CorelDraw Basics: Drawing speed lines and blast lines

Category: Techwriter Blast lines, motion lines, and perspective lines are used to emphasize movement in a comic book or provide emphasis to a particular object, face, or person. The classic effect is still used in product packaging and is still used in comic books (though today more frequently in manga than Western comic books). Blast lines are used to emphasis this team-up between Spider-Man...

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Thoughts on Web Design

Category: Techwriter Smashing Magazine and a host of other web sites have web design down into a science, expanding into the smallish realm of smart screens and tablets and dealing with topics such as line-spacing, effects, and CSS3 . As fascinating and as incredibly complex as the science of design is, I'm afraid it's not something that comes naturally to me even after going through books such as Design ...

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The Reading Experience: EPUB and PDF

The Reading Experience: PDF and EPUB Category: Techwriter Unlike other readers who boast of reading a hundred ebooks a month, I like to take my time reading. Reading is both an educational and entertaining activity and reading ebooks should be hassle-free. Navigating, viewing, reading, and even annotating an ebook should be easy and straightforward. Thankfully, two file formats have emerged to be...

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Review: Sylpheed E-mail Client for Linux

Category: LinuxWith Mozilla effectively discontinuing updates to the venerable but popular Mozilla Thunderbird, there's a vacuum for a default e-mail client application for Linux users. Thunderbird is still the most popular e-mail client today in Linux boxes but the news about Mozilla's plans is disconcerting at least. Evolution is a popular alternative, particularly in Ubuntu-based distributions while KDE users are left with KMail, a somewhat ungainly e-mail application. If you're running Lubuntu or possibly even an LXDE-based distribution,...

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Digital Preservation: James Bond, Spider-Man, Indiana Jones and the 80s

2012, the year of the Dragon, is a great year for guys who were around during the 80s. The magic that is technology, taken for granted by billions of people around the world, has taken great leaps to preserve media that triggers memories and recaptures the sights and sounds of the good old days. The Indiana Jones movies is finally on Blu-Ray and fans around the world who still don't own the series can purchase...

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openSUSE 12.2 KDE Review - Now is the right time Part 3

Category: Linux Multimedia Codecs and VirtualBox Introduce me to a guy complaining about multimedia support in Linux and I'll show you the nice folks at the openSUSE Community web site who have tirelessly produced One-click installation files for Gnome and KDE users of openSUSE. In the old days, the venerable VLC player was a godsend for Linux users, but today you can pretty much do without it on a Linux...

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Writing Linux instructions for a Product Manual

Category: Linux When I was given the task to write Linux instructions for a product being released by a major manufacturer, I was ecstatic. Having contributed to the online openSUSE wiki and Mandriva wiki a few times and a devoted Linux evangelist via this blog, I was raring to write about Yast2, Synaptic Package Manager, or even Yum. Let's be honest: Windows users don't...

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openSUSE 12.2 KDE - Now is the right time Part 2

Grub2 and Plymouth It's actually the small things that make a Linux users heart beat fast. Adding Plymouth and migrating to Grub2 was a timely choice although casual users wouldn't really notice any difference other than the spanking new splash screen. A Plymouth boot screen in openSUSE was a change of pace and seemed to complement whatever speed modifications were added to openSUSE. Personally, I couldn't...

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Adobe Reader app for iOS and Android: Unnecessary?

Category: Techtoday PDF and Adobe I distinctly remember a time when my Computerworld editor muttered oaths at the idea of using PDF in publishing. It was confusing, redundant, and irrelevant when PageMaker and Word files took care of most of his needs. Fast-forward to twelve years later and we find technical documents in PDF being exchanged daily in huge companies and organizations. Consumers with...

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openSUSE 12.2 KDE - Now is the right time Part 1

Like most incremental releases, openSUSE 12.2 doesn't bring  anything new to the table, but the  maturity of the Linux distribution makes it a compelling choice compared to  fledgling distributions or even  long-running releases such as  Debian or PCLinuxOS. KDE 4.x retains all its usability and power that makes it a dependable choice over new desktop environments such as Unity and Gnome 3. openSUSE...

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Matching the Avengers with Linux Distributions Part 2

Bruce Banner - Mark Ruffalo - Linux Mint I've never been a huge fan of the Hulk and always preferred the character as a guest star in Amazing Spider-Man or Marvel Team-Up in the 70s and 80s. His storyline in the comic books have all been garbage since Peter David left the books, but Edward Norton's Incredible Hulk was . . .well . . . incredible. And then...

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Matching the Avengers with Linux Distributions Part 1

Category: Linux After watching The Avengers a second time and marveling on how bad-ass it still was, I thought it would be a good idea to make a delayed review of the characters and actors by matching them with popular Linux distributions. Tony Stark - Robert Downey Jr. - Ubuntu There's little doubt that RDJ and his armored alter-ego is currently the most popular...

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openSUSE 12.2 Gnome: A Quick Peek and Short Review

I tested openSUSE 12.2 Gnome first because I was eager to see what improvements the Gnome and openSUSE devs have made since the numerous criticisms against the desktop environment. I had recently been underwhelmed by Mageia Gnome 3's release but openSUSE rarely disappoints me so off I went with the ISO, a USB flash drive, and the dd command. Bottomline, openSUSE 12.2 Gnome is fast - really fast even on LiveUSB....

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