Ok, so I made the plunge — Geocaching has now become my guilty pleasure and in order to do it properly, I’ve purchased a proper GPS — The Garmin 60CSx.

Although totally unnecessary — “Capital C” has two Garmin eTrex units — I just couldn’t go another day without the promise of faster satellite locks and better reception. I am, afterall, a fuckin’ gadget geek.

A full review of the unit will follow as soon as it gets here and I get to run it through it’s paces.

Should I really be this excited?

Oh, BTW — after much research, Amazon.com wins for best price. Under $350 with free shipping.

I never really took to outdoors in-the-woods type activities, they never really made much sense. Hiking, for instance, always seemed like such a pointless thing. Traipsing around the woods, ticks and mosquitos all over the place, dirt … And for what? Just to do it?

So, now — introduce a little technology and a purpose — I can’t get enough. Hiked at least a couple of miles through some pretty thick brush to discover 6 caches yesterday.

For those of you that aren’t in the know, Geocaching is basically a treasure hunt. You get yourself a GPS, head over to a site like (duh!) www.geocaching.com and look up a cache, get coordinates, program your GPS and head out on the hunt.

The goal is to find the cache, usually an ammo box or some sort of waterproof container hidden somewhere out in the woods, sign the log book and trade trinkets. There’s also GeoCoins and Travel bugs — these are trackable via website — that you try to keep moving from cache to cache.

So dorky … But somehow I can’t get enough. If the weather was a bit better today, I’d be out doing it again. Perhaps I’ll try an urban cache — being that I’m a die-hard city kid. I’ve heard some pretty weird caches exist in parking garages and various other areas of downtown Chicago. Might have to pickup a handgun or some mace first though.

Be real, have something real to say, and the SEO stops making all that much of a difference.   Deal with it.

Sure — you could try link-building, link-baiting, doing that “real content” thing or hundreds of other things to build your site popularity. But why?

Why not just find a really disgusting photo of Courtney Love being ever-so-unsexy, post it to your site with some amazingly interesting copy, and prepare to upgrade your server.

It really does seem that all you have to do to get thousands of fresh new visitors to your site every day is to post this image on your site.

It’s become so popular here that it’s by far the #1 most viewed article on my site — logging nearly 10,000 hits a day.

So the next time you’re sitting around and thinking to yourself, “I really wish I knew how to increase my unique daily visitor stats”, think: sick picture of heroin addicted bitch-from-hell flopping her tits around on stage.

From: Brian @ Joost PR To: TheAntiBlogger
Subj: Re: PRESS Any word for Linux users?

Thanks for your interest in Joost. Yes, a Linux version is planned, but the timeline for that is TBD right now.

Brian

Gotta love the canned PR response. I was, at the very least, hoping for some hyped up PR bullshit. TheAntiBlogger walks away unsatisfied.

One of my clients needed me to quickly throw together a violator/badge and so I decided to torture myself by using GIMP rather than booting up my backup Windows machine.

Masochistic, I know.

A bit about me

First of all, let me explain that I am an absolute GIMP newbie — This type of thing would take me about 2 minutes to create in Photoshop… Getting this to work correctly in GIMP took me about an hour. Most of that time was spent trying to find the features I’m used to.

I don’t know that I’m doing things in the most efficient way, but thats what the comments section is for. Please do correct me if I’m doing something dumb and I’ll update.

Create a new image

Create a new image. Choose a size thats about 1.5 to 2 times the size of what you’d like your final image to be. Set the fill to Transparency.

Using the Gfig filter to create a star

Aright — Can I just tell you all that finding this option drove me to the brink of insanity. Seriously! How the hell is a shape drawing tool considered a filter? Par for the course I suppose — there are lots of features located in places that make absolutely no sense at all.

NOTE: Before loading up the Gfig filter, I found that creating a new layer with a solid background color is an absolute necessity. If you try and create your star without one, the control points that are needed to modify the star are pretty much invisible. You can remove the fill layer later on by right clicking the layer and selecting delete.

To create this temporary layer, just select the new layer icon from the layers control. Select “White” for the layer fill type.

Once we have our temporary fill in place, we can go ahead and fire up Gfig by selecting Filter -> Render -> Gfig from the images menu.

The next few steps are where you can start getting a little creative — Not every violator should look the same. Depending on the desired size of your image, things like stroke width and number of points are going to be pretty variable and you’ll need to do a little trial an error.

Lets create the star by selecting the star icon from the toolbar. For this example we’ll set the sides option to 30, and adjust the stroke to 3px.

Draw the star by clicking and dragging from the center of the editor area out to any side. What you’ll end up with will look more like a starburst than a badge.

Next, lets select the Move Single-Point tool, then click and drag the inside control point, pulling outward, until you have something that resembles the badge shape you’d like.

Alright, the hard part (finding the damn shape creation function) is done! Click close and you’re newly created badge outline should be ready to decorate.

Color and Decoration

In keeping with the traditional violator style, the next thing we’ll want to do is add a radial gradient fill inside the badge outline.

For those of you that use Photoshop, you’ll find that this part works pretty much the way you’re used to. Select the inside of the badge using the Select Contiguous Regions tool (AKA, the Magic Wand for all you Photoshop types out there).

Choose the Gradient Fill tool, select the colors of your fill (In this example I’m using the preset Yellow Orange) and pick Radial for the shape of your gradient.

Click and drag within the selected area of your badge outline. In my case, I’m going from the top left to the bottom right to match the drop shadow I’ll be applying later. You may want to spend a little time playing around with the part as it really is the most noticeable part of your new image.

What you’ll end up with is pretty close to the final product. All we have to do now is add a few more decorations, soften things up a bit (GIMP seems to leave some jagged edges that aren’t very desirable) and finally add our text.

The Drop Shadow

Using the Magic Wand, select the empty space around the badge and invert your selection (select -> invert).

Now choose Script-Fu (Who the fuck comes up with these names…) -> Shadow -> Drop Shadow. This is another place you’ll need to be a bit creative, depending on the size and application of your badge; you’ll also want to take lighting into consideration. Since our radial gradient gives the impression of light coming from the top left of the image, our drop-shadow should fall to the bottom left.

Lets set our offsets equally, 4px to the left and down, set a blur radius of 7px and reduce the Opacity to around 40. This will give us a little depth and make the badge pop off the page a little.

Now, if you plan to use your image at it’s current size, you’ll want to add a little bit of blur to soften things up a bit. If you plan to reduce the image size, you’ll want to skip this step as downsizing the image should get rid of most of the visible jags.

To add a little blur, choose Filters -> Blur -> Gaussian Blur and reduce the blur to about 0.75 to 1.0 pixels.

Add some text and your ready to go!

Add your text and effects, and in our case, resize the image. There you have it. A web 2.0 style violator (badge) using GIMP. Although not quite as pretty as what I usually create in Photoshop, it is possible to get acceptable results from this Open Source Photoshop alternative. Though, unless I can learn some more tricks to improve the image quality, I’ll stick with Photoshop for my professional work.

If you have any suggestions or know any tricks to increase the quality of what we’ve done here, please post a comment and we’ll give it a try.

Whats next?

Well — If I get a little time and have the patience, I’ll try to put together a little write-up on creating a Web 2.0 style logo, and maybe some nice Glossy buttons. Of course, I may just get frustrated with GIMP and decide to chuck it in the bin. Only time will tell.

The first few days drove me nuts.

Yes, the first few days of using nothing but Linux & KDE drove me a bit insane. It’s not that I found it any more difficult than Windows XP, it’s the general awkwardness of functioning in a new environment. That little tiny learning curve that comes with anything new.

Finding equivalent applications

For the most part, my installation of OpenSUSE came pretty well equipped. My two most important applications, FireFox and Tunderbird, didn’t need equivalents — they’re cross-plaform. But what about all my other applications?

In order to start feeling really comfortable with this new landscape, I needed applications that not only had similar features, but also had the general look and feel of the applications I’ve been using for decades. Everything Linux seems very big and clunky. The user interfaces very … Unpolished.

I need my IRC

Since I spend massive amounts of time on IRC helping support a couple open source projects, my first mission was to seek out a usable IRC client. Now, keep in mind, I’m coming from Windows XP and I’ve been using mIRC for over a decade.

The most popular client seemed to be XChat, but it just didn’t feel right. I couldn’t get accustomed to the interface no matter how much I tried. It functioned well, but that clunky UI killed me.

A number of people suggested the ChatZilla FireFox extension, but that one failed to meet my needs by a long shot. Once again, the interface was all wrong.

After running through a list of others that don’t even deserve mention, I finally landed on kVirc … Talk about a motherfuckin’ moment of Zen. If I ever switch back to a Windows platform, I don’t know how I’m going to live with kVirc. The interface was 100% spot on. mIRC on steroids.

Can’t live with multi-protocol IM

I cannot believe that there are so many IM clients, but very few with the usability of Trillian. Short and sweet — the closest thing I could find to a Trillian equivalent was GAIM. Although not quite perfect, it did the job and felt (with a little adjustment) pretty comfortable.

Must watch mind-numbing sitcoms and b-movies!

My choice of video players while using Windows boiled down to WinAmp and Windows Media Player. In this case, function was just as important as form.

As an infrequent user of Linux I didn’t realize the limitations on media codecs and the ability to play DVDs. It never crossed my mind that I might have to purchase a DVD player for Linux just to watch my legally purchased DVDs. Alas, thanks to all those that came before me, I found a wealth of information on DeCSS and was able to work around most of my CODEC problems pretty quickly too.

Although nothing I found came close to the polished feeling of Windows Media Player or WinAMP, I did find a couple of players that did the job with minimal UI impact. MPlayer and Xine. I tend to favor MPlayer, but both get the mindless movies and time-killing sitcoms on my screen in an acceptable fashion, so… Let the procrastination begin.

Ok, I can watch them, but without a good torrent client…

Ah, yes — Where would we be without bittorrent? In general, most Windows clients for bittorrent suck ass, so if you haven’t been using uTorrent, you’ll be pretty happy with whatever client you happen to stumble upon.

The first client I tried was the one that I happened to install with SUSE — KTorrent. It did the job, but I wasn’t satisfied, so I started trying others. Most of the clients I came across were so similar I had a hard time distinguishing between them.

I finally settled on Deluge. It has a nice clean interface and seems to function well as long as you go through the usual firewall configurations, etc…

As with Windows bittorrent clients, it’ll take a bit of time before I’m completely convinced that I like the one I’m using. If I decide to try something different, I’ll let you all know.

Ok, so, we’re set with the fun stuff, but what about work stuff?

Well, this is where things start to get a little bit wacky for me. See, I’m not a big Office user. I mean, sure, I write the occasional AntiMemo and throw together a proposal now and again, but I just don’t spend much time using Office.

I decided to evaluate two different paths.

First, the obvious — find an Office application equivalent for Linux.

This was really easy; A number of half-assed attempts exist, but only one that came close to having the features and feel of Office is … Surprise!! Open Office. Nothing else came close, so if you need an office application on Linux, Open Office is the only way to go.

Next, the less obvious but much trendier. A web based Office equivalent.

I thought this would be quick and easy — there can’t be that many web-office type service out there, and probably even fewer free services, right? WRONG! It seems everyone and their brother has an online office beta available.

It didn’t take me long to realize that evaluating all the possibilities would take a fair amount of research, and frankly I didn’t intend for this to turn into a 10 page review of web based office applications. I will say this much: I don’t think I’ll have much use for the standard Office suites any longer.

Ok, so I’ve found my alternatives, but can TheAntiBlogger live in a non-windows world?

Although I did find replacements for nearly every application I’ve grown attached to, there is one big gaping hole in my list. A replacement for PhotoShop.

Now, I know many of you will tell me I can do everything I do in PhotoShop using Gimp, but I just can’t do it. I’m sure in time I’d get used to it, but … No. I’ve been using PhotoShop for nearly a decade and there are some things I just don’t want to give up.

I will however continue using Linux for my day-to-day tasks, hopping onto a Windows box, or maybe even a Mac to do my design work. Overall, I guess you can consider me a convert.

How can Google offer this service for free?
We believe that all users deserve free, fast and sanitary online access. To offset the cost of providing the TiSP service, we use information gathered by discreet DNA sequencing of your personal bodily output to display online ads that are contextually relevant to your culinary preferences, current health status and likelihood of developing particular medical conditions going forward. Google also offers premium levels of service for a monthly fee (see below).

GMail Paper

You can make us print one, one thousand, or one hundred thousand of your emails. It’s whatever seems reasonable to you.

Anyone wanna risk life and limb to mirror the site somewhere behind “the wall”?