desk and one chair and room to pace. OK, it's a man cave, but it's a studio to me.

You have to create a place where your world is under your control and your thoughts can rest. A place where you can say "what if" without saying "OH Darn, what now!" The production of art is all about extruding a line of energy under your guidance. Especially, this is true with art on the computer, you are using known procedures to accomplish your ends. Just about every facet has a tweak, an adjustment before you use it. Sort of like using a recipe out of a book. First you follow it to the T. Then you change it slightly to match your "Taste". After you've forgotten where you got it, you say "a pinch of This and a pinch of That", when someone asks.

PC's are all about repeatable results, this is why on-line tutorials are gold to the video artist. You may not discover it, but someone may have and already did what you want to do and has that let me show you gene. To teach is a blessing but to brag is mental torture. Lookie what I can do.......bang, bang bang, the loud music, the talk not clear. Sure the natural state of things are fine for some, but teaching is also an art. I would like to learn your method and prefer my own music turned down in the background, thank you.

On the drawing surface of the video screen, the cursor coaxed by the digital pen on a tablet or the mouse, leaves a trail of pixels. All the principles of art apply plus the added hand-eye coordination. Some have a pen tablet where video display is the tablet but most do not. Especially us casual artist. A mouse driven cursor is awkward for some types of drawing. For engineering CAD work or vector drawing a mouse is sufficient and efficient. For freehand drawing, sketching, painting, a digital pen is best. The digital pen needs a lot of practice to get the adjustments and feel right. I hope to get close to a natural feel like using a pen on paper. It's trusting the media and sensing what it will do when you are doing it. When it becomes second nature, it's right, effortless!

Art on the computer is all about layers. Layers of procedures, layers of operations, layers of pixels. It's how you control things. If you put it all on one layer as with a single piece of paper, you lose the advantage of the computer. That again is your choice, how you work. Layers make life with pixels more manageable. When is all said and done the layers are mashed into one view for viewing or printing. You can see it all from our lofty vantage point, we digital artist have to hone in. That is our daily practice so we can get down wid our content.
Hey a shadow, it's the ISS........is that graffiti on the side? Pimped out man!

Laptop goes quietly

2011-10-17T20:36:00.000-04:00

Hey everyone, I blogging today from the penthouse and the view would be great if it weren't for the tree. It's just starting to get the autumn tinge. As usual it waits till all the raking is done and the first sloopy rain/snow mix, then it looses everything. The chateau was renovated with the updated Xubuntu and then the hard drive would not boot. It a classic Gateway 4026gz with original equipment. Kind of beat up it was but comfortable to use. I will probably buy a used 2.5" drive for a few bucks and resurrect it. Yeah, I'm that good! LOL!

This economy sucks and I've been stuck with low budget hardware far too long. The good thing is that you appreciate what you can do with what you have. Limitations can be OK, but not always good. Open source has been a staple because availability and hardware requirements have not hindered me thus far. I lost my XP disc long ago. I think that was a good thing, trusting everything to Linux was a slow and exciting process. And yes I would have used Open Source had I still had XP.

Mind ya now, I am no code on the command line geekaholic as many think Linux users are. Though I've used MSDOS, I never gotten used to it. Linux has always had a windowed desktop in my experience. I am a mouse masher to the hilt. I do use the command line when there is no other way to do it. Mostly I am taking instruction from others who've written what to type. I just follow along in hope of repeatable results. Yeah man, computers do that well!

Speaking of desktops, Ubuntu's Unity desktop is in heavy use, it is not as efficient as the old drop down menus. You just have to embrace the way it does things. A step or two more to get to the icon you click to do stuff. People talk about improvements but the swiftest thing yet was the DOS shell on a 286 computer back in 1980's. Doesn't that sound a long time ago? That was before MS Win 3.0. What slows things down is graphics. There's a thousand words of code behind each picture or icon, you can't get around it in data. You have to process the picture AND the thousand words of code behind it. Now everybody wants fancy effects on screen, eye-candy, takes even more power. Not a problem, technology is keeping up, look at what you can do on iPads type devices, that's impressive.

The penthouse is kind of isolated, I miss the chateau in the hub of activity.

the art mind on pc fan fumes

2011-10-15T23:05:00.001-04:00

I have talked a lot about hardware and software but not enough about the inner workings of the artist. It is not so easy for me as I am a trained draftsman in the electrical CAD discipline. You know circuit design is only a representation of the actual circuit. When I did some printed circuit board design, that was more actual. If I had done mechanical part drawing, that is a modeling of the real thing. Doing artistic work is a challenge. Drafting is realistic like a photograph in a way, the data depicts the actual. For me the challenge is putting down the idea in a non-explicit way. I can go from drawing a blob and calling it a house to drawing a house realistically and nobody has to ask what it is.

The drive to draw a perfect representation of an known idea or concept is so strong. I have to tell myself I can draw a blob and call it a house. I don't have to draw a perfect house or a good house. I love Japanese water colors but not the calendar art where the planned flaws are obvious. I struggle for those happy "accidents" where the ink hits a spot on the page with too much water, but it's OK. I struggle because doing art on a computer is rather mechanical. I am trying to make it fuzzier or more unpredictable, more flawed like we are.

To date most of my impatient nature shows in my work. I do solid color fills and thin consistent lines. To grunge things up slightly is an extra step that would add interest, texture and depth. This trains my person to live with the process for a little while longer, to think and work in another dimension. You see a draftsman doesn't do "art", he draws an idea that is a plan for something to be made. It is precise so that someone can make it. Artist draw so you can get the gist of it, being a thing, person, landscape or a mood, feeling or concept.

I really don't draw abstractly or altering something until it's unrecognizable. I draw shapes and lines and colors and parts of patterns. If the mess reminds you of something you know, that's an epiphany on your part that makes my art, art. I also like to pimp out a room beyond traditional but not to the point it is overwhelming, because "ya gotta live wid it!"

more cafe dining

2011-10-14T12:04:00.002-04:00

We're still at the Linuxville Seaside Cafe. You know penguins, seaside and ice! Just finished remodeling the chateau including the penthouse and I'm letting you in on my take of the Linux madness. What a rush the new Ubuntu 11.10 is here and I downloaded and installed. Actually I downloaded so that I have a copy to pass around but on my two machines the chateau and the penthouse I did the on-line upgrades. Doesn't that take for ever? YES! But I get to save most of my personal files and configurations. A key thing is to put your HOME directory on a separate partition. That way swapping in a new OS or an upgrade does not effect your data., just the partition your OS resides in.

The penthouse is my upstairs desktop, for it I have Ubuntu 11.10. The chateau is the laptop in my dining room downstairs. For it I have Xubuntu 11.10. Since I am one of stretched resources, I don't have top shelf equipment, older but sufficient for now. I consider myself the bottom line. Xubuntu is perfect for my 512mb laptop, it is not bogged down. I did try regular Ubuntu 11.10 and it choked. It actually tried, didn't crash, but choked. The new whiz-bang idea is that most people can afford a little more umph!, so why not raise the bottom bar. To be comfortable the laptop could use 1gig memory. Neither the new Gnome Shell or Canonical's Unity 2D worked well on my laptop, period. I didn't try Gnome Classic because it works OK, heavy but OK. For the best, fast and efficient desktop Xubuntu's XFCE is king. And if you want spic-e check out Enlightenment 17( E17), very hot and fancy to boot. Pardon the pun!

In the penthouse/cave of wonders/studio/etc; my desktop sports 1gig memory. Regular Ubuntu 11.10 is in full play but..........short. Gnome Shell doesn't work well at all. I am so surprised Gnome is supposed to run on anything. The Classic desktop works, the Shell doesn't. Unity works and if you want snappy download Unity 2D (without the effects). What!?! effects are the key here. Effects are alpha channels, you know transparencies, shadows and overlays. Some graphics chips/cards handle that stuff well and some NOT. Having more memory can overcome this sometimes when the calculations are handled in software but doing it on the graphics chip is effortless.

“We have a verdict here!”, the penguin judge said as he slaps the fish-gavel on the table! Unity is improved and will take a while to develop efficient user navigation the likes of the older drop down menus. Same for Gnome shell. Reminds me of Win7 and the dreaded ribbon interface for XP users. A fresh approach requires a new mindset (and practice), it also invites new perspectives and new possibilities. Now, if the old ways are wanted, Gnome Classic (for now), XFCE is still here and E17. Upgrading your hardware is most valuable to increase your enjoyment of the new interfaces Unity and Gnome Shell. AND in the spirit of Linux and Open Source, the land of multiple solutions, if you can't come to grips with this, change it to that! And if that is not enough, MS Win7 OS and Mac OS are still available. You still compute, but you'll have to leave the Linuxville city limits. Not a worry, Open Source Software will let you in on fun we have in Linuxville.

Open Source cuts the mustard

2011-10-12T12:52:00.001-04:00

In the Linuxville Cafe the conversation is lively, the food is great and the views are unnoticed. Everybody's got some device to click, pat, tap or talk to.

Of Course I only scratch the surface! When you go too deep there are droves of folks running out of here. Only the faithful remain and the two-bit gotta say something not terse person. But you know the Open Source crowd is a gaggle of winers and diners. We savor what we use and exercise our discriminating taste with that hint of distraction, “suit yourself”.

Oh to buy or not to buy commercial software? Shall I suffer the outrage of difference or the consequence of being labeled “not a professional” or “not a seriously engaged artist” because my software is a little light on the economic scale? or “Why isn’t his name brand the same as ours?” or “You know the Swoosh was probably made on an Adobe laced PC, that’s good enough for me!” An air of compliance drifts into the space. The do I measure up question is suddenly written on everyone's face.

At our table there was a commotion after that last overheard remark, laptops flipped open, a buzz of key clicks. Then we all turned toward the pro-ware protagonist with the laptops held aloft, a swoosh-stika on each display and a laughter that rippled across the room...."the tools man, not the brand, the tools!”

GIMP or the Gnu Image Manipulation Program
GnuPaint or gPaint
Inkscape
Krita
Pinta
My Paint
Tux Paint
Xara Xtreme
And many more, some polished and some in various states of development, all up and running. All costing nothing but the time involved with it to learn the tools. In the end you create a file that's art.

All that professional stuff......, depends. Do you need to share files mid-project or work with others who use the same tools both in house or out? OR maintain a professional industry standard, OK. Examine your needs, then proceed. Tools and files are the secret to Open Source, no need to be hindered or limited. They don't make you an artist any more than pro-ware. So, bust your chops for nothing, then if you must go pro! If you are young and broke or old and broke (like me!), Open Source gets you in the game doing graphics. Ooh!, pass the wipes, mustard on the mouse is not cool.

Linuxville news

2011-10-07T23:48:00.001-04:00

I am going to expose myself to the would be art world to teach them the art of being an artist, digital artist. This coming from a guy who learned PC art via electrical drafting. What has computer aided drafting to do with computer art. It’s the tools man, the tools. There is some hardware needed to draw, then some software code used to draw. Guess what? The code was changed to accommodate the different kinds of drawing. Using a drafting program like AutoCAD is very similar to using Inkscape in the way it draws lines. Now trying to draw or paint in GIMP is another thing altogether. I think teaching how the tools work would work. So, I am not teaching how to be an artist but how to use digital artist tools to make art. Let the artist be the artist or discover he/she is an artist. This is all about the work side, the side most people don’t see.

After mildly bragging about using Linux and all the free open source software, I let it slip that there are Windows versions of open source also. Today I downloaded a DVD called Open Disc from http://www.theopendisc.com/ There are over 40 software titles on the disc. What is special here? They all are Windows versions of open source titles. The disc includes manuals and description pages, install executables and no malware. That’s NO MALWARE!! I make a note here because I helped a friend download and install Real Player and down his computer went. I do not use Windows myself but a lot of my friends do. Downloading software for the Windows platform is scary business. Since I’m not an avid Windows user I don’t know which sites are safe to download from. Linux on the other hand has protected repositories from which to download from. So, the Open Disc is a safe way to get the Windows versions of Open Source software without extra crap slipping in.

Man, there is building excitement a brewing in Linuxville. No lines like at the Apple Store, but users hunched over their keyboard all waiting to download the spanking brand new Ubuntu 11.10 dubbed Oneiric Ocelot. Hey, I just use them, I don’t name them. Maybe the controversy will be over as both Canonical's Unity desktop and Gnome’s Shell will be available. Oh it’s crap, it’s well....., No it’s great. I will let you know my two-bits when I see them myself. Stay tuned, Oct 13, 2011.

Art by the bits

2011-10-03T17:39:00.001-04:00

I'm working on a lesson plan to teach some folk about digital art via Open Source software. After a couple of days work, I was reviewing the plan so far. I had made a list of the software I was going to use.

GIMP for paint/draw in raster type work.

Inkscape for vector illustration type work.

My Paint a raster paint application that mimics natural paint methods.

PhotoPrint for versatile printing options.

Hey, I didn't do that intentionally, I just looked down and there it was. GIMP and GIMP, I think that is a sign everything is cool. LOL!! There are a lot of other free or low cost softwares I could have used, but I haven't used any of them and they don't spell GIMP when you stack them.

If you are thinking about learning digital art, there are things to be concerned about. One is that the process is as long as the process using natural materials. If you use a mouse get an optical mouse not one with a ball, better control and precision, no cleaning. Get a mouse with a tail, the wireless ones can lag so the response can be behind your hand movement. The same with a tablet and pen, there can be a lag. In some cases the wireless pen can pick up interference and behave awkwardly. I wish todays pens were wired to the tablet like the older CAD tablets. They were cursor pushers and didn't have pressure sensitivity. Practice drawing with a mouse or pen as if you were marking with a pencil. It will become normalized after many hours, the feel and coordination is different.

The first thing to learn after you're familiar with the program is layers. LAYERS, LAYERS, LAYERS. Even in my life as a CAD drafter, layers were important. Learning layers will save your sanity in doing digital art.

Set time for work and play. When you work, work and when you play, play. Why? if you play you will play a lot, might not get any work done. You see, you are not wasting paper, canvas or ink on the computer, only electricity and time. You might get play happy, still you won't get much work done. In digital art there is a lot of planning going on, a mind to work it out and get it done is good. There is always time for fooling around, experimenting, play. Why limit play time? Get away, do something else. Step away from the machine!

Open Source art world

2011-09-30T10:27:00.000-04:00

Here in the far recesses of the Linuxville Guide office things are changing. The mom-n-law in residence, former art teacher, artist has a new gig with the Most High. She has left the building for the here-after. Reflecting on the stuff she saw in her lifetime of 93 years is an avalanche of change. Me, I am 6.0 in decades and some considerations are before me to re-invent myself again. I like digging new holes to find gold yet keeping the old holes just in case I missed something.

As you know I am an advocate for Free Open Source Software and Linux. Since joining the Lorain Arts Council, I have thought about classes in Digital Art. The computer has revolutionized the art world like every place else. Getting into digital art has been about buying expensive professional software to get started. If you are like me building on casual interest, you can't afford to commit cash for stuff you might change your mind about. The free software world has been the bane of artist for years. Programs of poor quality, shotty look and feel were typical. Open Source Software was at one time like that also, but overtime one person development mushroomed into development teams, the quality went way up.

So as things stand, there are Open Source Softwares that rival commercial softwares. They are not the same but close enough and depending upon the usage can exceed all expectations. My view is like this: There are standard tools and operations, all you need is a comfortable interface and quality, reliable and communicable output. The interface, tools and output. Standard tools and file sharing between other computers (Linux,Windows and Mac).

At the Lorain Arts Council site we are talking about getting some donated computers for digital art classes. This is so exciting because while some wouldn't do art with natural materials so easily, would be totally into it on the PC. So why push Open Source when the professional art world lives on commercial software. Freedom! Free from money restrictions and the mental construct of having to have so that you can be professional. After all we are talking beyond simple photo editing into the "fling of creative thinking", with low or no cost.

My personal software choices are GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program) which is like Photoshop, Inkscape which is like Adobe Illustrator, My Paint a natural painting program, Scribus a desktop publishing program. For kids there is Tux Paint, very cool. I am not expert on any of these but online video tutorials help take away the mystery.
Also these programs have Linux, Windows and Mac versions, are free and if you have a laptop are portable too. And did I mention free?

There I am sitting at the riverside cafe, with GIMP on my laptop. I whip out my cell-cam take a pic, then transfer the pic into GIMP. Shall I manipulate it or use it as inspiration for a digital painting from scratch? We haven't even touched printing, a whole other world indeed.

I'm still at it.

2011-07-27T23:17:00.000-04:00

Where is RNO the artist today? Mostly with my head into tracing what happened to the Hebrews after Jerusalem was flattened in 70AD, where did they scatter to and who are their descendants today.??? But also doing some art where I take portions of figures from my sketchbook and play around with them.

You got to love how a computer can be the hub for art. I can draw on paper, scan it into the PC, then use a number of softwares to manipulate things to make art I probably couldn't do so easily on paper and print it out. You want to see?

There are a number of things I can do with this but the part that bugs me is at this time my funds are short, so I can't get this printed the size it needs to be. I really like when you go into a gallery and there is a nice big painting. But since I am not a painter I am robbed of the scale my prints could be. I am working on that. Right now though it feels strange to be satisfied with smaller prints.

I haven't named this yet, I was thinking about how real African history is recorded in stories and legends and in the writings of witnesses from other countries passing thru. When you put the pieces and snippets together in a pile, patterns start to emerge. It is so weird to zoom in for a close look, them zoom out for a global view. When you zoom out and change the time frame, the items stay the same but the names, languages and situations all change.

I ordered some memory cards for my ancient laptop, they came but didn't work. Right size and kind but loose in the slots (I thought). The old ones don't have any problem. Still I get around having adequate memory by not doing lots of fancy stuff in the drawing applications. This is what artist do, work with limitations. In fact it is harder to work with a full pallet of colors than one limited to a few. I think this is why some only use a primary set, then mix other colors as needed.

I am told over and over to use more color. This big splash of color is great if you want to compete with a flat screen video monitor or commercial displays. I am targeting the home, many people like a more subdued approach for home art. I think art for the home needs to blend in with existing decor, unless you like unavoidable attention getters in a room. Also when I show in the gallery, the picture is in a wide open space. The home space is small in comparison, the lighting much more subdued.

You learn that people rarely agree with your reasons for doing stuff until after you explain it to them, still "you could use more color." Hey, who is the artist? You do one with more color if you like that. Is that a commission or an unfunded mandate? "No, just an opinion." Oh!

Back to my quest and see ya!

calling all artist of Lorain County Ohio

2011-07-16T12:52:00.001-04:00

Hi there fellow artist and art fans of Lorain Ohio. You are all invited to participate in the Lorain Arts Council's efforts to promote the arts in Lorain County. We in Lorain have been thru the muck for a long time. Some say cesspool, some say compost heap. I go along with the compost heap because that is good fertilizer over time. So, now it is time to plant something wonderful in the rich fertile soil we created in our mutual suffering as a city and county. So the call is out wither you become a member of LAC or not to do art in Lorain.

How many cities have used the arts as mortar to plug holes between the bricks in their towns? How many have turned what is regarded as pastime activities into catalyst for change and revenue streams? The paint dabbler become a recognized artist, the garage band from internet videos to mainliners in shows, idea note jotters become book writers, playwrights, it goes on and around each activity is all kinds of business opportunity. The city gets transformed because people work together, face to face. People lose the fear of taking risk when the vision of improvement is shared. What risk? The risk of trusting others with your time, money, goals, dreams, etc. Who wants unfulfilled lonely dreams? Nobody! Get together with like minded and goaled dreamers and realize shared results.

At present I am the only Black, African American, on the rolls of the Lorain Arts Council. There are others of various origins, that is not an issue, at this instance I am addressing African American artist in Lorain County. We have a good mix of cultural heritage in Lorain, yet Blacks are invisible in Lorain. Yes, you can go to Cleveland, but here in Lorain adrift between the Oberlin college and Lorain County Community College is a big empty space called the ailing city of Lorain. To have a strengthened Black voice in the arts would stimulate Black hopes and progress in a lot of areas. It would be light in the eyes of hundreds of people who live here without pride in themselves. Don't give me that “I've got pride” stuff, pride in self is lonely, and hard. When you can see what others like you are doing, thinking, dreaming, you have a sense of place, more so if you participate.

Lorain County was part of the Underground Railroad, Toni Morrison was born here, what are we doing and thinking today, here in Lorain. Besides, I would love to talk about art and art business and collaborate and innovate and push the envelope and by all means to raise the standard of living in Lorain. The word diversity for many Blacks has meant blending into the woodwork. I rather use the word African diaspora so I do not lose the savor of my flavor while being included in the diversity. I hate we have to resort to “the African American presents in Lorain” tactic but we are already late to the party, need to get on with it. We live here too.

So, I invite all Lorain County artist of every discipline and art fans, especially those of the African Diaspora to hook up. LAC website is http://www.lorainartscouncil.com/

My blog is at http://arnoarts.blogspot.com.

drat, darn, shucks, back to the mouse

2011-07-14T11:23:00.000-04:00

Turns out the ceasing of the jitters on my digital tablet connected to my laptop was an anomaly. Oh well. I did find a couple of "how to draw with your mouse" tutorials, one in "Deviantart": http://kazzisato.deviantart.com/art/How-To-Draw-With-A-Mouse-18847145 Yes, practice is the same as exercising spelled differently, no one likes to start doing it, but having started, it's OK!

For the most part doing art on a computer is easy, almost painless. You point and click and boom, it's done. Then you scan the internet for inspiration. Just when your eyes are as big as quarters, you realize it takes knowledge and skills you haven't acquired yet to do stuff like that. Easy is over rated and artist must suffer, you know. I'm not talking about taking out the daily garbage or poor returns for your output of masterpieces. You aren't a master yet, you must face Vader! Where did that come from. Artist suffrage is........a painter who forces his will upon his materials finally learns to work with his materials. The brush stroke with so much paint acts this way, the arm angle, the way the brush hairs bend and twist when you push or drag. What about digital art, sure the computer can do a lot but what if you want subtle effects, fades, blends, sweeps, hard edge and soft shadows. The software is a fancy all powerful brush that you have to learn what it can do and what you can do with it. It is suffering to repeat a new pattern until it is second nature. It is a good thing computers support repeatable results. Do it enough times not only will you learn it, remember it, you will discover new angles too.

Here is my dilemma. Finding my own voice, telling my own stories, taking advantage of my limitations and my abilities. This is why I must draw stuff myself and not rely mainly on clipart and Gimp/Photoshop brushes made by others. Yes it is more work and sometimes takes you off course, but in the end, it is all your work. I don't think artist who do commercial or time sensitive art projects have time to make their own tools, any time saver is welcome. But you with the pocket protector of digital pens and the mouse holster, need to get over self image and get some work done.

actually drawing on a PC

2011-07-06T09:14:00.000-04:00

Here at the Linuxville chateau things are a changing. As you can guess I am the most scatter-brained artist who ever lived. Most of the artist I know have this focus like a laser to get projects done. Me, more like a flashlight. You've got to understand the media I'm working with is so vast. A traditional artist might say here's pen and paper, so I draw. I say here's the computer, the software, how do I proceed to draw.

I do have an ancient laptop which is my tool of availability and a digital drawing tablet. The tablet is a Wacom Graphire 2 about as old as the laptop. I never used the tablet because the cursor jitters uncontrollably plugged into the laptop. It works OK on my upstairs desktop but I don't spend much time upstairs. The other day I had a thought, what if I plugged a monitor into my laptop and see if the tablet would work better. So plugging my 14" CRT into the laptop brings the following revelations besides I should have tried this years ago.

I now have dual monitors but the same image on both. I don't think I can get split screens, this is OK. The color is richer on the CRT and the image more precisely focused on the laptop's LCD. Then somehow when I plug in the drawing tablet the jitters are gone. The cursor is rock steady. I am laughing like crazy because my old nemesis has resurfaced, I can't draw well. Sure I have used a sketchbook to record ideas but hand drawing a finished picture I can't recall ever doing. I am a draftsman, used to drawing with instruments. Even using computer aided drafting software (CAD) is basically instrument drawing. In my artwork I have used mostly what is known as vector drawing. This is the equivalent to instrument drawing with shapes and color fills. To draw on the computer similar to drawing or painting on paper is called raster or pixel drawing. Whats the diff?

With vector the end points of a line are marked then connected. The line between the recorded points can be altered by moving the line or the end points. It all stays connected. With raster or pixel drawing a line is a trail of independent pixels. If you want to move them, you've got to select all of them. It's just a line of dots and you can erase any of them the same as a pencil line on paper. It is said that vector lines are intelligent (they bend and stretch) and raster or pixels are more natural. On the computer you can make one look sort of like the other but pixel drawing can resemble more closely the natural way things look when we draw them with natural media. The big thing is that in vector you can draw a postage stamp and scale it up to a billboard size with no loss of composition. Scaling a pixel postage stamp spreads the pixels, the image gets fuzzier (pixelated) until it's just a array of widely spaced dots, the picture is gone.

Well the fun part is that both kinds of drawing are before me to mess with. And the computer can assist to extend my meager skills and add a few of it's own (under my direction of course). So just as with discovering how the paintbrush flops and the paint flows, I have to see how the points and pixels do the same on the screen. It's a wide world of experiencing this electronic media. Then there is printing but that's another adventure.

men and machines both need fixin

2011-07-01T09:09:00.000-04:00

Friends and relatives think I know a thing or two about computers. Lately they been on me about speeding up their PC. There are power users and ones who unknowingly use a lot of power. Multi-tasking has been a mark of computing superiority, how many applications open in use or waiting to be used. The illusions of some to say if the app is open and waiting, my waiting is short. Now wait a minute! I mean you could wait a minute to allow for due process. There are reasons for your PC to be a tad slow. Some operating systems are designed poorly or are on the edge of breaking to give you the illusion of good performance. The user mistakenly translates that to mean speed when depending on the resources and data being pushed really means "fast enough".

First thing I know about computers is if you are not using it shut it down. I have a Bluetooth app running in the background, I don't own any Bluetooth devices to sync with my computer. If you have eyecandy and other compositing effects and don't really need them, turn them off. There is a background services running monitor. If you understand what it is showing, you can turn off things you are not needing. Also apps that start up when you boot up, you need to check it. Then look at email retrieving, do you really need to check it every 10 minutes. Your web browser stores cookies and downloads crap all the time you surf. Lets face it you don't surf, you scuba.

The other thing I now is a little about hardware, some about Linux, less and less about MS Windows any rendition. I have heard that Windows will allocate a part of your precious memory for every open application, sometimes not letting it go when you close the app. This could get hairy if you multi-task or not close properly (remember due process?). Linux may do this too, I'm not picking on Windows.

My Linux experience says the desktop uses a good chunk of memory. My laptop only has 512mb, so I switched from Gnome desktop to XFCE. The result is when using the Inkscape drawing program, the cursor is firm, stable and visible. The response is quicker and the editing is faster also. The other thing I noticed is that videos wither CD or a file on my hard drive plays better when the desktop is not hogging the memory. I did notice that a new Windows install will progressively slow over time. In part because of its design and because of user habits. I have not had this with Linux. Linux performance stays pretty flat in the long run if I don't overload the memory. Why don't I buy more memory? You try to find and buy older laptop memory without winching and flinching.

I like Linux because I can change things around to accommodate the hardware I have. I like the whiz-bang of the cutting-edge but I rather have a working computer running smooth with few issues. Linux gets 5 stars, MS Windows 3.5 stars, any user 2 stars, two cents or two bits. You've heard mind, your Linuxville guide and not so madman after all, later.

shazaam! bop! boom!

2011-06-27T16:38:00.000-04:00

I am totally amazed! All you techies will know what I am talking about. I, your Linuxville guide and madman, has a bad case of distro jumping. That is when the Linux grass is a bit greener in the other distributions, I go for it. It drives anybody nuts until..............I took my own advice!

When I installed my last distro, I made 3 partitions on my hard drive, one for the OS (about 8gigs), one for my home directory or folder (about 20gigs) and a swap space (about 1gig). So when the fever struck me to move back to Xubuntu on my 512mb laptop, there was no sweat. Sweat = complete re-setup tweaking. I told the Xubuntu installer to reformat the OS partition and make it bootable, then told it to make the old home partition the new home partition without formatting. All my files were intact along with my email and web browser settings and bookmarks. The only tweak was to get the wireless to work which requires two apps from the repositories via Synaptic.

Oh, why I moved back? Well I was living on the edge of not having enough resources to do graphics work. The Gnome, KDE and Unity desktops all have built in compositing and requires too much of my meager memory to run both the desktop and graphic/media apps too.

Below's a chart I snatched from a comparison page. Usability wise XFCE4 is lots leaner. Less desktop means more memory for your apps to run. I am thinking Fluxbox as an alternative but the leaner also means less built-in services and tools. If you know what they are, you can add them on your own.

Desktop

Required RAM

Required CPU

fluxbox/idesk

100 MHz

XFCE4

128

200 MHz

Gnome 1.x

256

500 MHz

Gnome 2.x

384

800 MHz

KDE 3.x

512

1 GHz

cooler heads are prevailing

2011-06-02T10:00:00.000-04:00

My ancient laptop has seen better days as far as wear-n-tear. As you know I switched to Mint 11, partly because the Ubuntu desktop is in flux with Unity and all. And partly because I drool every time I see Mint. So Mint is Ubuntu based and this version has the Gnome desktop but not the new whiz-bang Gnome-shell. I want all that and I hope it runs great, when it comes. Gnome is not that light-weight, which is alright if you are driving 1 gig of ram. I have 512mb ram, Gnome runs but......when I am in Inkscape the cursor disappears when I move it. This makes drawing awkward.

Normally I would add the XFCE desktop, it has lots of well........ Gnome is a full-sized car, XFCE is the mid-size, LXDE a compact and the command line is blade skates.

I didn't like LXDE desktop before but now I think I like it alot. Why, because when I am in Inkscape, I can see my cursor nice and steady all the time. Using less resources in the desktop and more in the application is what I am talking about. Inkscape zips along in a refreshing kind of way.

This mirrors the Linuxville chateau perfectly, a small modest looking retreat on the outside, endless rooms and amenities on the inside. LXDE, when I first saw it was static, you couldn't change anything, today you can tweak it a little bit, good enough. Light and fast and not hogging the road. So if you don't mind sacrificing some changeability in the desktop to get some power in the application LXDE is the way, especially with 512mb of ram. This is another nerdvana experience, it's cool!

The exciting world of desktop Linux

2011-05-30T18:13:00.000-04:00

Now that I got my wonderments out in the open I hope you noticed it as a diversion from the heavy construction in Linuxville. Yeah, Linuxvilles' got more orange barrels than anybody. Just when it was to where I might could have explained Linux big changes come to mess me up. Of course they had to let us know that change was imminent, but the funny part was the collective "Oh no you didn't!" Windows flew open and now the street is littered with stuffed penguins.

Ok kids, go out and get your stuffy toys, that panic was not cool. It is funny though that after all the request for change is really fulfilled, we just can't handle it. Ok, let's try to handle it. First the play by play.

Ubuntu the poster boy for "linux for everyone", decided to field a new "default" desktop called Unity. At the same time Gnome is unwrapping Gnome 3. On the new Ubuntu 11.04, Unity runs on Gnome 2's basic libraries. So if you try to run Gnome 3 on Ubuntu 11.04 it crashes, bad. Unity is met with mixed reviews and Gnome 3 is previewed in Fedora and Open Suse live-cds. I think Gnome 3 is very cool. What a mess, no wonder the panic. Hey, put the real bird down and pick up the stuffed bird, thank you! Linuxville you will recover!

What did I do? First I will wait for the smoke to settle, that is clear desktop choices with no confusion. Then I switched my laptop to use Mint Linux, a Ubuntu based distro that's minty fresh (still has Gnome 2). At the suggestion from a user in the Linkedin Ubuntu group, I repartitioned my laptop hard drive to have an OS partition, a /Home partition and a swap partition. This is so that when I get distro fever and must switch, my /Home folder stays intact, unharmed and available for the new install. I only have to format the OS partition. And I am making full use of flash drives and live-CDs to test things. Many of you use virtual installs, I commend you.

So when the desktop choices are ............ well, I am waiting for Gnome 3. In any case I now have peace to wait. And Mint is the bomb, I'm glad I installed it. I also heard Pinguy Linux is also cool.

Arnold knows computers, ask him, to fix it.

2011-05-30T08:49:00.000-04:00

It is a tragic story of my life, how much I enjoy computers but don't like fixing them. Let me explain fixing. I enjoy the mechanical side of fixing, hardware. I can tear down a laptop, replace parts, put it back together and it still works. There is a certain thrill factor.

So, where's the tragedy? People's PC's are fine, they have a software problem. Everybody I know has either a Mac or Microsoft PC, I mean everybody. Not wanting to have the problems I've personally encountered with Microsoft products any longer I switched over to Linux. For ten years I have had a new problem base dealing with Linux. Way less problems, yet because I mess with PC's I get asked about fixing their software problems. They, the askers, don't get it, it's a computer, it has Microsoft on it, right?

Ok, there are certain general principals I can apply to fix anything. But knowing how to remedy programming glitches and such requires that you have used the software in question and have a sense of how it works. It does not instill much confidence when I just can't tell them what to do and even less when I must play with it a little bit and if I have to read a manual, I don't know computers very well.

I have worked as a repair technician, fixing Microsoft XP machines, but as I got into Linux, my interest in Microsoft products sort of went away. I didn't think it was a problem till I went to the library to use a PC. Their upgraded patron computer lab had all Win7 machines. I wanted to print a page. I had to figure out MS Word in the office suite. This is why I say, if you don't use it you just don't know it.

I say, "I use Linux." They get that glazed look in their eyes like "I'm savvy, what's Linux?" or I'm trying to avoid helping them. I am used to this but still it is frustrating. Maybe it's me! I use Linux instead of Microsoft, Libre Office not MS Office suite, GIMP instead of Photoshop, the list goes on. When I tell them Open Source stuff has runs on Microsoft versions and they are free, there is a curious ending of this conversation. I'm trying to tear them away from the brand-name they base their PC knowledge and loyalty on. No, no, no!

I'm not a Microsoft user, you can't ask me for Microsoft solutions. I might could figure it out but my experience is with Linux solutions, Open Source solutions. I have to go with what I know.

more than soul, the ooh-gah boo-gah

2011-05-27T09:42:00.000-04:00

Not having one single definable or identifiable heritage is mind numbing. For years I've joined the scramble to call it something. One thing is for sure, there is something there. I've been told I've got soul from "I'm Black and I'm Proud" to "He's got soul, he's got soul, ooh ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh baby!" So go ahead play some music with a beat, the hands and feet jump in sync and the dance is on. We gots' the way with words, rap'in as it were natural and dress'in because styling is in the blood man! And sports............!

Of course when the dust settled there were pictures of big hair and flared pants and loud colors, loud actions, exaggerated as if playing on a stage and making it plain to the back row. Having soul mainstreamed, everybody who is in the public eye has got to have soul. Soul is the one element of entertainment/sports that has transcended the bounds of cultural definition. Soul = a cultural charisma originating in Black peoples.

One problem I've noticed is that when all was said and done, concerning the outward display of soul for everyone's enjoyment by everyone who practices the genre called soul, is whether or not folks realize "soul" as a marketed trend product does have a downside. Like when you must do the Polka at a wedding and you are now out of sync. It's not that other cultures don't have soul, but the obvious difference can require a major adjustment. I am not nuts, ask any classical musician how difficult it is to play jazz. You can create a kind of hybrid to accommodate classical training and techniques, but on the fly improv and jazz rhythms is a way different world.

Soul is so pervasive, it is the root. Folks have gone from putting down the brown to getting down with brown to trying to be brown. From disgust and mistrust to admire and acquire. I am surprised there is not a soul pill and a book of how to practice the nuances of soul or how about a secret unpublished ancient document written in hieroglyphs about "soul" in the early dude?

I will conclude this soul train of thought by saying, yeah today we all got "soul" of some sort, but do you have the "ooh-gah boo-gah!?!

artist in the mirror

2011-05-25T23:06:00.000-04:00

In a couple of weeks the Lorain County International Festival will be upon us. The Lorain Arts Council will have an art show the theme is to show your heritage reflected in your art. It is so funny to think about how there are few pure-bred among us, as if there was ever such a thing. You will love and have kids with whom ever because you love them. Bloodlines are not a top priority, religious, political, tribal, ethnic advantage or crusty egos are crossed all the time. Still we like to identify with a root stock of culture.

My own sources have been in question for eons. I know what other people have called me, some not too nice, but if I reflect enough I would call myself a Black American. Black because the possibility of origin is far too broad. For instance to say African, where in Africa? We have been known as Black peoples in the positive sense and the negative sense. So I stop looking for a more pleasant word. I stand firm in the use of Black in the positive sense. I would even put American before African as American is all I have known, throughout my life. And when I trace my ancestors back to the enslaved I instantly identify with a diverse mega-group of Black peoples, not a tribe or country. A couple of centuries pass and I have lost much of my African ID to a great degree. If you don't have the language/heritage, the fellowship of society (daily customs and rituals) or live on the land where these things take place, what becomes of you? You take on the flavor of the environment where you are at. I lived in a neighborhood of other Black peoples all in the same boat. Our struggle to deny or reconnect with what was/is known of our past is hit and miss. I think we should give up looking for a ultimate and comfortable legal term. Throughout the ages we have been Black peoples of various countries. I am a Black person in America. I can claim ancestral roots in Africa and it is not a shame for me to not know from where, after all I did not cause my forefathers to come here by force. So, as a person of African descent I am supposed to be disadvantaged because of my darkness or my roots are unknowable. Ha, I've been transplanted and cultivated in another place. If you look at history you will see we Black peoples have been all over the world before the enslaving time and after, it is not a new thing. We have not been reduced to nothing. We have built nations as freemen and as enslaved. You see, just as we talk about indigenous or native peoples of a continent, Black peoples are indigenous to the whole world. I am not lost.

deep print knowledge

2011-05-25T12:31:00.001-04:00

I was mad at my 93 year old mom-n-law former art teacher and artist in her own right, for fussing about art materials. We were trying to get her interested in perhaps doing a little art to combat boredom. She has this tremor in her hands so that she can't hold a brush well or draw without squiggles. In her mind, as sharp as ever, she thinks she can do as she has done earlier in her life. Therefore she demands the best materials from the top shelf. I try to suggest cheaper alternatives because it would be a waste of expensive materials and a heartbreak when she can't make them do what she knows they can do. We haven't settled yet but I think she will win both the top shelf and the heartbreak.

I thought I would be immune to this, but as a digital artist, I am finding myself always looking for better equipment and materials. I bought a 4 ink inkjet printer, now I wish I could have afforded a 6 or 8 ink inkjet printer. More colors or gradations of the primary colors mean finer quality prints. I did buy a workhorse printer so it will handle more than business type papers and it has the after-market possibility of extended ink supply mechanisms. It also prints up to 13" x 44", that's a lot of creative possibility there.

What I did discover is that art printing is lightly touched even in Photoshop books. Photo printing however is made point-n-click easy, even red-eye removal is almost automatic. There are lots of tutorials on altering and fixing photos. Artist who draw and print are at a disadvantage, mostly all the books are geared to photo work or web graphics.

My printer prints fine on photo papers, though it does require tweaking to get it right. The real impressive work is on matte art papers, I could not believe the richness of the color even for a 4 ink print. 4 ink? Yes, CMYK or Cyan (blue), Magenta (red), Yellow and Black. Printing is a science by itself and takes as much effort as the techniques of putting brush to canvas. The outcome of the image is greatly effected by the printer, the inks, the paper or media. And even though all images that pass through a computer to a printer are the same (a digital file), photos and drawing require different considerations to make the outcomes as they are suppose to be.

So, I am getting fussy. Fussy means we take what we find off the shelf and make it more or less than it was to get the results we want. What's next a halo-deck? Hummmm!

wysiwyg is not my fault

2011-05-20T14:20:00.000-04:00

You just bought a new printer it works great, the bells ring and the whistles whistle. You grab your second print (first was a text page, no problem), a color photo or drawing, walk past your monitor and do a double take, what, no WYSIWYG?!? You put the print up next to the screen and shift it so that the light hits it differently. If you hadn't looked, you'd wouldn't have noticed it prints a little darker, certain colors are off and the paper you used could have been better. Aren't PCs and printers and cameras and such supposed to be pre-set, instant or fuss-free? It's not my fault!

It's D's fault or rather default settings on everything. Default is good for average normal quick no-hassle no-brainier stuff. As soon as you want to do special stuff on a regular basis, you got to tweak and adjust and fiddle, swap materials and hold your mouth at a certain angle. No, it's not all luck and magic. You need some education, some carnal knowledge of the workings of your equipment to get the best results out of them. “I'm educated, I can figure this out!” You are educated enough to read the manual so that info you missed will be discovered by your so smart self, making you even smarter.

If you are using Microsoft or Mac, plus popular software like Adobe Photoshop and have a printer well used by photographers, there are oodles of resources quickly acquired via the net or libraries. I will list 4 books.

Mastering Digital Printing by Harald Johnson – Muska & Lipman

Digital Print Styles Recipe Book by Tim Daly – Peachpit Press

Epson Complete Guide to Digital Printing by Rob Sheppard – Lark Books

301 Inkjet Tips and Techniques by Andrew Darlow – Thomson Course Technology

Now, if you have a newer printer but not so well used, use Linux OS and software like GIMP and Inkscape, resources are less. Mainly because Linux is not big enough for vendors to chase after and users are often not the kind to document their work and findings for the world to see (they aren't prone to write books!). So we are gleaning info from other equipment setups and using that as a starting point to make it all work for us.

When I first touched computer graphics, there was not much talk about printing except text or maybe desktop publishing. Web designers and game artist don't have the concern like photographers and graphic artist. The printer is essential if the print is the important output of the PC itself. So here the problem the PC does the heavy lifting and shows you the picture on the monitor. Then the PC sends it to the printer on the other side. If you can't preview the printer's output by what you see on the monitor, you'll just have to take what the printer spits out. “Gee man, I should be able to make this better!” Exactly! I would want to see very close to what the printer prints before it prints, same colors, same values. This take some work, some time and pays off big time.

why artist struggle part 2

2011-05-18T21:18:00.001-04:00

"I can't even draw a straight line." Who hasn't heard this. As an artist I can't either, as a drafter I used a ruler or AutoCad. That's just drama, the real suffering when you are used to one environment and then it changes. You are full of learning and practising, and reference material, you want to create something all your own. You have to forget it all until it is needed at the point of doing it. How do you hush all the voices planning and telling you what to do every step and every stroke. "I can't hear myself", you yell at everybody and everything.

Many resort to mind bending substances or a job in production art or not in art at all. I was surrounded by folks who had no relationship with the art world, and no idea that I was interested in that world. That casual social steering via acquaintances is like quicksand. Even the geeks know to hang with the geeks to maintain the geek life. Artist are feeling people, tend to get too close, too accessible. Artist at least visual ones like drawers, painters are solo performers. How the heck do you put away your social network long enough to go into your artistic process to make your mark.

I am learning to work amid interruptions, constant changes and endless suggestions (help). There is nothing like sweating for years at something and getting aid from ones who only want to say they helped you. I am being selfish I've been told. I now know the utility of cursing. My art, while in the process of my doing it, is my personal space, tread lightly, tread very lightly. Art is an enlarged personal space for the artist. When it is done, then he invites his audience to share, not before then.

Which brings me to critics and folks who need an explanation. "I would have done it different!", "What is it?" They force you to lie. A line of bull goes a long way. Gee, if I wrote down all the stories, it be a great book next to the bed stand. If you do realistic stuff, understandable stuff it's just "hum", "huh" and "aah!" The more symbolic or abstract, the more a good yarn is required. Do you personify the fib you are tell them, are you that deep, that shallow (I am shallow but vast, a very wide dude)? "You told me it was like this and now you say it's like that!" Hey, I am the artist and telling the lie of what it is is also art. I told you what you wanted to hear at the time I told you, for them it's different.

It's not all so harsh, sometimes it is all amusing the interactions of artist and audience. This is why we of the artistic bent need to get away, then come back, then go away again. The light changes, the people are varied, the times different.

After a good while, you know your own voice, you can use your training to extend your talents, you have a sense of people, not bothered by working alone or with another or taking an occasional help of a tagger. I laugh, an old guy just beginning to see all this 'an artist must suffer'. It is a lie and it is true too.

why creative artist struggle?

2011-05-17T12:07:00.000-04:00

OK, you got gumption, training, skills and ideas, urgent ideas, what is the problem? The things of life that need attending to and the people around you who think you are wasting your energy or doodling till something important comes along. While they on their jobs would never call you off your job to do busy stuff, would call you because you aren't really working. Artist don't really work if they aren't working for some employer, drawing down a regular pay-check, punching in a time clock or keeping regular business hours. Art of the non-business variety is leisure stuff and is totally unimportant in the scheme of things, overrated, discounted and something to do when you are retired or laid up in a nursing home doing craft projects.

This is all true unless you are a great artist with an even greater patron buying your socks and forcing you to eat so that his good name isn't besmirched by your lack of caring about hygiene or social graces in public appearances. 'He's an artist', they all say, the covering excuse for the rampant abuse issuing from his attitude toward all who would criticise openly and disdain for ones whispering under their breath the truth. After all art is a lie sort of like the emperor with no clothes and the kid who is treated like pervert because he dares to tell it like it really is. 'Shut up kid, that's the style, the trend, the what's wid it!

Artist suffer the pains of life, the interruption of the flow of creative juices, the botherings of others, the having to set the satisfying creative execution aside for the urgent considerations of others. I always wondered why some artist have a studio where they can separate themselves from view. Out of sight, out of mind and tell their friends and family that when the door closes I am at work, only call for emergencies and lunch. It all changes if you sell something.............

Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal and Unity so far

2011-05-11T09:32:00.000-04:00

I have a verdict as if my judgment matters. Ubuntu 11.04 Natty Narwhal is fine until you consider the new Unity desktop. First of all a "default desktop" should work on the meager hardware and on the well endowed. Unity has behavior problems on the low end, it is not a light weight solution and maybe it is not meant to be. Installing Unity 2D allowed it to work on my laptop fairly good. The slowdown comes when graphic intensive apps are used. Could be just a hardware issue. I installed XFCE desktop, it works way better than Unity on my laptop.

Then there are things missing so that adjustments can't be made to closer match my way of working. Unity is more a touch screen interface than a mouse driven desktop. It recalls what is seen on many hand-held devices these days. The touchpad on my antique laptop is disabled because it is awkward to use, unstable, too touchy. Perhaps new devices are way better.

Unity is habit forming which means, I like it enough to keep playing with it. I hope it will improve. I also used Ubuntu Classic in Natty. It is flawless and is about to succumb to evolutionary changes into Gnome3. Gnome3 is similar to Unity with transparent layers, floating icons, retracting panels. I think KDE started this dashboard madness and incorporating compiz. The Linux folks are trying to prove they can deliver innovation and style as well as Apple and MS.

There is simple, there is sophisticated, and now simply sophisticated. How many functions can you put behind that big on off push button? Time will tell, things will change and we will change too. You say no!? Eyeglass cleaning tissue got killed by contact lenses, got relabeled as hand-held device display cleaning tissue.

further developments

2011-05-05T08:52:00.000-04:00

Linux has a reputation for resurrecting older hardware. The problem comes when old drivers are needed. My ancient (not pre-historic) Gateway 4026 laptop was stuck on Ubuntu 9.10. I couldn't upgrade, version 10.04 wouldn't even boot the live-cd, 10.10 ran but the wireless was unstable. With all the trouble I had with Ubuntu 11.04 on my desktop, it took a while to want to try it.

I did the usual backup of files (thank god for jump drives!), slipped in the CD and the net cable to the router.

It does the location, user ID, password, then gives you some hard drive options. I always choose manual manipulation. I select the partition that had the previous OS, erase via reformat, select file standard, check to boot from here (/), click the do it button.

It installed without a hiccup, even warned me I didn't have 3d acceleration hardware and when it came up was in a state that didn't need it. This did not happen on my desktop PC. Anyway the desktop that came up was Ubuntu Classic or regular Gnome. Then I had to open a terminal, type 'sudo apt-get install unity-2d' to install the new Unity desktop with lower resource requirements.

I was scared that the wireless would be a problem. I googled the forum pages, found I could install two apps to end my quest. Since my wireless chips were unsupported anymore there is one app to find a legacy driver and another to install it. I installed both, rebooted the laptop, configured the connection and had stable wireless. It is totally like the Twilight Zone that this beat up old laptop sports the new Ubuntu 11.04. I am checking out the Unity desktop, have wireless and it all runs pretty good.

Time to put the orange cones away, take down the yellow tape and get back to work.

orange cones and yellow tape

2011-05-03T13:58:00.001-04:00

Something big happened at the Linuxville chateau. There is orange cones and yellow tape about. Hey, why you looking for the chalk outline? The only thing that expired was the MAC look as the holy grail for a desktop. I'm glad that's over. There is only so much you can do before you just copy it outright.

I did an upgrade over my Ubuntu 10.10 to 11.04. All went well until I rebooted, I gasped (ooh the horror of it!), big white square with vertical lines and white text I couldn't read. I think the video drivers are touchy with my hardware. While I booted I hit a down arrow and return and that did the trick. I got the login screen.

I didn't change anything, typed in my password, hit return, the white screen came back again, hitting me and blinding me. I grabbed at the reboot button on my PC, pressed it. Got back to the login screen, this time I clicked the session button selected "Ubuntu Classic", it came up nice and clean. The problem was I was expecting the new UNITY desktop, which didn't work. I think the cause was the default settings have 3d hardware acceleration in mind, too powerful for my average PC. The Ubuntu Classic is the Gnome desktop we all know and love (or loath), it works fine and is gorgeous.

I wanted so bad to love/hate UNITY like everyone else. Then I read on a web site to sudo apt-get install unity-2d in a terminal. Afterwards to logout, login selecting Unity 2D from the sessions menu. It felt like the part of a murder mystery where the band plays "Click the Mouse Slowly". Unity came up and it works. "It's alive!! I cried (of course!). Want to see it?

The first is at rest, note the icons on the side, that's the favorites launcher. The background is changeable. And the panel at the top carries the system stuff for each active application just like the MAC. Below shows MYPaint open. The side launcher retracts when an app is active but reappears when the cursor is positioned in the upper left corner or left side (your choice).

There are many things to explore and I won't spoil it for you. As you work with it, it gets into your ways and means. You will find the way to work with it. It will become as familiar to you as the other desktops you use. Awkward at first, then annoying little quirks, then I kind of like it, then golly geewhiz guys, ain't it cool!!

making a stand for art via open source software

2011-04-13T12:16:00.000-04:00

Here at the Linuxville chateau, I work on an antiquated laptop of Win95 vintage. It is under powered for the stuff I want to do but adequate for most. It is because I have installed Ubuntu Linux, ver. 9.10 works well, I have slipped past the world of commercial chaos into a sublime state of nerdvana. Besides being free and easy to use I have also discovered Open Source software, standard with Linux, to meet most of my needs. Open Source Software is often found in both Linux and Microsoft platform versions, sometimes Mac versions.

My quest is this, can a digital artist use only open source software, be productive and survive in an Adobe products on Microsoft and Mac PC driven world?

What, you can't be serious, you need Photoshop and/or Illustrator, or............!?@%#, these are what the pros use!!

My main programs are GIMP and Inkscape. I've heard the barks, GIMP doesn't have this and doesn't do that. The truth is they don't mention what GIMP does do and have because they already do that in Photoshop which they bought, own and use, no need for GIMP. I say if I need those things, I know where to find them, thanks. Over the years, I also see that GIMP has/is acquiring some of those not there things. The same with Inkscape.

I had a thought, digital graphics is about tools. In Photoshop a paintbrush works like this, in GIMP the same way. In Illustrator the same as in Inkscape. The tools are all the same. There are differences in the interface, tool options, but the biggest difference is in the file formats. File formats are how one company builds and keeps a user base. If you don't use a certain file format, you can't communicate with that user base. This is why folks push for across the board open formats that anybody can use regardless of the originating software. DOC., PDF., JPG., PNG., are all standard formats. I mentioned "Doc." because this presents the problem. DOC's is a Microsoft standard file format. It is under Microsoft's control, depends upon their permission to use it. They can and have changed it over the years. When a file format enters the public domain, it can be used to control access or gather and maintain a user/customer base. Another area where this is apparent is FONTs. Linux even has an add-on for MS standard fonts. When things hit the public domain, it is nice to have a wide margin of liberty.

My next thing is define "artist". If you went to art school and trained with Adobe products, because they are what pros use, are in the industry, etc; be happy, use what you know to do what you do. Just don't say "you can't do that!" Some artist use water color only, some oil paint only, draw with a No2 pencil. I use GIMP, Inkscape, just discovered SK1 (like Inkscape). There are a few others, but as I said it is about the tools. So for me as an "Artist", it is about using Open Source Software to do art.

How am I doing? You can see some of my works at http://www.lorainartscouncil.com/Arnold-L--Johnson.php

This is the art I do. You might do realistic stuff, cartooning, fine art type painting, vector illustrating, digital finger painting or math generated what ever, 3d.

If you are curious about digital art via Linux and Open Source Software - http://www.linuxgraphicsusers.com/forum/

The folks in the forum are a great mix of pros and noobys.

And by the way, my penthouse main machine (up stairs) is a desktop with the latest Ubuntu 10.10 and assorted artistware. Not top shelf by any means but more power makes the tools work better.

the science of burrito art

2011-04-12T11:44:00.000-04:00

Went to Micky D's for my breakfast burrito fix. All things being equal, training, amount of ingredients and practiced construction technique, I can't help wondering why each burrito is so unique. Is the breakfast pace too hurried, is the burrito maker a rookie, having a off day, or distracted? Or are they dedicated to customer happiness, bucking for manger? Do Hispanics from Mexico make the best burritos (sorry I'm profiling)?

Some days they are stuffed, some days they are wimpy, some days dry and some days I wait for the Mariachi band to serenade while I whiff and savior. Why is the Linuxville guy hawking burritos? I'm not but lately I realized that digital art has a kind of stigma in the art world. It is OK as long as it is on a web page or a game or movie effects, a sign or greeting card. You talk about digital art as serious art and people get that burrito questioning look in their eyes. Hey it's not the art educated high mucky mucks who are torpedoed, it's the average Joe and JoAnn who are still stuck on traditional media. Even the obvious repro needs to have once had brush strokes. I have seen total digital prints covered with gesso and stroked with a brush to enhance it for sale. They wouldn't do that to a silk-screen or a lithograph! OK, they might.

But....all things being equal, the hardware, the software, the training to use it all and still each digital artwork is so unique, hmmmmmm! Then print it, mount it, and hang it. You see I know that if Micky D's didn't have a procedure to stop the burrito maker at the right moment, it would cost $5 each. When we come to digital art, because of the possibilities of the media (so close to photography, animation and movies), we expect so much. The trick is to stop the digital art maker at the right moment so that a $100 picture doesn't cost you $500. The diff? At $100 you can savior, at $500 you buy insurance and a security system. I am talking niche buying, if you chose to spend more, go for it. The fancy restaurants all have their atmosphere plus more substantial burritos (extra for parsley sprig).

Digital art is causing a lot of reconsidering what art is. I can draw a mathematically perfect circle or squiggly lopsided oval or a sketchy round thing, all on my PC. I can alter it, copy it, shrink it or enlarge it. Still, when I am done will it be art? The PC is just another tool/media with it's own procedures and outcomes. You still spend time making art. I am always amazed, this is the art you can make on a PC and this is how it looks when you print it out. The one on the left is a $1 burrito, the right a $5 burrito.........sauce on the side?

first impressions

2011-04-01T22:24:00.000-04:00

In the Linux world first impressions are usually almost lasting. I stumbled upon my first Linux in the back of a library book. I found it hard to understand. That stuck with me until Linux became easier and I educated. So in that same vein I came across "Linux All-In-One, for Dummies" (4th edition). This is not a crit on the book, it is very wonderful as are the whole "for Dummies" series.

In the back of this book is a DVD with 5 live CD versions of Linux. Ubuntu, Fedora, openSUSE, Mandriva and Mint. To try 5 versions of Linux in a row is quite a coaster ride. I am already an Ubuntu user but this version did not even boot on my ancient laptop (must be ver. 10.4). The Fedora 12 detected a kernel crash on my system. Fedora always says that about my laptop, it's spooky. OpenSUSE came up the fastest but it had the KDE desktop which my biased self doesn't like. Mandriva gives you the choice of KDE or Matisse desktops. Matisse is very different. I think a desktop should let you get on with your work. But if you learn to use KDE or Matisse, I am sure you will have reasons to like them, just don't ask me.

So Ubuntu is cool but not ver. 10.4 on my laptop. And the last one Mint 8 is.............very impressive. I even like the minty green color. OpenSUSE is green too but Mint is nicer green. When you hit the Mint menu button it is clean, good looking and functionally smooth, way better than other distros doing menus the same way. OK, Mint is Ubuntu based and I am familiar, but Mint is a refreshing good design.

It is cool to have 5 tryouts and look at them while your impressions are hot. Of course, once you have settled you can tweak to your hearts content. First impressions carry a lot of weight with us fickle users. If you can have a good entry perhaps going deeper is easier to deal with. So we know, yes if you don't like what you see, you can change it. BUT, some folks don't and they have to like what they see first. If Ubuntu 11.04 won't work on my laptop, I'm going to put Mint on it. And that's a refreshing change.

Ah! what's a work flow?

2011-03-25T07:30:00.000-04:00

What's a workflow? Say you are looking at Blender 3D. You've seen the web sites, the videos, the mesmerizing array of features, the confusing menus and advanced finished animations that all say one thing to you, the learning curve is too steep for me. Panic attack! Go back to MSPaint!

First realization is that I do not need to learn all of what Blender can do to do what I need it to do. If I don't do animation why stress over it. Animation would not be in my workflow. My workflow is what I do. So, in looking at Blender I see what I want to accomplish, say model objects, position objects to build a scene, add lights, render that scene, and print it.

To do this I need to learn the basics of 3d modeling (similar in most 3d applications), the Blender interface in general, then the specific operations for the things I want to do (my workflow). We had to approach AutoCad the same way, else we'd never get any work done. Once you know, you know, you know!?

Now that you know, you can improve your workflow by hitting the forums to interrogate ones who do the same as you, to learn a new trick or two. The user videos on line are great show and tell. And if you can get in a Blender focus group (buds that blend, margarita maker society, the spinners.....), especially a local group, meet at the library or something. It is face to face bragging, tagging, whining, tipping and tripping. Nothing improves your workflow like friendly fire and encouragement. Then down the road, "Gee, animation looks like fun."

settling down to business

2011-03-13T19:47:00.000-04:00

Here at the Linuxville chateau penthouse studio of all things Linux and art, things are shaping up. Settling down to business means establishing workflows in applications you know and learning new stuff. I have been drawing with ball-point pen for years and thanks to a scanner I am extending that work. Also the GIMP is teaching me a thing or two as is Inkscape. Open source graphics software is great for cutting your teeth in digital art and getting a good bite on skills. If your work is not hampered by Photoshop or Illustrator requirements the road ahead is very exciting, like driving with free gas. Free lancing creativity is like off-roading.

My setup so far is two computers right next to each other. The main one has all the graphic apps on it and the secondary one is an old HP Vectra I use for documents and instructional videos downloaded from YouTube. The hum is minimum because the HP Vectra is fan-less so for an old PC is very quite. Low hum is key to keeping your sanity. I do need an updated CD player, it is very loud. And being the slow machine teaches me patience. This translates to slow down and think through the art.

Then the main machine and the secondary are connected to the same network via a router. I use a program called Synergy to share the keyboard and mouse of the main machine. When you collect hardware it is usually because stuff wears out but not thrown away. The keyboard still works except for the "e" key. I also have LCD monitors with bad driver boards, dag if I could only replace the board. LCD driver boards cost as much as a new display, go figure. Synergy allows me to share the same good keyboard on two PCs. I am still swapping files via a jump drive till I get file sharing activated.

I recently added Blender 3D and K-3D into the mix. I like 3D, it adds sculptural possibilities to my work. The cool thing is that the 2D work can mapped on and into the 3D work. They all play nice together.

Samples of my work exist at: http://www.lorainartscouncil.com/Arnold-L--Johnson.php

Now the trade off of being a digital artist is doing stuff to stay on the screen and/or doing stuff to be printed. I need a printer. First to judge the quality and tweak the work for the best printed outcome. Then to create a configuration file of best settings so that I can get the same results from any printer I use, including a printer at a print service establishment. This is what digital art is about, pushing pixels as far as they can go.

2d with depth

2011-03-04T09:34:00.000-05:00

Unless you are starting from scratch, you can grab and discard many 3d applications looking for the one. I like many artist have a load of background. Me, I've been an electrical CAD drafter for years. I haven't done much in the way of 2d part drawings and very little if any 3d work. I don't draw people or creatures or spaceships. Then I am not a pencil sketcher. I use ball point pens and love those rolling writer gel pens. I draw ideas of interior design art and furniture, sculptural pieces, rooms and houses.

So when I look at a software I want my ways of doing things and thinking to come out. I want precision like a drafting program but also to be able to wrinkle and fuzz things. Nobody like things too cold and rigid, the natural line, the calculated flaw and the accident is what makes art interesting. Then there must be a way to manipulate color. In 2d this is easy, paint it and you're done. Most 3d applications of note require a system of light placement and camera placement. Color itself is mapped on a surface or is integral to a material assignment of the part, like marble or glass. With the many variables and setting to be fiddled with, you can virtually do anything, virtually. Every operation requires a new found knowledge to get the results you are looking for.

The main caveat is finding all the stuff you want under a user interface you can understand and control. That's the rub, you got to live with it long enough to get a grip on it. Take the red pill, go down the rabbit hole. To be a Jedi takes the most serious commitment. You may have to push all other similar applications aside. The glitz and glamor of finished work posted in galleries can be a distraction if another artist produced something wonderful in an application you are not using. Ooooh, I want to do that too! Can I do that in this? Another argument is this application is used in the industry, yours is not or is new and untested in professional use. Sometimes some dude gives a biased review, or a bad review to a version from 5 years ago. You read it today and think, maybe I should be using something else. Hey, pick up your weapon, swing it around, face Vader (yourself), decide, slay, your done. You are now on your way.

I've been here before

2011-03-03T22:29:00.000-05:00

I just had the realization that one year ago I was attempting to use Blender 3d and K-3D. The problem I had was besides no patients, I had not committed myself to learning and fussing with 3d. Some of my drawings involved layering flat planes, then putting shadows under them to make it look like they were floating, thus simulating 3d. Now I can see better how to use 3d.

The first trick was to get the concept of working in 3d space. Playing with Wings 3d was good for that. Wings 3d is fast for somethings but lacks some tools I guess would make it a dream application, like boolean functions. What's that? It's when you can overlap shapes and add them together or subtract one shape from the other. Each graphics application has it's quirks, limitations and hot points.

As I said in a previous post Blender crashes on my laptop, someday I will get more power. Wings is quick but short on some tools. I just revisited K-3D, like Blender it has a learning curve but basic functions are awesome. I'm trying to get more video tutorials and I think I will just have to play with it. Getting used to the workflows to get things done and seeing some inspiring pictures is what I need. I kept putting off committing to learning one software because either the documentation wasn't clear, not enough tutorials or the user interface was not workable for me. Sometimes a great piece of software is an in house app. The designers feel that it would be good to let others use it. Blender was like this. Every tool in the book is in there, it's not simple. But once you get the hang, it is cool. K-3d seems like this also and I hate being the first kid on the block with anything. K-3d has a good feel so I'm giving it a shot along with Wings 3d. Ain't nothing to it but to do it.

still here but in 3d

2011-03-03T15:59:00.000-05:00

I have discovered two things, well three. One is that Blender 3d crashes on my laptop. The main screen comes up, I can insert a figure, then.........oh darn. This happens with version 2.49 and 2.56. Speaking of 2.56, Blender's got a new GUI that's less confusing but just as deep. That's number two and number three is Wings 3D. If you want to figure out how 3D drawing software works, Wings 3D is the short way to go. Wings is a mesh modeler with not too many bells and no whistles.

Now the secret to working any 3D software is getting your brain around how 3D works on a 2D screen. Wings goes a long way in giving you that idea. Not having whistles means that convenient operations are non-existent and it takes planning ahead to get some thing done with minimum headache. But you learn to think and design at the same time, who does that!?

My biggest complaint is that 3d graphics are number crunchy crazy so you need resources like good video chips/card and enough memory. My laptop is ancient and at 512mb of main memory is borderline crippled. My desktop in the remote penthouse of the chateau of upper Linuxville has 1024mb, works the 3d apps just fine. My serious recommendation is to max your system memory for no worries.

So what, you found some manuals, they only tell you about what each function is. You need tutorials. Tutorials give you the play by play via a small project, you know hands on. Even better yet video tutorials because you get play by play instructions, see it then do it. Once you know, you know, you know?

My next project is getting the power of upstairs downstairs. In my present living arrangement, that is awkward. I could use a cart with wheels for my big desktop setup or a new beefier laptop. I like the new laptop idea, maybe a tablet.

running behind the pack

2011-01-12T12:37:00.000-05:00

Cats are adventurous and nosy and the spreaders of particulate matter all over the house. I have a vacuum cleaner that specializes in pet hair. It collects the equivalent of a cat's worth of cat hair from rugs and furniture every time I use it. I have removed cat-mats from the cold-air returns.

Lately my laptop PC has been cutting off from overheating. I thought it was the power connection, because I didn't want to take the thing apart. Finally I popped off the back panel covering the CPU/fan assembly. There was a big hairball aka dust bunni blocking the vents and dust all over the fan. Canned air and tweezers are very handy, though I did remove 4 tiny screws of the fan shroud. Get a tech if you feel queasy about micro-surgery. I removed the offending fuzz-ball and sequestered it in the waste reclamation process. They will collect it and release it in a wild waste reserve. I feel so much better.

Anyway, I fired up the laptop and heard the fan whisper, then whirrrrrrr after the CPU heated up some. Every thing is back to normal. Here in the Linuxville chateau the point is to use the PC everyday. Gets kind of boring as things just work, so I have to get my kicks by content. I've been reading about tech heroes like Tesla and Edison and Bucky Fuller. History is so kool. You know all the genius that was throughout the industrial revolution to prepare us for the next revolution was phenomenal. So much that the money makers of that era can't let go in order for this next era to explode.

The other problem was that many geniuses were ahead of their time but the old skepticisms still hold economics hostage. When you revisit this ahead of it's time technology with new materials and science it is now very viable, but threatens the economy we built on the old technology. The result, new car old technology $12000, new car new technology $34000. Old money! If progress can only be purchased by the well heeled, the future has not arrived. I get the feeling financial hostage taking is the American awake (why we dream!).

Did you see the serge of PC tablets the likes of iPad? Where is the Wacom pad so we can do precision drawing on an iPad like device? If you can make the display the same size as a sheet of notebook paper you got a winner (on my screen!).

tales of the galloping hoards

2010-12-25T13:53:00.000-05:00

Taking a break from the cyber world, you know I herd cats. I am not opposed to dogs, it's just that cats are the petting appliance of choice. Hey, I tried petting tropical fish, it's not the same and birds are not meant for cages, though some beg to differ (birds that is!). Dogs are happy in packs, cats agree to co-exist. Dogs treat you as one of their own, cats expect you to hold up your end of the relationship or else (you can be replaced). Dogs wait on you, you wait on cats. Dogs have one personality, cats at least two, most nine. This is why dogs run in packs, they like others. Cats are already crowed, they will consider you after considerable consideration, then reconsider wither your presents warrants their attention. Then they test your sincerity, your dedication and take advantage of your advances till you reject them as a nuisance. No big deal, your done, so am I, see you next time. If they remember they will tempt you to see if you will respond. I got you now, pet me till your hand falls off. Oh wait, don't stop, you are not done yet!

Six cats is a herd, a manageable amount. I have heard tales of more, numbers not possible even in the wild. Too many of anything, no matter your heart felt intentions, will steal your soul and redefine your purpose of life. Balance is a must as you will serve to make up lacks so you all can survive. Many in my area are often overwhelmed, never ask for help and are discovered too late. Six cats is enough. My wife would have me care for neighborhood strays, I say no. Once people go down that path, they need to "org." with others and be funded and make that their life's mission.

That's the cat's tale and I go back to my computer mouse which doesn't purr or require mouse pellets. A shame, I pet the mouse more than the cats. I think they are jealous.

the ways of the source

2010-12-24T13:19:00.000-05:00

The scene opens with Han Solo is about to jump into hyper space, they got hit by enemy fire and C3PO is in a tangle of smoking wire. That was me folks. I was working on implementing a LTSP server environment on top of my existing hardware. Needless to say my enthused effort was no match for the really of diverse and inadequate hardware pieces. This will require a few acquisitions and some more in-depth understanding of the technical bent. It all seemed too simple a concept for it to go so amiss, but IT is not about just having the right pieces in place. There is software and configuration too. Come on you've all had the perfect cake recipe only to find success after the correct plus or minus baking powder to compensate for altitude. It's a Denver cake, you are in Ohio folks.

I did discover some things in restoring my system to working status. Hooking up and configuring routers and PCs for DSL service can be a trial of wits. All the instant and easy router install CDs are for MS Windows systems, I have an all Linux system. Good thing I can access the manual on the CD and I printed out much of the original config pages before the problems occurred. To manually config a router is one day of burning, one day of learning. I am a wiser man. So you router makers should at least put a Linux installation program on your web sites for download.

Another thing I discovered is that my Sata drive has some bad sectors. My baby's got some bruises! I could use a slew of new hard drives (huge honking), and a few smaller used drives that whine but don't click. I also learned that if more than one DHCP server is on one network, the network is obliged not to work. Most of my frustration came from iffy web access to the router admin page. Going back to defaults is scary, it all worked so well before I'd forgotten what it was all about. This is a big problem with Linux, you set it and forget it. Not having to constantly monitor things, you have to be reminded what you did and how you did it. Then the fix is in sight.

Well, things are back to working order only now I have changed. That means the door is opened for more experiments and another crack at the LTSP server. A better planned approach is in order and to think this all started with Tinker Toys.

And may the source be with you (I couldn't help that!)

techno tinkering

2010-12-19T06:02:00.000-05:00

What's going on at the Linuxville chateau, dead quite, then lights on at odd hours, alternating outcries of eureka and oh darn. You see, the whole fun of computing is to see what you can do with it without wiping out your data or net access. Really helps if you have more than one computer. And if you have more than one PC then it gets a bit tricky when some of your data is uniquely on each one of them or different versions of one file is on either of them. A central data store like a NAS or network attached storage would be nice.

In another setup, a through-back to the mainframe era, is the LTSP server. I don't know why I like this setup but one central server with some dumb terminals is economical for a home computer. The LTSP server can be powerful yet small, serving applications and providing data storage for a slew of work stations around the house. Perhaps the work stations called thin clients are diskless or perhaps they are just less endowed PCs, even older PCs that tap the server's resources. Some have even called these "chubby clients"or smart terminals. This goes to show you that personal computers are not always the best use of PC technology.

The real thing is how much it takes to setup and live with this arrangement. It can't be any worse than what music buffs do. I have seen home entertainment systems manned by home-brew media engineers. I am always so envious. My server can be the latest and my less endowed terminals can be older stuff. Hey, that's STEAMPUNK if I ever saw it! The terminals can't utilise the latest software in their own right but as terminals they can blaze with eye-candy streamed from the server.

Why me? I work with my GIMP setup a certain way on my laptop, changing it as I use it. Then I roam to my desktop, open GIMP and it's not the same. If I had GIMP on a LTSP server, it would be one copy and I could access it, the same GIMP, from either laptop or desktop. I have just killed redundancy, the need to sync data on two computers and created a consistent work environment. I know you can buy already set-up NAS and servers, but we don't always have money to throw at problems and besides home-brewing is fun. Schools don't have the time to teach you all this cool stuff. If you are a techie you must tinker, the same is true with artist, you must make your own tools.

So with that, excuse the yellow tape and no, it's not a crime scene. The flashing lights say "tinkering session in progress!"

a NAS is not NASA

2010-12-08T10:39:00.000-05:00

I guess the NAS adventure requires a why you need this? Let's see, I can recycle old computers I would have had to stash or trash. I wouldn't have to buy a huge honking hard drive for my own use that only I can use on my PC. (I don't need that much disc space, personally.) You see with a NAS on your network, everyone on your network can get at the files stored on it. Why is that important. If you gots family, multiple PCs in the house, and you are each downloading videos off of YouTube or NetFlix. A NAS is a central storage place everyone can access. Let me paint a picture.

"Anybody download the movie for tonight? Yeah dad, but Jimmy's got it on his PC and he's out on a road trip. (Should have burned a disc or put it on the NAS with the big honking hard drive.) I'll download it, burn it, when I'm done watching you all can have it."

Download it once directly to your NAS, it is there for anybody on your network. Lots of redundant effort foiled. It is practical for storing any digital documents and media. For me this means I have a huge honking hard drive that my various small PCs can use and not have multiple versions of the same docs floating around on each PC. It also means that my many CD library can be stored away (real backup copies) and disc swapping is a thing of the past.
This is busting the description of the home PC. A PC must have a keyboard and monitor and used by one person at a time, thus personal. A PC is only good when it can do everything the person using it wants. NO! You can dedicate a PC for certain uses. Like managing a entertainment system. A TV tuner card, media software, stereo speakers and home theater r us is yours. Connect to your NAS via your network and that huge honking hard drive(s) is a well of assorted entertainment. You can watch it on your big screen or your laptop.

If you are concerned about the noise level of old computers, buy new power supplies and cpu fans, have a techie install them. The newer stuff is quieter. But the point is that computers can be configured to share and not be so.......personal.
A NAS is not NASA, that is not rocket science, but does require technical tenacity (getting your geek on) or getting a geek professional or buying a commercial NAS unit $$! Home brewing a NAS just sounds like fun and useful. I'll let you know.

geekness - NAS

2010-12-06T11:48:00.000-05:00

It's not over yet. Good thing my geekness is in tact. I have a few minor but constant headaches. One is that if you are serious about any computer art, every program, and input device requires a time tuned skill. A mouse feels one way and the digital pen another. Then every program you use feels a certain way depending on your input device. There is that comfort thing and that changing device thing. On top of all that is discovering which program can better do what you want. I could not use just GIMP because Inkscape has already proven to me it can do some things I want to do better. GIMP and Inkscape work very well together. You must spend time with it all.

Pack it in and push it down. This has been a good word to me. Learn it till you are sick of it, then go do something else. Later just go to work and what you have learned kicks in. Sounds simple but when it becomes a habit it is the most useful, almost second nature. But you must apply it while you are using it or it is useless, once you know (via experience) you know, you know!?

There two things a digital artist must develop a habit of doing. Number one is save often. When a system crash happens or you click the wrong button or the cat jumps on the keyboard, having saved work in progress keeps you from starting over, and the cat lives another day. The second thing is backup. Copy to CD, flash drive or use a USB remote hard drive. However you store it not on your PC is a safe resource for you.

I can't recommend it yet as I am still trying to figure it out, but a good solution is a file server, Network Attached Storage or NAS. What is that?? Imagine a PC on your network and all it does is control hard drives. Hey, my PC can do this. Yeah but how easily can all the PCs on your network share the information on your PC? This NAS appears on your file system as another hard drive except that it is not in your PC. Being a separate machine on the network means all your other PCs can access it when they need to. I had an 2nd hand 300gig drive I was going to use. It is too damaged to be reliable, so I am testing the NAS with a 20gig drive. If it works out I'm investing in larger drives.

The software is called OpenFiler. It is free and if you want powerful options and flexibility there are extensions you can buy for it. Another NAS software is called FreeNAS. I am sure there are fans of either. Why use a NAS instead of configuring PCs to interconnect and share? One is the configuration work required on each PC the other is security. As a desktop jockey I don't want to be tweaking each and every piece of hardware I have every time I make a change. I setup a NAS once and forget it and get some artwork done.

It is kind of hard to dedicate a PC to a single purpose. I am so use to a PC being able to do a lot of stuff. Once this NAS is setup it doesn't even need a keyboard or mouse, the interface is via a web browser on another PC the same as routers are managed. The best is to re-purpose an older PC for this server work. It is not too complex, nor too hard, if your geekness is intact.

the life of an artist is not always pretty

2010-12-02T22:11:00.000-05:00

I'm giving in to a winning retreat today. What does that mean? Oh, I moved my main PC and router and stuff back up to the penthouse, computer lab and artist's retreat.

It's for artistic freedom and what not because a certain well trained older artist individual with Alzheimers in my house is so critical and insisting I take their tutorship, I must relocate myself. They have never worked on a computer, ever! But I can remote into my upstairs PC via TightVNC on my laptop. I can be seen and then escape when necessary. So peace of mind and so far my Wacom Graphics tablet which has unusable jitters on my laptop, works fine on my desktop. That is a win too!

Trying to turn assorted PC stuff into artist tools can be a challenge. With flash drives and notebook drives cheap this shouldn't be a problem. But times are tight and making due is the game today. In my collection are 10gig, a 20gig and one 300gig hard drives. You can't always be sure of the longevity of them when they are 2nd hand. I plug them in and listen to the noises they make. Whining is good and clicking is near bad about to be really bad. I never have enough of the right kinds of cords, or long enough Ethernet cable or phone cable or power cord adapters. I have two crt monitors 17" and 14". I have my laptop which is a big 15" and not wide screen. I'd have to get a 19" widescreen to have the height useful for art work. The widescreens seem so squinty. My daughter has a huge rear projection TV, that would be wonderful for digital artwork. Dibbs on that girl!

The missing piece for me is printers. My office printer is mainly for fax and scanning. I think I wore the printer part out. What I need is a wide inkjet that can handle paper and canvas. I can use commercial print services but I need to see and handle my own work to get the feel before I commit to 3rd party printers.

I think my life would be easier if I was doing web graphics, but I don't seem to have a heart for that kind of art. I wouldn't need a printer and it would seen by thousands, millions. but perhaps not so ever present as a pic over your sofa.

GIMP brushes can spin

2010-11-30T22:33:00.003-05:00

I was over at www.linuxgraphicsusers.com, the link is on the sidebar, someone there mentioned a way to turn a GIMP brush. Man that was work. I guess it's simple after you do it a hundred times. To my surprise, someone wrote a script to do the job. Too bad both the old way and the new way are on the net. I hear the future GIMP will have this built-in, how cool!

First go to the GIMP Plugin Registry at http://registry.gimp.org/node/16231, download a file called "rotatebrush.scm".

Then use the terminal to sudo into your file manager. Type sudo and the file manager name. Mine was "sudo thunar" Yeah, it's password protected. Type in your password, hit enter. Congrats, you have just used the command line. Not scary huh!

In the home folder goto the GIMP 2.6 folder. It's a hidden folder, goto View and check hidden folders if you can't see it.

Then in the GIMP 2.6 folder find the script folder. Paste the script file "rotatebrush.scm" into there.

Close the windows and open the GIMP.

I selected a brush I made circled in blue (5 dots angled to the right), from the brush menu.

Click on Script-fu in the menu bar (in red), select the resize/rotate brush flag. In the dialog box that appears, set the new angle in degrees. Sorry there is no preview. When you hit OK, the change is made.

My brush is now horizontal (in blue). This saves from making many single brushes at different angles and sizes. You can spin your brush while you are using it. Yeah, it's not quite that interactive but close enough to be useful. That'll learn ya! lol! And I hope I have fortified your Gimptitude a little more.

the hand that rocks the mouse

2010-11-30T14:42:00.000-05:00

The fascination I have with drawing instead of photo manipulation is something that has grabbed me from the very start. To tell you the truth when I take a camera picture I don't have a habit of messing with it. But I guess you can get quite artful with that. In all my paper wasting days I have always wondered what I might fit on a blank page. Sometimes I know what I see in my head will not materialize because I haven't got the specific skills to put it on paper the way I see it.

This all is awkward because if people ask me to share my GIMP skills with a group I would have to tell them how little interest I have in photo manipulation. The other thing they ask for is how to draw stuff like a person or an object. I don't do people though I would like to draw objects the same as in my sketchbooks. Drawing with a mouse is like tying a pencil to your elbow. I can see why computer clubs don't venture beyond fixing photos and scrap-booking.

Many, many computer artist are doing web graphics, desktop publishing, CD covers and what not. My interest are more design graphics, fine art, drawing, painting and my aim is the home. There is a certain thing with around the house art, while the cutting edge of art is complex, art for the home tends to be............what you thought I'd tell you? Depends on the persons living there.

I'm also looking for the illusive African Modern Style. The African art influence has been legendary for decades and yet there is no African Modern Style. There is Italian Modern, Scandinavian, even a Contemporary American Country. It's not directly about race, but Africa is the mother of us all. I think because there are so many geographic areas, climates, cultures, peoples, etc. in Africa that there is no one influence or school of thought to use as a framework for an African Style. More than not styles tend not to change as rapidly as trends and fashions. They are reworked in the latest appeal yet keep their essential classic elements. That is what makes them so endearing and when you talk to a designer they know what you are talking about. So, classic styles are a kind of a familiar language.

A lot of African style is wrapped up in textiles. You say Africa here and most see Kente cloth or Kuba raffias or Mali mudcloths, masks and drums. I had hoped the internet would cause an explosion of African influence in design down to the product level, that is, on the store shelves. This has not happened. What we have is so watered down it doesn't even pass for souvenirs. Folks here are still thinking safari and savannas and natives. There are progressive modern cities all over Africa filled with intelligent and creative people. If our American gov makes the connection, we children of slaves get shafted along with Africans getting bilked. If we children of slaves make the connection there is a transference of ideas and commerce. That is my opinion, but I haven't seen different yet.

Anyway, it is kind of cool to view but limit all the American influences. Again it is not so much a race thing as it is a cultural thing. This African culture is often not so apparent among American blacks as we are pushed to embrace diversity so very strongly these days. If we are left alone, the African comes out. Still seems if we are Afro-centric in any visible way we are suspect, labeled un-American and are in rebellion of the American Euro-centric way. OK, I admit I didn't come from Europe, so sue me. There is still a fight to be seen and heard in America, even today. And just because Hispanic peoples are taking the hits today doesn't mean Black peoples have arrived. The arts are often what is sustainable about any culture. We are all hip (hop) to what is the entertainment of the day. There are folks we've forgotten. They have devised the next cool thing already. The age is turning again keep your eyes open, you ain't seen nothing yet! Keep playing with the GIMP.

Anybody seen my brush!

2010-11-27T14:03:00.002-05:00

I'm going through the GIMP brushes and the one I want is not in there. The Mr. Impatient way of GIMP brushes is to draw and save as and put it in the hidden GIMP brush folder by hand, what a pain and good luck with that. The results is a brush with no good attributes. Here's what I discovered:

Make a new drawing, the size 72 x 72 (could be bigger, must be square).
Under Advanced options, set color to Grayscale (if you want brush to use whatever foreground color). Set the "Fill with" color to transparency. You should get this:

Draw on the transparent square, use shift + to make the image bigger.

Hang on it's not a brush yet. Select "ALL" from the select menu and from the Edit menu "COPY" instead of save (in the file menu). Now here is the magic: "Paste AS" from the Edit menu and "New Brush". The dialogue box should appear. Give it a brush name and a file name with extension (.gbr).

When you hit "OK" you have created a brush, the brush menu refreshes and your new brush appears and is ready to go.

And if you wants to delete a brush, just right click and delete. If you delete it there is no getting it back.

Perhaps I am a little crude here but in time I will have all the finesse of a Hollywood movie. Hey did you hear the one about the painter who plucked his own beard to make his own brush. This is way easier than pulling hair. I read a GIMP Bible, watched a video tutorial, fiddled and condensed it into an experience. See, the Linuxville guide is into GIMPtitude and giving it to you.

reinventing the bookshelf

2010-11-25T11:30:00.001-05:00

Oh man, I got all the cool apps but I don't know how to use them. The way it goes is that you install it then you dabble with it. That is you use all the easy stuff. Soon you want to tackle a challenge and duh! Ok, then you scour the net to find every ebook and manual in PDF format or HTML you can find. Soon you have files and folders all over the place. Linux has this app called Calibre, a master at organizing ebooks. You can suck in ebooks in different formats, convert them to one standard format (of your choice), then view them with a few clicks. Here is a pic:

I guess I could demand it be more automated sort of like Picasa but I am happy to have it as it is. Picassa scans your hard drive for every picture, makes a thumbnail and puts it in a menu tree. Calibre does give you control over what gets selected but once selected it is awkward to remove other than delete. Mostly I go into the Ubuntu system file manager and move the file to another directory, then refresh Calibre. Calibre is so handy and as usual I do all the easy stuff first, there are deep and hidden secret powers lurking beneath the interface.

I am migrating toward using the PC as a complete system to handle most home media. It is a trend any electronic handy person can envision. PCs can do TV with a card and cable service is a plus, internet, play audio and video files, be a reader of various documents, do email, internet browse/search, calculate and control. Books in print just might become rare, what was that? Gutenberg turning in his grave? I can see more and more book shelves being knick-knack displays. There on the shelf is your favorite picture, it's a digital picture frame. At rest, it's a photo display, when you pick it up, it's a wifi-pad to the house computer.

You think I am nuts, my brother had a VHS video collection that could be used as a sofa. If that many videos could be stored and played off a 1 terabyte hard drive, a huge chunk of living room real estate has been recovered. Add to this a collection of books, magazines and newspapers. Actually the local library should have an online service where you can for a small fee read anything online on demand, no need to download. But what about human contact. Walk into the library with your wifi-pad or trade your card for one of the library's.

Having the work on one workspace and the manual or tutorial on another is a big deal. I find I have to practice some skills over and over till I got them down, you know the repeatable results thing. Then I can tweak them and discover new stuff. No joke, I can sit at my PC all day and not waste a minute. And I am just an average Joe. OK, I'm a geeky Joe.

Somehow I think there needs to be a difference in the personal computer (single user) and the home computer (shared users). If we can mash together the business server with multiple home users (family members PCs) we can manage personal data and shared data. We just have to make it practical. This can be done with present day off the shelf parts and we haven't even talked about controlling the home life support and security systems.

talking penguins, dude snap out of it!

2010-11-23T12:50:00.000-05:00

I walk away from the penguin a bit anxious, I turned, threatened to sand board him (they like the water), he squawked, muttering about Mutter and the end of the 'X' windowing systems as we know it. Then before I could ask more he quickly donned his shades, trench coat, fedora, slipped into the crowd and..... where'd he go?

There is all kinds of mysteries in the Linuxville streets, the talk that Linux has no curb appeal has been slung in the gutters and in the burgs (icebergs) for years. Somebody finally has the nerve to do something different and change the present situation. All of a sudden he is sick of mind, an evil genius who will force us all to comply. Users, fickle as a pickerel, crying "fix it but don't change it!" Legacy, is such a lovely word, all new stuff is so untrue. But that is not how the song goes, progress, innovation, improvements are all at the expense of trimming off the past. Some genetic scientist is injecting color into the penguin population and the gnu is still a wildebeest only a bit wilder. The nature of Linux is in it's parts and how they are put together. I am sure there will be for a time things as they are now, but for the future not to come, that is not the Linux way.

What if penguins are really distant cousins to humming birds? There was a fork in the species, a wrong turn in migration and a liking for formal wear!

Oh man, good nap! The dream seemed so real. Better get back to work.

speak bird speak

2010-11-23T09:51:00.001-05:00

The late great Johnny Carson had the Great Karnak thing going on. In Linuxville you corner a penguin who sees all and tells nothing (unless the price is right!). It's not a bribe, it's a donation, he says.

Notice the push the drive for seamless media and access on all your devices. Your handheld device is really a personal digital assistant. You can call, web browse, take pictures, do email, text and open and close your garage door, arm your security system and never leave you TV set. That is the part that gets me. You never leave your TV. Yes, you can take it with you. You know I couldn't buy those commercials where there was a TV in every room including the bathroom. But the new and improved media net can be viewed on the cell, the PC and the TV. Of course you have to have the right equipment and the right software. You can already get internet, TV, and phone from your cable company. But no need for a TV in every room when you got your cell or iPad type tablet, netbook, laptop and desktop, in every room or on your person anyway. Oh wait something is missing. The cable company gives you access to the outer world, what about your private world?

The VPN, virtual private network is the answer. Many of the PDA devices are mostly on the go access devices, no real fire power for heavy computing. Then folks on the go may not want to carry around a huge honking storage device or an expensive and powerful laptop with all their work and personal data. VPN allows a PC or a server device to sit at home protected by a firewalls and backup power supply. Then you can access it from anywhere if you are secure in that arrangement. Between the cable company and your VPN, you can raise the power of your PDA in quantum leaps and..........."Please deposit another fish in the bird beak". Oooh boy!

Gimptitude is moving along fine. I am comparing GIMP to Inkscape while learning them together. I am finding I can do some things more optimally in GIMP or Inkscape, then import it to the other and apply it. Working mostly in Open Source is like the Darkside of the Force, "once you go down that path, forever will it control your destiny." But that is the warning of folks who don't go and we here are not talking about evil. The caveat is that you have to learn it to use it and once you do, you are changed forever. GIMP users complain about the Photoshop interface and the way it works also. Photoshop looks strange and weird when sitting in the GIMP cockpit. The thing is that most Linux users are used to having to use different interfaces on different apps. MS users are mostly wanting the same interface on every program. Which is better, you decide.

Gimptitude - overcoming others to get the art out

2010-11-22T12:33:00.001-05:00

One of the big things in my life is getting support for my artwork. I am sure you've heard the saying, "that's a good hobby, what you gonna do for money?" Yes, they've gotten so good at saying it that I've heard it in deadpan monologues and set to rap music. Unless you are pressed to be a commercial artist and produce a paycheck, you are doomed to be lambasted, underrated and marginalized. At least it seems that way. In my case I listened to all the voices and did "other" money making things. Now that I am unemployed, with time on my hands and I can smell retirement age looming, the prospect of doing what I had intended originally and naively, seems very possible today. Of course the voices are still there, it takes an act of God to change the record sometimes. Wake up people, it's about fulfilling my aspirations not meeting your expectations. But I guess they depend on me to the point that my taking risks might endanger their comfort and security. In other words where is the paycheck?

There are other pressures. Loved ones who are so one with you that they feel it's their right to influence your work even though art is not their strong suit. And other loved ones who are well trained in the arts but were pre-occupied with life issues and never kept up with their own work. They offer so much advice it is worse than critics. I remind them I did not travel through the same path nor been taught the way they were, I can't relate. I use a computer mouse not a pencil, pen or paint brush and Glade does not come in turpentine scent. When my art is in progress I can stop, save it and pickup where I left off months later. I can make copies and save them, alter them, print them and on and on. My artist world is different than the one my love ones are familiar with. I remind them being an artist is not my job description, it is who I am. I will do art wither I am paid for it or not. I can't meet the standard set by other artist especially when some of the highly trained scribble and get paid on their name. How the heck am I supposed to judge the amount of experienced creative effort when my scribbles are just like theirs. I do what I do and that's the art. It is the art of the artist. I did not need an accreditation or to be approved by the accredited to do art. There is no gauntlet of paintbrush bearing hazers to run through.

I like contemporary and modern art and African flavors in art. I live in an area overburdened with commercial products, conservative tastes and trendy fashions. Not many appreciate design you can't get on the store shelf. Most feather their nests with what I call watered down canned design. It is a very casual acquisition of interior decoration stuff. In my artist's world, design is very concentrated, almost extreme. You might select one item of mine to fit into your world. It changes the context of your world but not enough to make my work a theme in your place. That is OK.

I am standing in the gap by not focusing on web art nor on traditional art media. It is both awkward and a challenge for everyone to think of a print as art. Painters will have their work photographed and together with photographers have their works scanned and printed on canvas or high tech paper. If digital artist directly print their digital work, all of a sudden the argument is on, what and where is the original and which determines the value the artist work, the quality of the print or the kind of print. If you print on a home office printer or a high end print shop printer or the kind of print medium and inks. It is so academic. Yet a guy can do oil paint on newsprint and is an unquestioned creative genius in techniques and material use. Is there no worry about archival quality of the original? Seeing how digital artist work, there is just as much effort put into the works. The direct printout of a digital file can be appreciated for the artist's work. I guess the scary thing is that digital prints can be postage stamp to billboard sized and applied to almost anything. Ok, the same beautiful picture on typing paper is of less value than if printed on glossy photo-paper or on canvas. You have to set the value by the materials used and the composition of the picture.

And you thought it was easy being an artist! Try being well known for your work but not bothered so you can get some work done. LOL

Linuxaticity - some pride, a fall, a restore to gimptitude

2010-11-18T12:15:00.000-05:00

Man, you missed a bunch of stuff. I was playing around with my laptop sound system. Then wanted to check out the Gnome Office suite. I already had AbiWord (word processor) and Gnumeric (spreadsheet), I wanted to know what other packages were included in that suite. A word to the wise, ask the question, then Google search it. I just installed the Gnome Office Suite and it was added but it also removed some stuff and my sound went with it. As of yet I don't know what comprises the sound system (usually ALSA or PulseAudio libraries) and I was using Xubuntu 9.10 which doesn't have a sound configuration app.

Rather than hanging my head and bashing it with my laptop, I reinstalled Ubuntu rather than Xubuntu. Yeah it is a little rich for my laptop, but I also installed XFCE desktop as an alternate desktop. I can now run fat or skinny when I feel to. The cool thing is that the full Ubuntu has lots of configuration tools built-in. I found the Sound icon in the Preferences menu and I had sound. You can also use System Testing in the Administration menu. And if you need to deep oogle your system to get info, there are a few apps otherwise investigate Terminal or Command-line methods. Command-line? Please don't panic, think recipes that work every time if you follow it. Once you know what to expect, it's done. I consider the command-line as the axe in the glass box, there if you need it. And if you hose your system Linux is so easy to install. I do have some recommendations.

1. Put your HOME directory in a separate partition. If you tryout OSs as much as I do, you won't have to reformat the partition with your personal data, that's less backing up.

2. Save your files to a remote drive, flash drive, or second drive. Not having your data on the same drive as your operating system is called security, and less backing up. This is very cool for sharing in a family (a drive for each family member). You can get a lot of personal stuff on a flash drive and the bookshelf hard drive is very handy.

3. If your PC can boot from a flash drive, put Ubuntu on the flash drive. You can turn your Win machine into a Penguinator at the drop of the mouse. Who knew!?

4. I am tired of syncing my PCs and keeping up with duplicate data. Put your stuff on the remote drive OR on that huge, powerful, dust bunny collecting doorstop to be PC in your closet. Then use an app like TightVNC or UltraVNC to remote the desktop from your laptop.

My laptop is three times more than what it appears as I tap the desktop machine remotely. It is way better than dual-booting or virtual machines. I can run two operating systems at the same time and not share resources. And if I want to improve I can share data, though I am not sure about sound across a remote connection (gosh, another adventure!).

Well how does this help my GIMPtitude? My desktop becomes the workhorse and the barn for my stuff. If you come to my house I have few books on a shelf, mostly PDF files and tutorials and videos and what not all on a hard drive and CDs. My laptop is the smart user access. You don't need new computers for storage but however you work it out, at least for me it's fun. There is one caveat, the older computers sounds like a vacuum cleaner, my wife thinks I'm doing the rugs (hint, hint!).

Get some GIMPTITUDE - don't be a GIMP wimp!

2010-11-17T11:43:00.000-05:00

What, you think I am going to show you how to do stuff in GIMP? Hey, like I said I'm a guide not a trainer. My job is to tweak you! Come on, it's net search time!

So I found some basic intro videos that went over some of the basic tools. I like vector drawing and am an Inkscape fan. I heard you can do vector drawing in GIMP also, it is called Paths. The icon in the toolbox looks like a fountain pen. In the drawing area the tool draws points to outline a shape. You can move the points and alter the lines between the points. There are keyboard controls and the 'Paths' dialogue box to deal with. When the path is made you can have a line 'stroke' the path or apply any brush to paint the path.

This all made questions pop into my head. What's the diff between vectors in GIMP and vectors in Inkscape? If I can do vectors in GIMP what do I need Inkscape for? They handle vectors in different ways, so I must discover what the diffs are and how that is useful to me. OK, in GIMP vectors are used to construct shapes but the resulting shapes are bit-mapped. In Inkscape everything is vectors and the resulting shapes are vectors, but you can export a copy as a bit-map.

Now, don't forget when you make bit-mapped pictures larger the pixels get further apart, the image gets fuzzier. With vectors the same drawing can be stretched from postage stamp size to bill-board size and have the same sharpness.

Take each tool you want to use and see how it works. The videos are a great help as I am often not a patient book reader or a step by step instruction follower. I get the gist and run with it. Now wait a minute! Slow down! While in the act of playing around, focus your attention on one tool (say the Path tool), learn enough about it to enhance your play and exploration (serious play). Then you need a project to confirm your training (constructive serious play). Make a desktop background or a logo banner. You can build on your knowledge and progress over time, before you know it you are doing complex work-flows quickly, with good results and having fun too.

Now I very much like Inkscape because it is like the CAD software I have lots of experience with. GIMP though is mostly a free-hand drawing, painting and photo editing application. I have sketched with a pen, but I've yet to perfect doing it with a mouse and as I complained in the past, my Wacom Graphire Tablet has the jittery cursor really bad on my laptop. This is the caveat when doing computer art, hardware and software are interdependent tools, you got to spend time to get good at it, but they have to work right too. So, take your time, sharpen your skills via serious play. Before you know it your GIMP wimptituity is over.

Digital dreams through penguin eyes

2010-11-15T11:18:00.001-05:00

Hey you think swimming with the sharks is hard, try swimming with the salmon!
How about wallowing with the minnows! Eeeuoo boy, penguin dreams!?

This is the G.I.M.P., ooooooh! Gimpness!

Yes, I am into GIMP, the Gnu Image Manipulation Program and the other day I spotted and installed one called Pinta. Pinta is billed as Gimp Light. Actually there are several Linux paint apps along the lines of MS Paint. Meaning something quick and easy for viewing and doodles and whatnot. Pinta is more polished than most of these doodle machines and is a desk full of tools rather than a studio full. It has the typical needed drawing tools and layers. Most of the doodle machines don't have layers, Pinta does. But I just noticed that Pinta's paint bucket and a couple of other tools are greyed out. Did they put it out while still under development? Bummer!

This is Pinta! Simple and fast.
Yeah, Pinta is handy, quick and needs to get those tools finished, yet I still like it.

Back to GIMP, I've concluded that if you are into Photoshop, GIMP is a little hard to swallow. But the purpose of the any interface is access to the tools. When you work in someone else's studio you have to find where they put the scissors, the tape. Once you found them they work the same or close enough to get by. You learn to make it work for you, so quit complaining. Artist are known to make do. What? Oh, it's commercial artist who are complaining because you expect a certain standard (called like Photoshop). That's OK, if you don't find GIMP useful for "YOUR" work, then don't use it. Now for the rest of us who don't need that professional standard, GIMP is a Photoshop replacement, period. If GIMP did everything that Photoshop does and was still free, Photoshop would go belly up. This rant was brought to you by the Linuxville Office of Flight Training for Penguins, The Foundation of Birds Below the Waves, and The Roaming Berg Resorts because ice is nice in your drink, in the sea and on the polar-cap.

Learning the GIMP is easy.
1. get basic over view tutorial videos off the net.
2. get project videos off the net to see how different stuff is done.
3. view videos and practice like crazy.
4. brag to Photoshop entrenched friends (optional, lol).

For me it's about doing the similar stuff and style that I have using a pen in my notebooks. That kind of sketching ideas and putting down thoughts is so cool. Then I also have the opportunity to progress to finished works on the same platform. Drawing with a mouse is awkward and so is with a digital pen and tablet. My interest is more about drawing than photo correction and alteration. Practice gets you used to using these input methods and used to handling how the applications feel and work. With digital work it is about the workflow to achieve what you want to do. It is handy that folks have documented some of these workflows for you to follow and learn. Repeatable results is the thing computers do best. And you can change the recipes to suit your own ends.

Training on this site? No, I'm not a trainer, still learning myself, your humble Linuxville Guide, guiding you into all the wonderment of penguinessence.

Linuxville artist's standard tools

2010-11-11T11:36:00.000-05:00

When I was in college I took a few traditional art classes, in traditional media via traditional teaching methods and conventional teachers. We didn't even consider computers for art in the 70's. We have greatly progressed, there are artist tools on every PC platform and photo quality printers on the cheap. In fact the design profession has become quite entrenched with Adobe products taking the lead. It has gotten so deep that the full blown software is coveted by beginners, learners and want to be's globally. Go ahead aspire to that! It's OK! But wait!

In the backrooms of the Linuxville chateau, behind the bookcases, down the stairs in the cave of wonders, I've have discovered it is about the tools. As a kid I stressed about Red Ball Jets tennis shoes or Keds with the magic wedge. If I couldn't run optimally, they both were the same. It is obvious that Photoshop and other Adobe creative products are the grail of today's artist. But if you strip away the well explained interface, there are tools common to all graphic programs. The tools themselves are standard equipment. Think about it, the programming required to draw a line or a bezier curve or do layering, is pretty much the same in every program. Most good graphics programs have a standard set of drawing and editing tools , a way of adding custom scripted functions and extra tools.

What's the real diff? I think it is in the output of the digital file to printers. If you are doing RGB, you can get away with a lot because inkjet printers are RGB already. If you are talking offset or printing that requires you to separate color layers as with CMYK printing, that is more involved. Photoshop has built-in tools for CMYK output, GIMP does not. CMYK only makes Photoshop better if you need CMYK. With RGB printing becoming quite the bomb, GIMP is RGB cool.

We are told GIMP has a bit of a learning curve. That's a big curve if you are already into the Photoshop interface and work flows, way smaller if you have no experience. What's the secret? Stop comparing and criticizing and watch some video tutorials. Watch them, you'll say, dag man, I can do that! Believe me, once you learn to use say, a bezier curve, you can use that tool in any program that has it. So, what's holding you back, a $brand-name$?

the penguin is out of the bag

2010-11-10T12:53:00.000-05:00

TightVNC is proving to be very cool for me, except if I play a movie on my remote desktop I can't hear it on my laptop. I learned how the scroll bars on the sides work, they move left or right, up or down via the mouse buttons.

Doing the remote control of another computer is fun but don't expect snappy performance unless you have a fast system and lots of memory for things to flow smoothly. Ubuntu has some built-in VNC tools, they perform with choppiness while working with graphics applications. TightVNC on the other hand is a lot smoother on my meager equipment.

Still looking at digital pens. Can't afford a new Wacom Tablet and the jittery cursor of my present tablet bothers me. I narrowed the problem to the radio communication between the pen and the tablet. If I wrap the pen in foil, I can block the signal, stop the pen from working. If I place the tablet on the laptop keyboard the jitters lessen. I like to have pen pressure control but it is not a supreme necessity. I have used CAD programs for over 20 years, none of them have pen pressure control to vary the line weight while drawing. Also many have used paint applications with a mouse for years. If I can get a pen device that functions as a mouse, writes on plain paper, that is useful. Having handwriting recognition and converting to text is extra. A couple of the pens I like have a small sonic radar that clips on your paper. It tracks the position of the pen and records the pen strokes. This is also used with some Whiteboards. The pen strokes can be turned into a graphics file and tweaked by your computer. An artist like me can have fun with this. The caveat is can I get this in Linux. Oh well!

My madness says I am used to drawing with ballpoints and felt-pens. While it is nice to have line weight control, I don't usually use it. I can get by without it. I have seen pen style mouse replacements for $30.00, you can't cry about that. On the high end is the smart pens that records your pen strokes, converts writing to text and records sound. Some smart pens that use a special digital paper are down right remarkable. Why do I use simple tools instead of top of the line geeked out, I gotta get me one of these, kinds of stuff? Because an artist can use a pencil, a pen, a brush to create his magic. If I had to learn a new contraption it could be a long time before I could bridle it and get my own art out through it.

A good picture is rock musicians. Everybody likes the air guitar, playing the real guitar though takes focused time to learn it and then practice till you can play it as if it is an air guitar. The air guitar has a mental interface with theatrical gestures and vocalizations. The real guitar requires you to strum or pluck the physical strings and work the physical fretboard. There is no air in the beginning.

So the artist in me's first consideration is to go with what I know. Then if a new thing seems worth getting into go after that in a way it doesn't smother or stifle what I am already doing. I try to do everything in Linux. The professional world of digital art and printing is hooked on XP and now Win7. I have to be open to that, but I don't have to like it. The object is to get the work done and out.

penguin in trenchcoat and dark glasses

2010-11-08T12:34:00.000-05:00

Welcome back and excuse me, I know I am more than I appear to be. If I take off my paper bag disguise there is..........another paper bag, lol!

Yes, I am still using Tightvnc and exploring what it is about. I noticed the screen resolution on my desktop is higher than my laptop. This is a viewing problem. I could change the resolution on my desktop or fiddle with a config file and change the display parameters my remote desktops can be viewed in. Using a virtual network computer is akin to having a dumb terminal and a smart server computer. My dumb terminal is not so dumb and my smart server computer can be a hub for lots of other things.

My situation is like this: My ancient laptop is limited, needs upgrading and is tethered to the power brick, good thing I still have wireless. I need to be seen about the house not held up in my upstairs geekster's lair. My powerful desktop is now shoved in a corner of the bedroom, not a good working environment. With VNC, I can load all my power applications on my desktop and operate them at the dining room table from my laptop. So my laptop is now more powerful. Imagine if you had several PCs, a printer/scanner, and other networked devices all accessible via your laptop. I heard some techies' are doing remote hardware monitoring and software testing/repair this way also. Lots of possibilities and lots of fun.

I am looking into input devices also. You know, my desktop hasn't changed in 20 years. Still a keyboard and a mouse. I've added a graphics tablet but it is not satisfactory, sorry Wacom. The digital pen came into my view. They've been around for a couple of years. There are simple mouse replacements and smart-pens, with and without tablets, with and without special paper, with scribe tips and with ballpoint tips. The software is overwhelmingly MS Windows, some Mac and covertly Linux. This software is all about capturing writing and converting it to text or just capturing a page of pen strokes (writing or drawing). Lots of possibilities here, I am investigating. That's why the trench coat and glasses, oh the penguin suits' a give away? Didn't think you'd notice.

I tell the PC truth

2010-11-06T15:12:00.001-04:00

The truth is that not all computers are personal, some are control devices.

You don't need the internet to use a computer. Some may disagree, but it is the truth. The internet is a great convenience, if you can get all your data resources on flash drives, DVDs, CDs, or your hard drive, your PC will work fine by itself, you just won't have internet. Yes that limits your resources and communication, but it's to show that a computer without the connection is still useful, just less. Back in the day we called it sneaker net, only required shoe rubber and a stack of floppies. Today both Nikes and flash drives are an upgrade.

Many folks only have painfully slow phone modems, they know what I am talking about. So wither it is the economics situation or the communications infrastructure limitation, computers can still be used. I wouldn't want to run a business on that but the computer will still compute. Many operations and activities we do on PCs do not require the internet. Some kind of access is needed though, many go to public libraries.

Here in the Linuxvlle chateau there are ah ha moments and hu mu mu mu aaah haaa ha ha ha! moments. Here is the situation. My powerful desktop PC is in the bedroom. But for the sake of the ladies in need I must be somewhat visible and accessible during the day. So I use a somewhat meager laptop on the dining room table. My graphics applications require a bit more firepower than my laptop can deliver. What to do?

VNC to the rescue. Virtual Network Computing is when one PC remotely accesses another PC to use all the abilities of that other computer. So at my meager laptop I can control my desktop PC as if I was sitting at the desktop. That laughter just came out of nowhere, I couldn't help myself.

I used an app called TightVNC, there is one for the server (my desktop) and one called xTightVNCviewer for the client (my laptop). I had to read several sources to get just how to set it up because folks have different equipment arrangments. They're description of things vary and to leave out details is human. I am told there are better VNC prgrams but that is a deeper investigation for the future.
So I am running around the house yelling "it's alive!"

living Linux with fewer gotchas

2010-10-28T12:56:00.000-04:00

Are there any downsides to living with Linux? Depends! If you are fortune enough to have Linux pre-installed it is no different than Mac or MS, point n click. But like any new country you visit you must do a little homework or your tourist status gets changed to ugly problem child with issues, attitudes, unreasonable preferences and demands, can we deport him now!?!

Homework means you read a little to get what Linux and Open Source is about. The newly acquired freedoms and liberties (copy-left or GPL) are often misinterpreted and effaced by the folks use to the other PC platform legalities (copy-right and user license agreements). Find net info or books about the applications and browse. A little knowledge goes a long way.

Now if you need help beware of support sources, Linux enthusiast are varied. Some gurus will tell you to read the manual in colorful terms. They are not representative of us all. So if you want something fixed, who you ask flavors the answer you get. Realize you are a noob, nubi, newbie, padawan learner and you are actually a new class of Linux person, the desktop user. Most experienced Linux users are more likely to be System Administrators, Network Administrators, Software Engineers or high end engineers of other sorts. Finding one with "desktop user friendliness" is a blessing. While Linux has had a desktop for many years, the support of personal computers running Linux is still a rough area.

My example is this: I just switched my ancient laptop from Ubuntu to Xubuntu. They are the same but Xubuntu is leaner, faster and a less user friendly setup. Some of the setup tools are not in Xubuntu. I had to figure out how to get sound to work. The drivers were there but the app to interogate and test the system was not there. I hit the net, searched around. I learned that applications that did the job were not called what they should be called and the recipe (repeatable results) to put it together not in one place. The applications that run in the background are called a server. So I figured you need sound chip drivers, a sound server and a controlling front-end (mixer). I didn't have to use the commandline to type in commands I didn't understand. Mostly it was checking boxes and testing if I got sound, yet. I got sound!!!! The full-bodied Ubuntu has setup and testing tools but is a little rich for my acient laptop. Xubuntu is just right, takes a little work, but works fine now.

My point is this, system admin and server folks might be dap with connecting networks but desktops are a speciality by itself. So, each desktop user should have skills to manage their own desktop or take it to a Linux desktop support person. Linux desktop support needs to be created, with mouseside manners, user empathy and application know-how. Right now the internet is very good support but you must do your homework. If there is a local Linux user group near you, you have resources, use them!

This is why the Linuxville guide chateau is in the hood. The Linux server side is well cared for, the Linux desktop side needs more support. Don't take my word for it, check out Fullcircle Magazine for Ubuntu users. http://fullcirclemagazine.org/

Living the Linux life.

2010-10-25T11:53:00.000-04:00

PC users are of several kinds, the casual user, the business user and the enthusiast.
I guess I fall under the enthusiast, because my love for computers extends beyond what they can be used for. I became a guide by virtue of hands-on experience but I am not an expert via training or ego. I make no claims of guru status though my wife will exclaim to friends a certain nerdiness and geektatude. I am compared to a hot rodder knowing enough to detail a car but not to make the show circuit and collect trophies.

I read all about computer operating systems in Byte magazine before I even had a computer. DOS and DOS front-ends were replaced by MS Windows 3.0 thru to XP. I stumbled upon Linux in a library book. LST Linux was a German distribution I almost got to work on my 286 DOS machine. I still am not a programmer, if I load it on, push the enter key and it doesn't work I'm done. I tried Slackware, at that time formatting separate partitions for each system folder was my understanding. Today I make one partition for the system and one for a memory swap area. I think one for the home or user files should be done so that upgrading is less a pain. The part many don't get is that they don't have to install it to use it. Just pop in a live-CD Linux, reboot, use it, save to flash drive, shutdown, remove CD and done, without changing your PC. Do your homework if you plan to install and/or get knowledgeable help.

Once you have a working system you don't usually go around comparing your system to others. But, because you do get to use other systems, you notice what annoys you and what sparks your praise. The system you use the most is the standard and defending that is normal. Believe me, no one is objective, bias is rampant and spin is everywhere. It's cool but, nice but, ugly but, expensive but, and cheap but. Butts are standard on users and concerning their PCs.

Linux was like a mystery to be solved. How did Linux run on equipment meant to run Microsoft? I had to pay for every Microsoft software and so-called free-ware for it was awful. Here is Linux, not great but OK, with open source free and better than any free-ware for Microsoft. The improvements over the years were steady and the cost did not go up, what is this? How can this go on and people not regard? I think because I was willing to go a little deeper into PC stuff, I got hooked. Linux lets me play with my collection of PC hardware and get stuff done too. Hot rods for show are cool but to be able to drive it like any other cars is what makes it cooler yet.

My kids visit, I don't dual boot for their sake. They have few questions or no questions about Linux. They use what's on my machines, it's not difficult or different. To me the Linux desktop is simplicity and works well. Sophistication and polish often gets in the way of efficient working. I'd rather have simplicity and polish. Linux does this, especially the Gnome and XFCE desktops, though some would say this of KDE desktop, I don't feel that way. What ever is your fav, I am sure the simplicity and polish factors are high for you.

upping the downside of dreaming

2010-10-22T11:39:00.000-04:00

Dreaming is a very useful aspect of life. Dreaming lifts you out of the mill of practical stuffs to look ahead. Smart folks will use that vision as incentive and motivation and devise a plan toward a goal or as energy to move forward toward a hoped for end.

The downside is when all you can do is dream because the practical means and or the knowledge to do it is obscured. In my case I could have been an engineer or architect had not high school been totally screwed up. I still have those dreams but I had to realize them in a different way. Life moves on rapidly and I am no longer a young man. Dreams have a molecular structure that can be re-arranged to be realized through the means at hand.

Now, let's get down to the crux. The advertisements display the glitz and the flash of a wonderful operating system called Microsoft. The latest Windows 7 can do things the previous version couldn't. The cost for a new PC and this new Win 7 is OK if you can afford it. But is stands to reason you can not get all what's advertised unless you spend the top dollar. You gotta love how technology promotes you must buy new.

Say it with me, "only my XP operating system is obsolete, my hardware is fine. My PC is older but mechanically, it still works fine."

Here's the situation, you can not buy a new PC, the support for Win XP has joined the retired ranks of Win95 and Win98. The PC you have is under powered because memory upgrades were and still are expensive. My laptop only has 512MB of memory, ooh I am doomed to use old software and old applications. Even the dust bunnies in my old PC has gray hair, err fuzz.

I am writing this blog on an antique Gateway 4026gz laptop. It has 512MB of board memory and 1ghz+ Celeron CPU. It has a wireless card, 20gig hard drive, PC card slots, USB ports, a heat problem and one missing key-cap. For the heat problem I took a small Masonite panel and glued three wedges on it so that when I set my laptop on it the fans which vent through the bottom are unobstructed. It used to heat up and cut off in 10 minutes, now it runs all day long, no problem.

And I use near the latest version of Ubuntu Linux. Just as a reminder, Linux is free in cost and in user rights (what you acquire is yours!). Then to top it off, the Open Source community has supplied every imaginable application, 99% of them also free. Now my PC use is not strained, I am not a gamer or a multi-media maverick, or a social net junkie. I blog, write emails, view videos, do digital artwork, etc. Linux does all this and I have the latest versions of all I use. I can't and don't do it all, who can?

My dreaming down side of not being able to acquire the latest and greatest PCs with all the so-called professional applications, has been met with Linux and Open Source software. My dream has been fulfilled at quite a high level, with the stuff I already have. If and when I do get "mo-betta" hardware, I will put Linux on it because I am into Linux.

Now when you come into Linuxville it takes a while to get over the surprises. The oohs and aahs are normal, but the big event is when you finally relax into a blissful Linux wonder. The collective sigh is felt throughout Linuxville.

....buzz, chirp, psssssst! What's an iCar?

2010-10-18T12:01:00.001-04:00

America, land of the mono-cultured everything is going back to the roots that the Asian folks never left. Business wise we have individual companies that have tightly focused on narrow product lines, where as the Asians have industrial conglomerates. So under one brand-name you will find electronics, appliances and autos. Here in the American mono style we merge and absorb then consolidate and downsize for efficiency, er a profit. The Asians gather companies under an umbrella brand-name and each industry concentrates on it own product with the caveat of sharing production ideas, technology cross-overs and innovations, bypassing the legal constraints and copyright and patent restrictions of individual companies. It's just an impression folks, but mono has plagued America from the industrial revolution till today.

Look at farming. Because farming is what it is we have fast food eateries, pre-processed foods and canned goods out the kazoo, all laced with sugars, starches, salts and dyes, on top of pesticides, fertilizers and preservatives. Now ask yourselves why the medical "industry" is an industry. We save time and shorten our lives at the same time. It is also why you need a big honking grid sucking refrigerator to store and preserve. Thinking out loud we should have one refrigeration unit in a house that will chill the house and the food too.

Back to the food, if food was grown local, consumed local, though you would go to market more often, you would need less storage. Oh, did I just turn big city living into a small town life. We have hurried lives and we rest in front of the TV. Going to the market every other day is........oh wait, there is so and so, haven't seen him since he sold his big screen TV. He looks good, healthy, rested. Oh and by the way, cooking is not a lost art, stop watching it on TV and cook your own grub. Where's the book on low powered cooking? and does microwave cooking really alter the molecular structure of foods so that they are less healthy?

Somebody should write an illustrated book about low powered lighting, how to do it with style, get enough of it and how to energize it with local solar and wind (vertical wind turbines are less intrusive), with special emphasis on city dwelling. You can do it in RVs and space stations but not in a typical city house. I would call this a hybrid power thing. Take lights off the grid and use that power to fuel your big honking refrigerator, air conditioner, washer and dryer and for backup. Gee!, you don't need to cover the whole roof with solar after all. This kicks starts a domestic industry by getting some green product on every house and sold by Lowes and Home Depot etc. The deep cycle battery business will be off the hook and people will be off the grid (at least for lighting).

Every laptop I have worked on had a memory card reader slot and a PC card slot. Instead of loading the operating system onto the hard drive, it can be burnt onto a memory card or solid state device for the PC card slot. The PC would be generic until the operating system card is plugged in. The applications and user files would be in separate partitions on the hard drive. Or you put two card slots in a laptop, and a bios app lets you single/dual boot or run one OS as a virtual machine within the other OS.

Oh wait, there is a disturbance in the force, you are calling me nuts. Just like Sith lords, there's one or two.

the crystal baldhead guy speaks

2010-10-16T16:27:00.000-04:00

Technology converges always. It started with a four function calculator and will end with a universal controller someone will retro into a four function calculator case.

I think it is crazy no matter which device you use, cell phone, PDA, tablet, netbook, notebook, desktop, TV, it will all look and work the same and display the same media, the same information.....buzz, chirp, pssssst! gone fuzzy again. Difficult to see the future is (Yoda!). What's an iCar?

If you want a personal computer ditch the ethernet cable and pull the wireless card. There will be the same warning label you find on your mattress on your PC, warning you not to disconnect from the "net". You will get a cellphone call, Mr. Johnson we noticed you are no longer connected to the net, is this intentional or is there a personal emergency, do you need tech assistance, we can send someone to re-connect you. And yes there is a charge for both disconnect and reconnect processing.

Mr. Johnson your new pacemaker has built-in defibrillation. We can monitor your stats and give you a jump when needed. OnStar is always here for you, please keep your account current.

Criminals have all their electronics removed. The ankle bracelets are no longer needed because lawful people are connected and tracked. Lawbreakers have to use word of mouth and barter. We sentence you to 30 days in the natural state.

Buses are obsolete, someone found a way to link Segways together for family outings and carpooling. College kids form largest linked Segway ring, ride in a circle for 10 days non-stop. Amish invent peddle powered Segway gets hit by folks driving regular Segways. The hottest new venue in sports, the Segway races at Bonniville Salt Flats. Featuring the "Loaded Pedestrian" 100 mph tire burning turbo powered Segway.

The typewriter keyboard refuses to go away in spite of the new voice input software. The OS is burned into a solid state device, plugged into any PC and just works. A laptop is just a keyboard and large screen for your PDA device. A Steampunk cult brings back the 8 track and the word "icon" is replaced by "avatar". And remember here in Linuxville, tomorrow is only a day away!

Boom out the box, not flash-boom

2010-10-05T14:57:00.000-04:00

Boom means you get basic functions for basic hardware. It's the middle of the road, high and dry and useful. You usually get internet access if you have a service or DSL like I do. You get applications like a web browser, music player, picture viewer, document writer or the Open Office suite and the GIMP (picture editor). So you have to see what's included. Of course if you install it, you have access to a very large online catalog of applications, so you can add and remove to your hearts content.

Flash-boom depends on the hardware you got. You must have enough system memory or the flash will slow down the boom. I have 512MB in my laptop. I can flash ok but the boom suffers a lot. 1 or 2 gig of system memory allows lots of flash and lots of boom. The next thing is the video chips. Usually ATX desktops don't have a problem as you can swap in a new video card at will. Laptops have to deal with what they have. In any case if there are enhanced video drivers for your chip set, you are prompted to install them. The better drivers allow the flash to be big.

The next part of the flash is selecting the configuration to make the pyrotechnics work. In Linux this is called compositing. Compositing has come a long way. You can get windows that wobble when you move then, windows on a spinning cube, all kinds of fade effects, and combinations of eyecandy that will rot your retinas. I have turned them off on my laptop so it remains snappy. On my desktop I kept just the drop shadows for that 3D look.

Other add-on features are icon bars that rival Apple's Mac and side panels that mimic dashboards. Some features are only available on certain Linux desktops. The Gnome desktop is one way and KDE is another and XFCE (on my laptop) is another. They are mostly the same but have different user strategies, different styles, different looks and different features. Same but different.

It all sounds hard to do but that's because most don't know this stuff until they've messed with it a little while. So find a Linux user group, Linux savvy PC shop, or something already! There are lots of advice givers on the net, forums, videos and such and me. I'm no expert, just a humble guide with some experience. My forte is the desktop not servers. I think the Linux desktop needs more support so that users have help on their own level. I hope you find Linux of any flavor a restful retreat and a reprieve from the other setups.

Hey, where'd he go??

2010-10-02T16:27:00.000-04:00

It's October and I haven't posted in over a month. Been doing some non-computer stuff, interrogating the Holy Bible and looking into Black history. I plan to keep the focus on Linux and on digital art, but the background world view has changed a lot in the past few weeks.

During all this time I have had neither glitch, hiccup, crash, or shut-down. I did build a platform with small wooden wedges to lift the back edge of my laptop off the table. Now I can run it all day without overheating and I run it each and every day.

On October 10th a new Ubuntu, version 10.10 will be out. You can't get it in stores, but if you go to the www.Ubuntu.com web site it will be there for download or you can buy a CD, I think for the cost of shipping. I usually just download it. There are versions for server, desktop/laptop and netbook, 32 bit, 64 bit, etc.

There are several ways to use Linux. The live-CD is very cool as it runs directly off the CD without installing. When you remove the live-CD your computer is unchanged. What ever applications are on the CD can be used by you and you can save your work to a jump drive. You can install while running the live-CD or not. You choose to make a hard drive partition or use the whole hard drive. If you want to run both MS Windows and Linux, a program called Grub gives you a menu to choose at boot.

If you have MS Windows running when you put in the Ubuntu Linux CD a program called Wabi will let you install Ubuntu in a MS Windows folder so that it runs sort of like a Windows application. I call this a pseudo virtual machine.

For me if you want both MS Windows and Linux on the same machine, dual booting is best. That way the two different operating systems are separate, not needing extra resources. Be sure you install MS Windows first to minimise booting problems. You can select the default OS in the Grub OS selector afterwards.

Another option is virtual machines. You can run Linux as a virtual machine on a MS Windows system and vice-versa. VirtualBox is my favorite application for this. There is a MS version and a Linux version. Virtual machines is about sharing resources, so running two OSs needs more memory and some hard disk space.

The last option is called Wine. Wine is a MS Windows compatibility layer which runs in Linux. Wine lets you, within limits, run MS Windows software on a Linux system. I can't run Photoshop Professional, but my Photoshop Lite runs fine. Can't tell you if MS Office will run, I use Open Office. But a special configuration of Wine called Crossover Office seems to handle MS Office products. I don't have experience with this.

The most cool thing is that you can slide the Linux live-CD into any MS compatible system, reboot and try out Linux. I recommend Ubuntu. If you have it installed or install it yourself, you gain access to the online repository of free installable applications. Some versions of Linux have live-DVDs so that the large selection of installable software is on the DVD. With my DSL internet it takes 1 hour to download the CD and 3 hours for the DVD. Once you have it, you own it, you can install it on as many machines as you want. You can copy it and give it to friends.
Now I will warn you, Linux is not as flashy as some like. This is so that it appeals to a broader swath of users and works on a broader swath of hardware configurations. You can tweak it up or dumb it down, that is what makes it what it is. So that's boom out the box but not flash-boom. You can add flash later.