DoctorMo's Blog

My dearest community, please consider spending a minute of your time reading this early draft of a poster I am constructing. It’s target audience is the general masses attending libraries, colleges and other public places and it’s attempting to genteelly introduce people to Free Culture concepts.

I need to make sure my working is good as well as my spelling, the blue boxes are for images which I’m getting a fellow artist to sketch up and should go in there soon. Do let me know if you want the svg before it’s complete, once out of draft I’ll add it to spread-ubuntu in A3 and Ledger sizes. Thank you everyone!

This is a howto for all those making Ubuntu Day graphics and slide shows for how you can drag and drop your clipart from template sets into inkscape as you would in programs like Dia or Visio:

View Video on Blip

Enjoy.

According to OMG! Ubuntu the Ubuntu Manual project is looking for testers, people who can read the manual and find errors.

They’re going to freeze it at the end of the month so the community needs to get cracking in making sure it’s all good to go, I think everything should be able to give one chapter a brief read over and to report problems.

Report Problems here

This week Disney’s 2nd Alice in Wonderland in 3D came out and I had the chance to go see Avatar in 3D… ok that may not make sense to normal people, but the further towards the end of a films run you see it, the more money the cinema gets and the less money the studio gets. I only mention Alice because I wanted a cool blog title.

What I love about these 3DReal films is that they give you polarising glasses. And I wanted to know what kind of geeky fun could be had and I’ve hit upon a surprising use for them:

If you’re a designer or an artist you often have to change the mood of a picture or design, making things more blue, yellow or red to get the right setting. Well using these glasses you just have to tilt your head to the right to make an LCD look more blue and tilt to the left to get a more yellow image. It’s really very cool.

I got this very useful advice from Fredreyk today, he suggests that if I do videos that I should use a process that improves the sound quality so people can hear what I’m saying. It’s the same thing that adverts use to make themselves sound louder compared to the show your watching: compression.

To do this you need to take your recorded video (in my case an ogv) and using Avidemux-gtk you strip out the sound and save it in it’s own file by going in the Audio-Menu to save the audio-stream.

Now open the audio file in Audacity mark everythink(ctrl-a) and use compression in the effect-menu i took -44db in the first slider,
but it depends on your material. Just play around, so that you stop sounding like darth vader. Save the results.

If the file sounds fine then put it in avidemux together with the video-stream (open the first point (main…) in the audio-menu and use “external”). Double checking that the sound still syncs with the video.

I wrote this nifty script in python to take the output from the cal command and parse it, using an svg template it outputs an entire calendar in your own style, with your own pictures and everything.

It was a bit rushed because I was making a personal calendar for my wife with birthdays, anniversaries and our family pictures on it. And it came out really well too, she’s very happy with it! Here is a page from the calendar:

A big shout out to Inkscape, which again was flexible enough to allow me to create my calendar template without complaining about missing images or custom svg xml. If you want to have a go yourself at making a calendar then just download the following package:

calendar-creator.tar.bz2

Populate the flips directory with your own png files 01.png – 12.png and a title.png file for the front page, add any extra dates you want to the dates.lst, then run `./create-cal.py 2010` on the command line this will make a whole set of svg files for each page. You can then run `./make-book.sh` which will use inkscape (make sure it’s installed) to generate png files of each page.

Once you have your images, you can print them out in order or create a pdf of them using imagemagik’s convert command: `convert pngs/*.png full-calendar.pdf` but be aware this file might get big and generating these things takes time.

I will post a complete calendar tomorrow.

These are the words I use and the way I use them:

• How to – A specific work-flow given as list of commands with breif descriptions of what they do.
• Guide – A tour of a specific work-flow with verbose explanations and tangents.
• Technical Documentation – A document that describes the internal workings and mechanisms.
• User Documentation – An explanation of every feature available to the user and how to use it.
• Manual – A blend of user docs and guides to add context.
• Definition – A brief description of the use and mechanics without example, see wikipedia.

The Ubuntu Manual project is a highly focused plan to write a guide for new users to Ubuntu 9.10 and to provide this guide under a copyleft license (CC-BY-SA). Started by Benjamin Humphrey, the manual project became open to community collaboration after the Lucid UDS had finished.

So far the project has amassed an entire ten chapters of content, translations in 20 languages and has over a hundred contributors, this is a team of people who are powering through content creation at an impressive speed. Both graphically and writing competency are not being compromised for this speed either, take a look at their development release:

Ubuntu Manual 0.1

The group is still looking for people who are interested in writing material for new users, it’s also looking to get the manual shipped in time for the Lucid release and possibly included on the CD. Quite an ambitious goal, but from the looks of it they’ll at least get the first goal if not the second.

My hope as a member of the Ubuntu Learning board is that the content created in the manual will be transferable to the classes we’re creating. Collaboration is all possible thanks to Creative Commons licenses and I have to say, I am impressed by this project (as you can tell from this blog entry), I hope the plan is a sucess and we have a really good manual to give to new Ubuntu users for this LTS cycle.

I was doing a bit of a search for internet connection sharing this evening, you know like you do. And what I found was a bit of a mish-mash.

Plenty of people on the forums are currently or have in the past advised a method which is highly complex and involves a great deal of custom configuration. Take this thread: Howto Share internet connection in the Tutorials and Tips section of the forum. You get to this when you do a search for “Internet connection sharing ubuntu” and this forum post is from 2005.

To correct some of this misinformation, I’m posting here this evening a quick video guide for how you deal with sharing from one ethernet port to another. I’ve asked my good friend David Edwards to record his first video, he uses WindowsXP for all of his own work and doesn’t use Ubuntu normally.

So to share any internet connection method to your ethernet:

1. Connect to your internet connection via WiFi, Ethernet or GSM as you usually do.
2. Right click on the network manager icon
3. Select “Edit Connections…”
4. Go to your “Wired” connection tab.
5. Click the “Add” button
6. Enter the connection name “Shared Internet”
7. Select the IPv4 tab
8. Under Method, select “Shared with other computers”
9. Click “Apply”
10. Click on the network manager again, this time with the left button
11. For the target ethernet port, select the new “Shared Internet”.
12. Now plug in your computer via ethernet.

If you want to share your internet connection via wifi, then you need to use the “Create new wireless network…” to make a wireless network that other computers will be able to connect to. This automatically shares your internet connection.

I’ve been plodding through the graphics for the “How to Ask Smart Questions” guide, which coincidentally will help people ask questions with the same quality that Akane does in chapter 03 of Ubunchu. Some of the graphics I’ve been playing with are for illustrating various parts of the guide and so I asked my good acquaintance C-Quel to draw me up a quick SVG image of Risa to help us through.

The problem was I feel, was that the style of the guide I wanted to make was more conservative than C-Quel’s style, I also wanted to make sure I wasn’t suggesting that only women in dresses have problems. So I set about modifying the SVG to produce some more professional, slightly more western eyes and clothes.

Your thoughts, dear reader?