Blog

Chatty Applications

Sometimes it happens via dialog, sometimes it happens via notification bubble, but either way my computer can be quite chatty. I’m wondering if there are any guidelines for designing programs to be good citizens in their chattiness. Some questions that I have that maybe could be used to come up with a set of guidelines …

Scribus Tip

If you design something in Inkscape and are looking to Scribus-ify it, you will save yourself a world of pain by opening the Inkscape SVG directly in Scribus (the file extension is hidden by default, pick ‘all files’ in the file extension dropdown of the open dialog) rather than importing the SVG. I learned this …

ZOMG Stickers!!!!11

I received a nice delivery today. Fedora stickers!!! They are conveniently-sized for branding your Fedora laptop! Check them out close up: each sheet features the new Fedora Four F’s, and also has four blank bubbles you can use to write whatever messages you’d like: And we have a lot of them. Look for them to …

Christmastime Recycling for Nerds

I made some Christmas cards this year out of found/recycled materials (as much as I could, I ended up having to buy large envelopes to fit them in since they turned out quite large.) I ended up using some old red tech conference badge lanyards as a snowman’s scarf and for some lining ribbon on …

Fedora 10 Lightscribe Label

Patrick Ernzer asked me about putting together a Fedora 10 Lightscribe label together. This was a pretty quick job and I used some of the artwork Jayme Ayres put together on the Fedora 10 Media Art page. Patrick was kind enough to test it out for me and send me a copy so I could …

show, don't tell

I read an interesting email today from Michael Tiemann. He said, in part, “The open source model makes a big deal about “showing the code”, and indeed when one proudly shows what one has *done*, then others may be inspired to do the same. By contrast, referring to something that somebody else has asked you …