I’m really happy to see the old abuse of the IPO
editor for shape keys gone. The new shape buttons are
really nice and easy to understand.

Here’s comes the cool app of the day – Audio Tag Tool.

If you ever stumbled upon having issues with capitalization of id3 tags,
needed to do filename conversion or changing the genre of an album, you may not
have been completely happy with what Rhythmbox or Banshee provides.
This little gtk+ app will provide a lot of this corner case functionality with
a not-so-crackrock interface.

Packaged in debian as tagtool.

… and I‘ll feed your jukebox with music
you’re very likely to enjoy. I’ve been told about audioscrobbler quite a while ago, but never
realised how great the thing is.

You can just download the binary player and search for an artist you like
and run the jukebox, blacklisting stuff you don’t like, but it’s much nicer to
get some of the player plugins and feed it with your diverse listening
habbits. I am surprised StevieJ doesn’t have that in the iTunes Music Store
already.

Some weirdo people even listen to this weird junk .

• My profile page
• Various player plugins.

Certain things in life make you realise we’re all getting old. Things like
pspupdates needing a whole paragraph
describing to today’s gamers what a ZX Spectrum is, before pointing to an
emulator for the PSP (almost 95% the speed of the z80, amazing!).

Matt Ebb has done a magnificent job at
redesigning the project Orange
website. Well done, Matt.

The project aims to create an animated short while using and extending the
free software 3d animation and modelling tool, Blender. Similar to the tool itself, it is being created in an open
manner, cooperating with external contributors while keeping a devoted
blender-artist-dreamteam in house. All project files will be released along with the
film under the Creative Commons license.

How’s that for user testing? Even if it’s too early to predict, I believe
there can’t be a better way for developers to ensure a software package is
really being the best tool for the job than cooperating so closely with the
artists as it is in this case.

Too bad this year’s Blender
Conference kinda clashes with the Boston Summit. I’m affraid I’ll
have to miss out. Was great fun metting most of the dream team last
year. Best of luck, guys!

Not long ago I have shown you how not to do a usable wallpaper. Well maybe it also makes sense to give a few tips on how to create a wallpaper that is usable and doesn’t get in your daily desktop usage.

The desktop is a highly exposed, fairly large area. Just like a work desk, people tend to personalize it. Apart from stuffing incredible amount of useless junk on the desk to be “within hand reach”, people put family or personal photo frames on their desk. Similar thing happens on the desktop. In GNOME, files from the web are downloaded there by default, most used application launchers are placed on the desktop and people tend to customize the wallpaper image as the first thing they do on a desktop.

Photos

In majority of cases, users will place a child or a partner photo on the background. As for computer geeks, nekkid chick does the job. If everybody changes the default to a photo, does that mean a desktop should ship with a photo by default? Hardly. The reason why people change their wallpaper is to make them comfortable; to feel “at home”. Using a photograph has major usability implications though.

• A typical photograph has enough contrast to make the items on your desktop lose the visual dominance. Finding an item such as the recently downloaded file or an application launcher becomes harder.
• Putting a photo of your loved one will seriously lower your effectivness as you will not want to cover his/her face with an application window! (Just kidding in this case .

So for a default wallpaper do we want to rule out photography as a whole? Not necessarily. Especially in the field of macro or abstract photography, you can find a plentitude of great wallpaper material. My fellow artist at Novell, Garrett LeSage, has a tremendous library of photographs, many of which are perfectly suited to be a usable desktop wallpaper. The attributes to look for are lower depth of field and homogenous, out-of-focus spaces.

Photography © Garrett LeSage

A photo is also a great asset to be edited furter to become a great wallpaper. Using various blur and overlay techniques, a photo that isn’t very usable as a wallpaper on its own can become a base for a highly usable wallpaper.

Generated Images

From the usability point of view, a solid flat color background is perfect. It is also pretty dull. Decent desktop environments allow to create a gradient instead of a flat color area. This works for some, but still bores most people I’ve had a chance to observe.

Handy Techniques

So what can can we create to spice up the desktop without hindering usability? Here’s a couple of techniques you may find useful in the process of creating a usable wallpaper. But first, let’s keep in mind what makes a wallpaper usable in the first place:

• Homogenous Spaces. – try avoiding covering large areas with high contrast artwork.
• Obstructed Areas. – when deploying elements such as logos or embeded photos, make sure you take obstructed areas into consideration. This depends on the desktop environment, but usually the top and bottom areas are occupied by a panel. All sides are very likely to be used for placing launchers and other items. The rule of thumb is that if at all, use
  the center of the screen for a logo.
• Testing. – Never forget to test your wallpaper. It may look just fab when you press F11 to view it
  fullscreen in GIMP, but keep in mind you will have the desktop items and the panels and everything overlaid. So you want to apply the newly created image and check out your desktop.

  Since the process usually takes a number of iterations, it may be more practical to create an overlay of your desktop items
  as a layer in GIMP to toggle when previewing fullscreen. To do this, apply some unlikely color to have on your desktop, such as pink as your background. Incidently this can be done by draging a color from the gimp palette or other color widget onto the desktop Take a screenshot of your desktop and use color to alpha filter to get rid of the pink areas. Now you can use this image as a layer overlay on your actuall wallpaper.

Solid Noise

Solid noise is in my opinion the mother of all abstract wallpapers. Without much work you can achieve a nice wavy texture to defeat the empty canvas syndrome and let the experimentation begin. Here’s a sample session to inspire your own experimenation:

Selective Gaussian Blur

While not too much of a problem on a photograph, having CCD noise on a desktop wallpaper is extremely annoying. This magical GIMP filter is a great help to get rid of the noise. Read my earlier entry for more pointers on how to use it.

Watermarking

One feature of the gnome desktop with regard to wallpapers that isn’t widely used is the possibility to use semi-opaque RGBA “watermarks” on top of the flat color or gradient. This allows the user to keep the texture from the wallpaper bitmap while customizing the color or preference. Also useful for creating a watermark logo tile.

This hilarious short
reminds me of my early stumblings with “undo’s for weaklings” blender.

Today’s Inkscape tip comes directly from the maister chief Bulia – to
add nodes to your path, select a node or a few and press Shift+D to duplicate them
in a similar manner you can duplicate objects with Ctrl+D.

My Airport base station suddenly started dropping signal for a few minutes. The first one I got had issues with the ethernet, but managed to die before the warranty expired.

So after a tip from a friend I went for the Asus
500g. With a custom
firmware (the thing is Linux based, surprise, surprise) you can do all
sorts of funky stuff with the device.

• Attach a USB drive and share it through FTP, NFS or Samba. Nice combination with something like the iaudio.
• Attach a webcam (my ov511 based creative cam worked fine, b/w with the default and color with the upgraded firmware. It can even do motion detection and e-mail you a picture of your cat peeing on the keyboard.
• USB printer server
• Apart from a zillion bridging functions it can also do traffic shaping, yay.

(updated): Oh and they respect the GPL and clearly benefit
from the added 3rd party functionality. Way to go Asus Way to go Harald Welte.

The only downside is that you will end up wasting quite some time tweaking the thing. Also it lacks a bit in the aesthetics department compared to the old airbase.