I like Firefox, I really do. Version 3 has a lot of cool features, and runs very stable on both my XP system at work and my Ubuntu system at home. But…
Firefox3 is a huge memory hog.
I regularly see 140+ MB of memory being used by FF on both my Linux and XP systems. This […]

I’ve just finished and uploaded Episode 064. This screencast demonstrates the use of Inkscape’s Object->Clip->Set function for some creative bitmap masking.
Head over there to watch or download the episode and check out any of the other 63 episodes we’ve done so far.
Happy Canada Day tomorrow everybody!

If you’re interested in a super-slick way to browse images (on Flickr, Google Image Search, Picasa, Facebook or any of almost 20 different sites), and you’re using Firefox (Windows/Mac), Safari or even IE, then check out Piclens.
On my XP machine at work I’ve installed the Piclens add-on for FF3 (there’s one for FF2 as well […]

A week or so ago, I espoused the virtues of Task, a great little command line application that has replaced the venerable todo.txt system for managing my projects and To-Do list at work. In that post, I described how to build Task within Cygwin for those of us who use Cygwin to get our Linux […]

Episode 061 is now up. In this screencast I demonstrate how to create a pseudo-realistic looking recycle bin type object. It could be useful for someone wanting to create icons perhaps. It only took 7 or 8 objects to create and demonstrates how some subtle uses of gradients and blurs can help get the effect […]

Shortly before I went to Las Vegas, I decided I’d like to buy the Flip Video Ultra camcorder while I was down there. If you don’t know what it is, here’s a short description:
It’s a handheld, solid state, 2GB capacity video capture device. It captures 640×480 video at 30fps. There is a 1.8″ LCD screen […]

One of the highlights of my recent Vegas vacation didn’t have anything to do with Vegas. The inimitable Dave Yates interviewed me via phone for Episode 73 of his Lottalinuxlinks podcast. This is definitely one of my favourite Linux podcasts, and that is probably all down to Dave himself. He always makes me chuckle.
It went […]

Score one for free software today, at least in my personal space.
I had a set of shop drawings come in from a client. These were large format (24″x36″) TIF files at 200dpi. My task was to add a few items to each digital image and send them back. This included a digitized version of our […]

In a comment to my previous post about Facebook, JakeT also ponders the signficance of Twitter and why I use it. Although Twitter is different things to different people, I’ll just describe the things I like about it and what it does for me.
I follow about 80 people and about 70 or 80 people follow […]

I know I know.. I was gonna wait a week or two. But the trigger finger got itchy this morning and I clicked the upgrade button sitting atop Ubuntu’s update manager before I left for work this morning.
It came as no surprise to me that the process had stalled about 70% of the way through, […]