Working with complex objects is easy in Inkscape due to the cocept of groups and layers (that makes it a far better candidate to do UI mockups than GIMP btw).

Inkscape provides means to select objects overlaid on top of each other with Alt+Click, but also allows you to press Tab to cycle objects in the DOM tree. When you have groups, things get tricky as you need to add Ctrl to the game and you’re on your way to sore fingers.

Thus today’s tip — you can actually ‘enter a group’ by selecting it and pressing Ctrl+Enter (or double clicking). Now it appears as if you just unselected the group, but from now on you can normally select individual objects in the group using the regular methods, until you press Ctrl+Backspace or select an object outside the group.

Update: I mixed up Ctrl and Alt, corrected. Thanks Bulia.

While I can’t disagree with reasoning why this is bad, I also find it kinda neat that Apple did that in a world full of fake political correctness.

Graphic on the left © Apple, Inc. Inappropriate use of the Windows logo on the right, me.

Having a bluescreen is actually just as recognizable as using the windows logo, which they likely can’t use due to trademark (just like us). The association is just as strong, the metaphor works (Well, if it was the CIFS protocol that was the important bit and not the fact it’s a remote share). BSOD *is* Windows, just like bucket of mayo and a few chips is Belgium even if there’s plenty of countries that consume more of each.

No matter I did the research and found the Star SP512 receipt printer to have cups support, I can’t get it to work. Simple echo "hello world" > /dev/ttyS0" is nifty, but I’d like to be able to use more sophisticated apps .

If anybody reading this blog has experience with it and can help making the provided cups driver (particularly the PPD) actually work on a recent distro (/var/log/cups/error_log is silent, gnome-cups-manager says “** (gnome-printer-view:31912): WARNING **: model named 'Star SP500 Tear Bar' doesn't have a recognized structure” I would appreciate it.

I have a weird feeling I released this, but couldn’t find it, so here goes. While looking for some assets in my library I found this fairly unusable and totally bling wallpaper that the openSUSE community may find interesting.

Enjoy, comment.

Zdravim vsechny sve virtualni pratele. Duvodem ze ode dneska budu mit v ICQ status offline je nasledujici:

ICQ transporty nÄ›kter??m (je jich hodnÄ›) u??ivatel??m ukazuj?­ v??echny ICQ kontakty jako Offline. SpoleÄ?nost AOL zmÄ›nila protokol a od?™?­zla v??echny klienty protokolu ICQ2000, v??echny kontakty teÄ? mus?­ b??t v serverov?©m kontakt listu ICQ a mus?­ b??t autorizov??ny obÄ›ma stranami. Pokud v??s tento probl?©m postihl, nezb??v?? ne?? doporuÄ?it pou??it?­ multiklienta jako je Pidgin, Miranda, Kopete (pouze unixy) nebo QiP Infium Beta, kter?© um?­ nativnÄ› jak Jabber tak ICQ. Dal???­ (ale v mnoha p?™?­padech nemo??nou) mo??nost?­ je p?™ev?©st va??e zn??m?© na Jabber, a?? u?? k n??m nebo na libovoln?? jin?? ve?™ejn?? Jabber server.

Najdete me bud na jabber.cz nebo google talk (gmail.com).

It’s here! The awesome GIMP 2.4 has been released today. We’ve cleaned up the gimp.org website at the same time, so you can enjoy slightly more posh release notes. The whole site is themed with the Wilber balloon designed by the awesome Paul Davey for the 2.4 splash screen. We need more superstars like that .

2.4 has brought many of the long awaited functions and polish to the interface. To me, the fullscreen workflow I demoed at GUADEC (even though Compiz and X tried really hard to prevent that) is what makes GIMP a joy to use for my photo editing (leaving the library management to F-Spot of course).

The selection tools have been redesigned from scratch and I must say they’ve grown on me and I love it. While I’m sure the slashdot crowd will end up discussing the lack of GEGL integration, I’m excited to see UI design being core part of a free software project. Making the most common task of adjusting/perfecting a selection is a breeze now, and the super-confusing ‘shift key before a click’ or ‘shift key after click’ is gone. Rounding a rectangular selection has also been more difficult than it should in the past so it’s directly a part of the rectangular select now.

So thanks to everyone involved in the development, release and the website redesign! It’s still fun even though some individuals rather hard to make it not so.

P.S.: There’s a tribute to the best splash artwork ever created on the new website, start lookin’

I have found myself not liking the default grid snapping behavior of recent Inkscape builds. When you have objects with a stroke, the stroke isn’t considered in the snapping, so for a 1px stroke, you’d get exactly the opposite what you might need. Inkscape would snap to the middle of the stroke, leaving your outline fuzzy.

The reason for this is the that node snapping is enabled. What you need is object bounding box snapping. Good bye fuzziness.