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Gimp Tricks: Selective Colorization

July 1st, 2009 gatolinux No comments

Today, I’m going to teach you how to first simply create a black and white image from a color photo, then to selectively colorize any portion of the photo. I’m not going to directly adapt a Photoshop tutorial because this is a very simple process, but if you want to find the Photoshop way of doing this, simply google “selective colorization” and you’ll get about five gazillion results. For those of you keeping track, yes, this is the first Gimparoo original.

So, as I mentioned in the previous post, flickr’s CC license image search tool is totally awesome, and that’s where I found today’s image. In the spirit of the license, I’m attributing flickr user Daniel Montesinos as the original photographer. Thank you Daniel. I will also make my finished product available with the same license provisions on my flickr page.

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The right to be free

June 22nd, 2009 gatolinux No comments

This article is aimed mainly at the supporters of culture without boundaries, the people who have been convinced by Lawrence Lessig (the author of “The Free Culture”) and Richard M. Stallman’s ideas of fighting the bad copyright and non-free software licenses.

Everybody knows, that DRM is bad. Also everybody knows, that Open Source is just a compromise and a stage in transition to a close-to-ideal system, which Free Software is. The free culture advocates have written dozens of books, heaps of articles and hundreds and thousands of blog entries showing the sense of standing against the law, organizations and corporations who bound (or try to put boundaries) on our freedom. Also stacks and heaps of text has been produced showing why should we boycott “bad” products designed by the aforementioned villains, the products being designed to achieve one obvious goal : to maximize profit, regardless of the consumer’s good.

The effects of these publications can easily be recognized : more and more people are now Open Source aware (mixing terms with Free Software though), there are more and more users of free/open systems, the closed formats are being pushed out, rejected by conscious users (just to mention the Ogg and FLAC’s success or even ODF’s victory over OOXML), and the new portals like do.org.pl or osnews.pl are in bloom, attracting more and more web community.

Step by step, led by the leaders like the creator of the Linux kernel – Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Creative Commons license – Lawrence Lessig or the creator of Free Software philosophy – Richard Matthew Stallman, we go on convincing more and more people and changing our reality.

However let’s try to look at the other side of the coin : with all these activities, trying to “free” the virtual world, including the user, aren’t we sometimes, however rarely, effectively restricting the freedom of those, who we want to be free ?

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Amarok 2.1 is out & Installing Amarok 2.1 on Ubuntu 9.04 Jaunty

June 13th, 2009 gatolinux No comments

I was catching up on some feeds yesterday, and this piece of news caught my eye – Amarok 2.1 released. Being a long time Amarok fan ( heck Amarok itself was catalyst to make me use my SUSE 10.0 use full time) – I read the article with great interest. Amarok 2 users would know that Amarok 2 series is a shadow of its old Amarok 1.4(”Amarok Classic” self) – and quite a few people still prefer Amarok classic to Amarok 2 – primararily because of Amarok’s missing support for visualizations, equalizer amongst others. I don’t use equalizers – and as for visualization – well don’t use that either.

Coming back to the point – Amarok 2.0 release was somewhat like a KDE 4.0 release – more of a framework release, basic building blocks in place, but just about. I terribly missed queuing support, and promptly stopped using Amarok (and on a different note, switched to Gnome – Rhythmbox is sweet!). Amarok 2.1 brings in a lot of improvements – and the most obvious one is the improvements to the playlist and main play window area. With Amarok 2.0 – the playlist area was a bit of a hit and a miss the lyrics, Wikipedia info was there but wasn’t obvious, you had to “Add the plasma” and once you added multiple plasma(”applets”) you had no idea how many were there without “zooming out” and overlooking it. And with the zoom effect not at its slickest best it was a big chore. Amarok 2.1 fixes this by adding buttons which bring up the respective applets making it easy to remove the exisitng applets, add new ones or simply re-arrange them.

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