Many times on this site, I have railed against online "hacktivists." Quite a few people have been critical of me for doing it, claiming that I must be a mean old Grinch who hates freedom-fighting and justice. So when we finally see a hacktivist group in the harsh light of day, without being shrouded in cyberpunk romanticism, it just makes me smile all the sweeter.
Four British members of LULZsec have begun serving relatively light sentences for various cyber-vandal crimes. Far from the Robin Hoods that websites like Boing Boing, Reddit, and 4chan like to characterize them as, they are revealed to be the same breed of petty thugs that steal your hubcaps and set fire to your trash cans.
Now for the fun part: The defense's pleas for the LULZsec members paints a picture that perfectly matches the way I imagined them:
Kids.
Claiming every psychological disease in the book, all the time.
Oh, and also mommy and daddy didn't love them enough.
Socially isolated.
No clear idea or goal. Waffling between "let's have some fun dude!" and "I'm Batman!"
Ignorant.
Arrogant in their ignorance.
Of course, the troll legion (who has my site on speed-dial) will insist that because I'm anti-LULZsec, I must be pro-Westboro-Baptist-Church (one of their targets) forgetting that I can dislike both equally. Two trolls do not make a citizen. Ditto Sony, a company I will always condemn. I condemned the presidency of GWB too, but you'll notice I didn't get arrested for committing any crimes against him.
I will say it again: Hacktivism HURTS THE CAUSES IT PROPOSES TO HELP. Now that LULZsec has gotten themselves busted like a meth lab, they have given credibility and honor to their targets. WBC and Sony can now point to themselves as victims, leveraging this case for the further abuses of the legal system they have in mind.
I can't believe this hasn't been solved somewhere before, but I was converting a .gif to individual image frames for a project when I discovered this behavior.
UPDATE: Guess what??? image magick CAN output zero-padded files, just by doing:
% > convert mygif.gif mygif_%05d.jpg
no wonder I couldn't find it by Googling. I was looking for an option switch. But you'd still need to find out how many zero-spaces to use for individual gifs for each case. My thing is, I hate remembering fifty commands when I can name a script after what I want it to do and forget about it.
We now return you to my folly, which you can still adapt for programs which don't zero-pad:
That's because not all programs that are going to handle these image frames know to ignore Bash-file-sorting order and substitute logical numeric file-sorting.
And I'm searching all over the place, but there doesn't seem to be an option in convert to force this file-naming convention, or else I'm not searching for it right. Anyway, this script whacks the file names into shape:
#!/bin/bash
#
# Apparently when you call image magick to convert gif to jpg
# it doesn't use zero-indexing to ensure the files list
# in order for each program.
#
# So... ouch!
#
for FILE in $(ls *.gif)
do
DIGITS=$(identify $FILE | wc -l | wc -c)
convert $FILE ${FILE%gif}jpg
for JFILE in $(ls *.jpg)
do
NUM=$(echo $JFILE | cut -d- -f2 | cut -d. -f1)
PSTRING="%0"$DIGITS"d"
NEWNUM=$(printf $PSTRING $NUM)
SEDLINE="s/-.*\./-"$NEWNUM"\./g"
mv $JFILE $(echo $JFILE | sed $SEDLINE)
done
done
exit 0
You'll note the convoluted series of variable abuse. That's because of the various quirks of the individual text-mode tools.
First, $DIGITS finds out how many zeros to index for the file names. Since you want this to work on any gif with any number of frames, we have to use Image Magick's identify command on the gif, pipe it through wc -l to count the frames, then use wc -c to find out how many digits that number is. As you can see, we end up with one superfluous zero here, but the hell with it at this point, it does the job.
I also have to extract the number from the file name, and drop it into the $NUM variable.
In a perfect world, I could just expect to say something like:
Second, sed won't take a mixed variable string like "s/$PATTERN1/$PATTERN2/g". So you have to put the sed argument in a variable.
But we're zero-indexing here, and the only tool I know of to do that is printf, and guess what? printf also won't take Bash variables in its argument string! So now you have to make $PSTRING to build the argument to printf so you can make $SEDSTRING to build the argument to sed...
So, is that done now? I'm crazy for doing it this way, aren't I?
It does work. If you use it, be sure to use it in its' own special little directory so it doesn't wantonly mess with other unrelated files...
A couple posts ago, I cooed with joy over discovering Seq24. And last post, I pointed out SFXR (now in twilight development status) for producing simple low-fi sound effects. Now here is an app which is pretty capable at most of what SFXR does, and works as a Seq24 plugin as well.
amsynth is a cool little synthesizer desktop app all by itself. It can also be used, like Hexter, Wsynth, and xsynth, as a DSSI plugin for Seq24 modules - just start a copy of each, and set one (or more) loops to amsynth's output. And it looks cool doing it.
While AMSynth (which I've just decided to capitalize that way because it looks righter) doesn't have a full orchestra of instruments at your disposal like Hexter.so does, it is far easier to customize. To make your own instrument, just select 'new preset' from the preset menu, hit 'Ctrl-R' a few times and audition each result to hear the random sound, and stop when you find a sound close to what you want, then tweak the knobs on it (by clicking with the mouse and dragging up or down) to get it how you want it, then name it with 'rename preset' in the presets menu again, and finally click 'save' right next to the presets dropdown menu. You'll now find your new preset in the menu, and it will reload each time you start AMSynth. So this way you can build up your own personal library of sound effects.
It's also easy to copy / paste and edit presets from the plain text file. Open ".amSynth.presets" in your home directory; there's the list of all available sounds, including the ones you save. Easy to copy and share! You'll also notice that at the bottom, AMSynth seems to save a lot of 'new preset' instances, which you might want to delete here as they don't show up in the menu anyway.
As seems to be par for the course for FOSS audio engineering software, documentation is minimal to none, the project appears abandoned, and is barely a fuzzy rumor at best. Even the man page is a place-holder. The closest thing to developer-provided docs is in /usr/share/doc/amsynth/README, and that's 80 terse lines of bare clues.
Update: Whoa, nelly, the AMSynth team dropped by the comments to let us know they're live 'n' kicking, and there's going to be a 1.4 release with over 1000 sounds! Also drops this link, with demos you have to check out.
I've also discovered that AMSynth will export directly to .wav file, for just making sound effects and music accents like you would in SFXR. Nifty side feature.
Here's that 'night frogs' preset in action as part of this cruddy little attempt at an ambient noise track:
Once again, be advised that I don't know music composition from my arse from my elbow. But if you find these useful, Creative Commons for your next game, video, or whatnot. And once again, I'm doing this not to pursue a career as a musician, but just so that when I need audio for future projects, I don't want to have to live in terror of the RIAA mafia for the rest of my life. Just five minutes of fidgeting produces my own track to do with what I please, and all those scary copyright phantoms just disappear in a puff of smoke. That's a good feeling.
By the by, here's the Wikipedia entry on synthesizers, which has some explanation of the sound audio jargon you wade into using programs like AMSynth. And here's further resources at the Linux musician's Wiki, hurray, they exist!
SFXR was once one of the coolest little sound toys out there. It generates retro 8-bit sound effects - at random, with a bunch of sliders and buttons to play with. If you're familiar with my last post exploring MIDI music production (and the techno-flavored files I was producing) you'll see where this is going: Adding old-skool lo-fi sound effects to music tracks, quite probably using Audacity to monkey around with them.
Except SFXR doesn't seem to be up to speed with modern desktops. Pepperidge Farm remembers when you could just install a Debian package. No longer!
The original developer offers a round of package options - there's a .deb package (won't install, only for AMD64s), a source code tarball (which won't compile unless you have GTK+2.0, which has gone the way of the dinosaur), and a Windows executable - which sometimes works and sometimes crashes along with a side order of Cream of Stack Puke.
With sound apps, I'm right in the cargo cult. Sacrifice goat, please volcano god, don't ask questions.
And here's a little gallery of other sound effects I've managed to squeeze out of SFXR over the years, which I'm giving away as Creative Commons door prizes:
The idea here is that you can import them into Audacity and tinker with them there, use them for sound effects in your next video game or animation, or... use them as a preset for DSSI synth plug-ins? Maybe I'll figure that out next.
Oh, by the way, I'm starting a new category here at the ol' home blog for multimedia, because it's about time I dug into this little-documented area of desktop Linux.
This post will, eventually, be about composing original MIDI music on the Linux desktop using the funnest, easiest toy for this purpose. However, we've got three disclaimers to get out of the way first:
Disclaimer #1 Setting up audio-studio software on your desktop will be the most frustrating, aggravating, hair-pulling experience of your life. No, really, even programming or designing 3D animated graphics or grokking Middle Eastern politics pales in comparison to setting up audio-studio software on a desktop. Don't look for logical reasons for anything. Just accept that random crashes, horrible default settings, blatantly anti-user behavior, invisible documentation, and gremlins are now a part of your life if you want to compose audio on the desktop. Take it for granted that every audio program is designed with maximum sadism in mind. Just flash back to your Windows days and reboot compulsively.
Disclaimer #2 Audio work by its nature is complicated beyond mere mortal comprehension. Sound engineers speak in sound-engineer-ese, and - not being subjected to the same egalitarian pressure that computer geeks are - have not the slightest interest in breaking down the jargon for common people. They love plugging things into other things, for the sake of plugging things in. Check the stage floor at your next concert; the entire surface is carpeted in thick black cables, a safety hazard that would be intolerable in your server room. Show a sound engineer a stove, and their first reaction will be "Why have the knobs, oven, ranges, and clock all together in one handy unit when you could split all those up into separate boxes and connect them all with cables?" This mentality extends to sound engineering software - there are no sound engineering programs. There are families of sound engineering programs, and they all have to run together like a litter of kittens.
Disclaimer #3 I'm going to present here audio files which I, myself, have created. I have no musical talent. I have no musical training. I have only a smidgen of musical knowledge, and that all comes from writing about music all these years at places like Lyric Interpretations. Bottom line, listen to the MP3 files at risk to what sanity you have left after attempting to run sound engineering software.
WHEW!
OK, I do recommend Linux Mint for the distro to use here, since Mint at least puts you ahead by installing lots of those annoying codecs so you don't have to hunt them all down yourself. A close second is Dyne:bolic, which is a sound-studio Linux live Cd in-a-box with everything set up. Second, if you're going to install Seq24, you'll need at least all this for support or extras:
Hydrogen
Xsynth
Audacity
Timidity
Rosegarden
Ubuntu Studio Audio Plugins
...plus all their dependencies, which Synaptic will handle.
Like I say, you don't just install one thing. You shovel piles of crap onto your hard drive and pray that the Angry Audio Gods will be appeased at your offering. (Note: There's no such thing as a non-angry audio god.)
If you run on Linux, chances are (like, 99.9%) you already have PulseAudio crammed up your hinder whether you like it or not. This is bad news, because music synthesizer software requires Jack Audio (at least all of it that I've seen), and Jack and Pulse installed on the same system is like having two wildcats and a bee stuffed in your underwear. Whenever either of these two territorial bears sense the other running, they will crash your computer trying to fight with each other. So if a program that used to work suddenly freezes, it's because it depends on Pulse and you were just running something that required Jack, which caused them to slash each other's throats in the background and now sound is mute and your mouse pointer stopped moving, no matter what program you use.
As you can see from that masterful demo, first you need to have the jack-dssi-host program running 'hexter.so' (which shows up in my menu as "hexter"), because it has the instruments. (What, did you think the same program where you're pressing buttons to make sound should also be the one making the sounds??? Are you kidding?) Then you'll need Hydrogen, just for the drums (You thought synthesized instruments and drums would be in the same program??? Are you CRAZY?). And every time you add a new instrument, you have to start a new instance of jack-dssi-host running hexter.so.
Oh, and saving the file won't work the same way you think it will. See, every one of those little boxes you create in Seq24 won't make any noise without that hexter menu telling it what instrument's voice to use. That data is not saved in MIDI, the only format Seq24 knows. Here's my solution:
How else do you save your song? Well, in an ideal world, you'd just be able to fire up one of the 3000 Linux desktop recorders and "roll a tape" on your song. Nope! Wrong! See, desktop recorders can't handle MIDI playing over Jack, so they won't record anything. You can't start something with Pulseaudio at the same time or it will crash Jack's sound. What do? Here's my solution:
Yes, there's good reasons to have multiple computers in the house. I'm astounded that this worked, even though the MP3s I recorded did have some background noise from computer fans and such, which you'll only notice if you blast them, which you won't because they suck. Anyway, that's what you'd want Audacity for, to trim whitespace off the beginning and end of the recordings (I didn't with mine. Who would care?) and tweak the noise and whatnot.
Finally, some dippy little MIDI songs in MP3 format composed in Seq24. I'm releasing them Creative Commons to the public (oh hell, steal 'em if you want 'em), mostly because I can't stand to own them anymore myself. But they do show off the range of capabilities of Seq24, beyond the mere toy you'd at first expect it to be.
pipe-thumpin.mp3 - So deluded by now that these were starting to sound good.
Steely_Dan_Brown.mp3 - Definitely taking myself far too seriously with this one.
Around WFMU's Beware of the Blog, they call this "Outsider Music." I've blogged about outsider musicians many times before covering Ubuweb's 365 Days Project on the aforementioned LyricInterpretations.com; now I am proud to join their ranks!
On the whole, Seq24 is dangerously, mercilessly addicting. It is by far the easiest program for the novice to pick up, and presents the kind of interface that I love: It makes perfect sense for its purpose, while driving usability experts to hang themselves.
Every now and then in Linux gaming, it pays off to pick up an old favorite and see how it's come along. Last time I visited SuperTuxKart, it was a dinky thing with about four tracks, no powerups, and disgusting "burp" sound effects. Maybe it was 2004?
You won't believe how far SuperTuxKart has come now! New tracks, better art, better sound, more playable characters, a challenge system, bells and whistles. It feels like a professionally produced commercial game now.
And here (it's about time I did this on my blog!) is a video play-through:
This was also my first time recording desktop video (using ffmpeg command lines) and editing it (using the incredible OpenShot video editor, so easy your cat can learn it). So, no sound. Haven't figured the right magic spell for that yet. I will be blogging more about desktop video production and editing later, gimme time, I gotta job ya know.
Anyway, SuperTuxKart, a top-notch achievement in Linux gaming!
Hey, stereotypically-enraged Internet mob! Pardon me, if you could put down your pitchforks and torches for a minute and direct your attention this way? I am about to write the first post on the Internet about CISPA that is not alarmist, panicky, sensationalist, or populist. Instead, we're going to take a look at what's really going on behind the scenes, examining the government not as some mythical hobgoblin, but the way it really works when people clock in in the morning.
Try it. I know you won't accept it, but try it just to give it a whirl.
TL;DR: I DO NOT SUPPORT CISPA. I DO NOT OPPOSE CISPA. It just DOESN'T MATTER.
What does CISPA do, exactly?
It would allow for the sharing of Internet traffic information between the U.S. government and technology and manufacturing companies. No, really, that's it in a nutshell! No new data will be collected. Corporations already have data about you. The government already has data about you. This would just open up a slightly wider pipe between the two.
Here's the PDF draft of the bill itself. Note that it only specifies classified intelligence. At the root, this will make it so that classified intelligence isn't so restricted on who can read it. It will not restrict Joe Public's access to web porn and LOLcats.
Why it doesn't make a difference: Washington Post peeks under the hood of government
Let me introduce you to a very important study and report by the Washington Post from a couple years back, which didn't get nearly the exposure it deserves: A hidden world, growing beyond control, about what an overwhelmed behemoth our security intelligence infrastructure is.
It's a 7-page article, a long read, and nobody has any business having an opinion about CISPA until they've read and fully absorbed every jot and tittle of it. If you don't have the time to read it, you don't have the time to scream about CISPA online.
Some choice quotes:
"Every day across the United States, 854,000 civil servants, military personnel and private contractors with top-secret security clearances are scanned into offices protected by electromagnetic locks, retinal cameras and fortified walls that eavesdropping equipment cannot penetrate."
...
" The U.S. intelligence budget is vast, publicly announced last year as $75 billion, 21/2 times the size it was on Sept. 10, 2001. But the figure doesn't include many military activities or domestic counterterrorism programs."
"Every day, collection systems at the National Security Agency intercept and store 1.7 billion e-mails, phone calls and other types of communications. The NSA sorts a fraction of those into 70 separate databases. The same problem bedevils every other intelligence agency, none of which have enough analysts and translators for all this work."
...
"Leiter spends much of his day flipping among four computer monitors lined up on his desk. Six hard drives sit at his feet. The data flow is enormous, with dozens of databases feeding separate computer networks that cannot interact with one another."
"When hired, a typical analyst knows very little about the priority countries - Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - and is not fluent in their languages. Still, the number of intelligence reports they produce on these key countries is overwhelming, say current and former intelligence officials who try to cull them every day. The ODNI doesn't know exactly how many reports are issued each year, but in the process of trying to find out, the chief of analysis discovered 60 classified analytic Web sites still in operation that were supposed to have been closed down for lack of usefulness. 'Like a zombie, it keeps on living' is how one official describes the sites."
"Two years later, Custer, now head of the Army's intelligence school at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., still gets red-faced recalling that day, which reminds him of his frustration with Washington's bureaucracy. "Who has the mission of reducing redundancy and ensuring everybody doesn't gravitate to the lowest-hanging fruit?" he said. "Who orchestrates what is produced so that everybody doesn't produce the same thing?"
He's hardly the only one irritated. In a secure office in Washington, a senior intelligence officer was dealing with his own frustration. Seated at his computer, he began scrolling through some of the classified information he is expected to read every day: CIA World Intelligence Review, WIRe-CIA, Spot Intelligence Report, Daily Intelligence Summary, Weekly Intelligence Forecast, Weekly Warning Forecast, IC Terrorist Threat Assessments, NCTC Terrorism Dispatch, NCTC Spotlight . . ."
Do you know what CISPA is going to actually do? I can tell you what CISPA is going to do. CISPA will put another email in that inbox. It will put another report on that desk. It will add another redundant redundancy into the redundant system.
What if CISPA had been in place? It probably wouldn't have helped much. Another stack of papers would have gotten shuffled around without getting read. Maybe it would have put the right dot on the right map. If it had, doubtless three other things that demanded attention would have been ignored instead.
Call it "Penguin Pete's Law of Surveillance": It doesn't matter how much data you collect. What matters is having the eyeballs to read that data.
Now in this case, doesn't it seem kind of freaky that the Department of Homeland Security knew about a threat, the FBI didn't, and neither organization acted on it anyway? Furthermore, there were restrictions in place between the FBI and the DHS being able to tell one another "Hey, here's a radical guy that may do something squirrely - keep an eye on him." Wouldn't you think they'd be able to just do that?
I've worked in government. Yes, it's that bad.
During my time in the California Conservation Corps, it was part of my contract to be loaned out to other state agencies. Lucky me, I got the warehouse spot for a state hospital. In that warehouse (which was the size of a Walmart by itself), at least two whole isles of shelving had nothing but forms on them. Yes, that was part of my job was to just issue forms.
There were actual scenarios where some state employee would have to fill out a form, take it to their department head, who would fill out a companion form and get it stamped and send two copies back to the first employee, who would then be granted permission to come to my warehouse and get... (*drum roll*) ANOTHER BOX OF FORMS! After they signed my form and I signed their form, of course. And this was just for the state hospital. There were no security clearances involved.
A small dive into United States intelligence agencies
Want to fully explore US intelligence agencies?
Sure thing. How many lifetimes do you have?
Here's the Wiki category, dive right in. Be sure to check out all the subcategories and the sub-subcategories.
There's the Bureau of Intelligence and Research... Wait, within that branch, there's the Office of Research, the External Research Staff, the Current Intelligence Staff, and the Publications Staff, which probably sends more stacks of reports to desks. There's offices for analysis of each major continent. There's the Office of Intelligence Operations, the Office of Intelligence Resources, and the Office of Intelligence Coordination, all headed by (say it in one breath) the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Intelligence Policy and Coordination.
I might be going out on a limb here, but maybe some of these departments and agencies and offices are starting to sound a little bit redundant?
We haven't started on the United States Department of Homeland Security, which, of course, has its own galaxy of sub-departments, including the Federal Protective Service, which deploys bomb-sniffing dogs - hey, we could have used some of those in Boston! The US DHS also now controls U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement; now you would think that ICE would have no responsibilities beyond keeping people from jumping the fence and making sure nobody brings quarantined fruit through the airport, right? But they also have divisions for cyber-crimes and national security, too.
And don't forget, every branch of the US military has its OWN intelligence and counterterrorism departments as well!
We're just getting started. We could fill ten more blog posts this size with more US intelligence divisions and still just be getting started. Last year, I blogged on Mind--Blown about Intellipedia, A US government intelligence Wiki that mere mortals aren't allowed to view. And there's more than one US government intelligence wiki out there - and they're all classified!
So there you have it. Think of an idea to solve the problem, any idea at all. They've tried them all.
It appears Obama is aware of the problem of intel-bloat; he recently cut 8% from US spy agency budgets. I'm sure he'll get blasted for it - I can hear it on FOX news now: "At a time when the Boston bombing shows we need more intelligence gathering, blah blah blah."
Honestly, if I were his adviser, I'd probably just shrug about now and say "What the hell, pass it. It might not hurt." That's the best you can hope for. It's redundant on top of half a zillion intelligence and surveillance acts and bills and laws we've already had. But it will not affect a damned, damned thing.
Well, yeah, unfortunately I ran into a lot of dead ends. It's like the zombie apocalypse is over and the zombies won out there. Say what you will about the state of desktop computing, Linux computing, FOSS, or graphic design, but graphic design on the Linux desktop is just about DEAD!
Cinepaint's blog hasn't been updated since 2009. Another developer wandered off. There doesn't appear to be a Cinepaint package on the Debian platform, and the Fedora platform has the old package which installs, but cannot work - it can't even open an image file. Rumors abound of somebody or other taking over the project. Cinepaint forums suggest switching to Gimp. Tricorder readings show no signs of life.
KDE's kool koloring program provides a kompact komposition to be redundant with Xpaint. Again, not good for much more but klowning around.
MyPaint - Promising, but more for true digital painting again.
MyPaint seems to be a perfect program for users who want a lightweight version of Krita. There really doesn't seem to be too much else going on here. I've tried it and it is nice - very basic, but nice.
"Picasa is not currently available for your operating system" - That's what Linux users will see. In fact, Picasa, the desktop application, is being phased out altogether for every platform except as an app for Google+ photo sharing. (Because plain old uploading and displaying a file, once such a basic operation that even 4chan users could do it, is now rocket science that has to be broken down into 500 expensive parts.) Picasa is heading for the Great Google Graveyard of discontinued apps.
Speaking of Google... Sketchup - Awesome, but for 3D architectural drafting.
Remember Sketchup? You can still download and use the freebie version of Google Sketchup 8 from that link, and my suggestion is to get it now from that link while you can. Sketchup has been sold to Trimble, but is still in transition. Trimble seems to have no idea what to do with it. In any case, Google quit making Sketchup back in 2010 at version 8 - bound for the Great Google Graveyard. But the Windows version runs fantastically on my Linux Mint 14 Nadia install of Wine - far, far better than when I reviewed it in '08. Even if you hate it and have no hope for it, you'll want a copy to torrent to your buddies five years down the line when it becomes abandonware.
Obligatory building doodle I just cranked out while writing this, imported from screenshot into Inkscape (Sketchup still can't save a PNG right, don't even try) and edited some:
Speaking of 3D, I might as well update one last program you used to hear about all the time here. POVRay - I'm still vowing one day to rebuild a frontend modeler to POVRay, but in the meantime there is one other soul who still holds out stubborn hope for the POVRay renaissance, this guy with a German site (in English) has updated it this very month, and he has a half-step for a POVRay front-end - a menu of pastable object code hosted in HTML.
Wings3D is also another program I've been trying to nurse along as a replacement 3D modeler. It's actually pretty good, but runs only on my Fedora because my Debian base systems complain about Erlang (Wings' extension language) all fouled up. It's also starting to look like a project in its last gasps.
That's extra sad, because Blender has gone the way of Gimp - insane. I loaded up the latest version of Blender, and discovered - for the thousandth version now - that every single menu, button, command, keyboard shortcut, and function has been rearranged pointlessly AGAIN!!!!!, meaning I would have to sit down AGAIN!!!!! and devote solid, monastic concentration to learning AGAIN!!!!! a completely new Blender interface for a month before I could produce anything with it. This has been going on nonstop for a decade now. Forget it, I have better things to do with my time than waste it with silly games by the sour trolls of the Gimp and Blender teams. Can't WAIT for those two projects to choke off. So sad any other projects have to go.
What else do we have? Inkscape, glorious, perfect, holy Inkscape doing it right, doing it with a mighty righteous rightness that shames the sour trolls by contrast and inspires the weak and struggling by its example.
And what is this Cthulhu curse on Linux desktop graphics editing? Why are they mostly all dying or turning to shit? I'll say one thing - I hope the Bolsheviks are happy. They wanted a world without skills, tools, or engineers, and they're getting one. But at least nobody has to feel excluded by "elitists" any more!
Better we should all starve to death than for any man to think too highly of himself for baking a loaf of bread, right?
Since I'm tired of trying to get work done with the Gimp development team constantly pissing on the very idea of "utility," I've been investigating some Gimp alternatives. While it's going to be painful doing without the Gimp, there's other FOSS graphics applications that don't get nearly the attention they deserve. If we gave them some exposure, perhaps they would get some support and introduce those few remaining crucial features that will put them over the bar as Gimp replacements.
If you're associated with any of these projects and know of some more resources for any of them, I (and other readers) welcome your input in the comments section.
Pinta is a lightweight, simple image editor that's more of an xpaint on steroids than a full-featured image editor. It's a FOSS clone of the popular Paint.NET. That fact should make an obvious downside apparent: It uses Mono and to write extensions for it, you need Visual Studio.
For those of you still reading, I did get it to make a simple photo edit:
As should be painfully obvious even from this example, there's no smear tool, no magic-wand select, and no color select - three tools crucial to photo editing. But in a pinch, if you have nothing else, you can make do with Pinta. It is fast and easy, you'll learn it in no time. I found this review of Pinta on a fellow Linux blogger's site - I'm not having any problems with it crashing, but perhaps either they've fixed some issues since the review was posted, or my Fedora 17 just likes Mono better than Ubuntu does.
There's also an add-in manager, ready in place for perhaps some needed features to be born in the future. There's already a stack of filters installed through this system (blur, edge, renders, blah blah) but I couldn't seem to get any of them to make any visible changes?
Krita is a beautiful program packed with features. Part of the Calligra office suite, it's more for the serious graphics artist than photo-editing type work. But when it comes to a digital artist's easel, does it ever blow away the drawing tools in Gimp! It does things with brushes that shouldn't be natural. Tablets are made to use with Krita (and bless Linux Mint Nadia 14 for being plug-and-play for my Wacom Bamboo!). The interface is very well thought-out. You'll spend hours just playing with all the toys.
And now, the downsides: It crashed quite a bit on my set-up, and being a KDE program, this did not surprise me. Save early and save often. It's also starving for documentation, and again being a KDE program, this did not surprise me. And it has a steep learning curve after you get past the basics. This led to a merry challenge between groveling through the forums, trying out experiments, fumbling around trying to undo stuff, and recovering from crashes.
There's some very slick videos out there by established Krita artists on YouTube. So they may take time to watch, but could prove valuable for picking up tricks. I'd love to write some tutorials for it myself, but as always, it is impossible for me to share knowledge that I myself do not possess. So I'll have to play with it and see if it grows on me.
Til next time, kiddies, and remember: The first job of any tool is to get out of your way and let you USE it! Just say no to Gimp.
