a bit about Free software, a bit about graphics, a bit about design, a bit about photography, a bit about gadgets, a bit about life and many more
I hoped I left printing and wasting paper behind me long ago, but here the COVID quarantine and online school (my daughter is first grade) forced me to buy a printer. A bit of market research for a home printer pointed me to Brother HL-1222WE , the main pros were: relatively cheap price for a laser printer with wireless connectivity; cheap consumables, replacement toner cartridges are available…
For the Valentine's Day, a thematic selection from my pictures at the on-going protests in Bucharest (the events are covered more in-depth in my photography blog ) For the curious, the images are processed with darktable, GIMP and now PhotoCollage. PS: It looks like a bunch of other Linux geeks were there
Honestly, nothing from the features in the announcement of the Fedora 24 release didn't manage to excite me intro upgrading my desktop from an old, out-of-support Fedora. It's main task is to edit digital photography and for some years a Linux solution is decent at it. Still, the devil is in the details! I wanted to switch to the (relatively) recent 2.x release of darktable and maybe play a bit…
For the foreseeable future I do not intend to return as an organizer for Wiki Loves Monuments, five years of working on the Romanian edition is enough for a person, the time has come for new blood and new enthusiasm. Myself I am burned enough. And, arguably, any community project has to attract new contributors, if not perhaps it lived its life. Note: I won't be totally out of the picture, if…
I want to congratulate the people behind GIMP on the 20th anniversary since the initial announcement of the project, they came a long way. Myself, I switched to it as my primarily image editor long ago, can't point the date precisely but it was around 12 years ago, back in the GIMP 1.x days, when it's UI was... less than optimal, to say the least. Then I went to use it more and more, even write…
For the last couple of years I didn't manage to attend myself the Linux Install Fest traditionally organized by ROSEdu at Politehnica University of Bucharest, which is a shame, since there is a lot of cool stuff going on. But such is life, there are so many things to do and so little time left... However, I learned a bit from watching the graphs from the official website and the pretty pictures…
Not long ago, there was a talk about how people deal with their photos: organize, edit, archive and such, and I gave then a partial answer. Why partial? Because I follow two slightly different processes, one when the photos are made for fun and the other when they are for work . Since that answer was partial and made behind a walled garden, I feel the need to expand it in a public piece. I don't…
I know that after the calendar the sun is over, but looking outside, it looks and feels like the middle of the summer. And the truth is, for the last month I was all the time on the road, so even if the pictures are taken a while ago, only now I got the opportunity to edit them as desktop wallpapers for a blog post. If you like any of them, feel free to use (CC-BY-SA).
It's been a while since my last post here with free (as in CC-BY-SA) " wallpaper -ized" photos and I am not sure anyone missed them, but the hell, it's summer and I have a few appropriate images, let's share them.
By Ruy Carvalho (Own work) CC BY-SA, via Wikimedia Commons This year I was invited once more to be a jury member for the Brazilian Wiki Loves Earth photo competition (thanks Rodrigo!) and it was a pleasure to witness so many wonderful images (yes, I am a bit jealous for my recent inactivity in travel/landscape photography). Taking a look at their top 10 winners anyone would probably agree this is…
Let's assume one is a "normal" Firefox user, so based on Windows and with no knowledge about using directly the mirrors (or without intimate knowledge of obscure acronyms). And let's assume the same person wants a FREE web browser, one with no binary blobs, with source available and not blocking the content from its user . The challenge is, going from the Firefox start page , find a way to…
A few years ago I used to regularly publish videos, so back then I started with an evaluation of FOSS video editors available for Fedora. At the time I decided the "winner" to be Kdenlive (at the time PiTiVi was useless, OpenShot unavailable and Blender unknown for its video editing capabilities), despite all the drawbacks of its KDE interface and sudden crashes. Fast-forward, about a year ago, I…
A while ago, a set of misty wallpapers proved to be quite appreciated. Fast forward a year and some more, after another misty morning, here's a new set of free pictures ready to be used as walllpapers .
Step 1: with bad design decisions one after another (Australis is a shining example of that) slide yourself into irrelevance; Step 2: when market share goes below some threshold, the main sponsor diminishes (or suspend?) payments; Step 3: in retaliation, hurt the users by forcing om them a sub-par alternative as a default; Step 4: profit bleed even more angry users and go even faster into…
Organizing Wiki Loves Monuments in Romania this year was the hardest so far. Why so? We had a bigger budget, which allowed us to be more ambitious, so on top of the free photography contest for Wikipedia we had to manage a photo exhibition, a 2 day field trip, an additional contest for juniors, a team of volunteering interns and more. But it was rewarding, the results are notable: over 8200…
Usually pictures including people does not make for good desktop wallpaper, one exception is images of your beloved one, which do not make sense to share, and another exception is images of scantily clad celebrities, which is some circles may be popular but in others are highly controversial. But as a photographer I prefer to take photos with people, those pictures have more soul. Still, how such…
I was away for the week-end, so I continue clearing the summer wallpapers queue after a small gap (initially planned the climax for the Sunday). Hope you will enjoy them, no matter the timing.
As anticipated , today my free wallpaper series is completed with yet another part from this summer backlog (good new for those uninterested: two more parts and I will stop for a good while). Now is about birds flying above the sea and in front of a rising sun. Quite a lot of empty space to host desktop icons.
I'm not sure why I liked to call those images "post-industrial" when the cranes in the background are from a large and very active naval yard, still I think they are a worthy addition to the series (and free, of course, as in CC-BY-SA).
As hinted the other day , there are more posts in the queue for my free wallpaper series . Today we are going to the beach! ...and if I wouldn't be so used with the one I keep using for a few years, I could see myself going with the first.
Now, when the summer is over, I look back and notice quite a lot of summer-ish pictures which people may want to use as desktop wallpapers. Damn! my last post in the free wallpaper series was in the winter ! My backlog of picture is considerable, so there may be 3-4 more similar posts to follow if I feel there is interest.
I am a bit late writing about this here, but on September 1st a new edition of the Wiki Loves Monuments photography contest started globally, with 34 countries registered to participate. It is happening in Romania too, for the 4th time (I am again part of the team) and for us the start is promising so far: in the mid of the 3rd day we are well past the 1k images mark, something which happened much…
I was invited to be a member in the jury for the Wiki Loves Earth 2014 photography contest in Brasil and I joined gladly: it was both a honor and an opportunity to see some places which otherwise I don't expect to see any time soon. Also it was an opportunity to share from my experience with 3 editions already of the similar Wiki Loves Monuments in Romania . Now, as the Brasilian contest has…
Recently I took a very colorful and quite abstract picture, which I thought would make for an interesting 'pop art' effect. The process is really basic and obvious, but I decided to share it for anyone who want to learn a quickie. So, I opened the image with GIMP . Since I want the final collage as a 4x4 composition, increase the Canvas Size to 200% on both directions. Then Duplicate the image…
Probably everybody already heard there is a new Firefox release and it changes many things and already has an opinion about it. Unfortunately I don't have the audience to gather a significant sample, but if anyone runs such a poll, I would be genuinely interested. Which Firefox user interface do you prefer? Firefox 29 (the latest, just released) Firefox 4-28 (still on long term support) Firefox…