Create your own animations with this open source motion graphics tool
In animation, there’s an old saying that animation is easy, it’s the tweening that’s hard. In traditional animation practices established in the 1920s, key frames are drawn by a lead artist, and staff artists draw the in-between frames. This is called inbetweening, or “tweening” for short. Today, computers are often recruited for the work of inbetweening. In the words of Tony DeRose, of Pixar: read more...
Open source desktop publishing with Scribus
One of my favorite shelves at my local comic book store is the zine rack. Filled with self-published booklets that are too niche, too quirky, or just too individual for any company to spend money on producing, zines are produced by one or two people who have something to say and want to express themselves through text and graphics. Zines are usually created by cutting out blocks of text and graphics and literally pasting them to a...
Open source design collaboration with Penpot
When a team of designers works together on a project, one of the most important goals is consistency. Whether you need a consistent look because of a corporate identity or just for visual cohesion, the look and layout of pages and screens must be reasonably similar within any given project. It’s hard enough to do this as a solo artist, and it gets more complex with added contributors. It becomes a monumental task when several...
Open source file sharing with this Linux tool
In the early days of my Linux experience, I was the technology director of a small PreK-12 school district in the state of New York. Our technology budget was always stretched to the limit. We were a Windows 2000 Active Directory Domain, but we had limited central server disk space and no teacher home directories. In addition, we experienced a dozen or so hard disk failures for staff computers. read more Powered by...
My favorite MyPaint features for digital painting
I don’t practice drawing, so I don’t expect to be able to draw well, but I do sometimes enjoy drawing, regardless of skill. One application I use when attempting to get some imagery out onto a canvas is MyPaint, a digital paint application focusing on a clean interface, appealing brushes and materials, and ease of use. The ease of use part is important for artists and chronic doodlers like myself. read more Powered by...
How I play Tetris on the mainframe
The ability to run Linux on modern mainframes opens doors to doing all kinds of things on the platform. An Apache HTTP server? Easy! A database? Would you like SQL or NoSQL? Kubernetes? Sure! As I concluded in Linux on the mainframe: Then and now, all of the most popular Linux distributions for servers today have versions for the mainframe. read more Powered by...
