This used to be the future.

[reddragdiva]

• Rocknerd: The discreet charm of the Grateful Dead..

• NotN: English acquires its millionth word: "bollocks".

The toddler demands I dance. OH DEAR GOD I MUST DANCE AGAIN. I sit down. "um, um" and she pulls on my hand. DEAR LORD LET ME STOP DANCING ONE DAY. Pushes me to stand over there and dance. Now I have to pick up her rag doll and make it dance on the purple plastic stool. DANCE DANCE DANCE UNTIL YOU DROP THEN KEEP DANCING. FOREVER.

My theory is that two-year-old girls are young gay men in discos. My evidence is that Freda loves Bear Force 1 and Abba and started dancing to the new Pet Shop Boys album (Yes — I highly recommend it) literally seconds after it started playing. DANCE DANCE DANCE MONKEYDAD DANCE. DANCE.

Out for a walk again with nyecamden to the pond near Whipps Cross and back. Lovely day out.

Today's technical questions: 1. Does Ubuntu Netbook Remix come with any good 3G usage counters? If not, what's a good simple one to add? 2. arkady is trying to use her Wacom tablet with Gimp 2.6.6 on Mac OS X 10.5 PowerPC. Drawing is unusably laggy. Are there ways to fix this other than "use Photoshop"?

Comments

[reddragdiva]

The Gimp problem (apart from it being Gimp) may be X11. The Leopard shipping version is a few revs behind. Current version or current beta should be a lot better. Hopefully.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I would be very suspicious that tbe Gimp issue is X11 related, and the answer is probably just avoid Gimp. Which I do generally anyway, as apart from price Gimp seems to make its goal in life to combine both the flaws of poorly designs open source software, and all the flaws of photoshop.

Both Pixelmator and Acorn are good mini-photoshop style apps, both seem to work fine for most things (I mostly use Pixelmator when I need a photoshop substitute, though I virtuously seem to have actual licences for both via various macupdate deals. Acorn has the nice feature that you can write plugins in Python, but I've yet to find a reason to do so.). I also recommend taking a look at Artrage 2, which is commercial 'natural media' style graphics program, very cheap and also has a genuine usable free version.

[arkady.livejournal.com]

Can Pixelmater and/or Acorn handle .psd files and Photoshop brushes though? Basically I need something that isn't going to take me ages to figure out how to use, with which I can use my collections of PS brushes, and I can work on my existing PS projects with - including SL textures and templates, which all come in .psd format.

[strangedave.livejournal.com]

Yes, Pixelmator opens photoshop files and uses photoshop brushes (though I can't swear to the latter personally, as I've never tried, its a claimed feature). It seems to handle layers etc quite similarly to photoshop, and I'd expect that switching wouldn't be too bad. I've found it pretty easy to learn to use.