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GREYCstoration

GREYCstoration has slightly improved over last few months. It uses autotools and is fully translatable now. I've just sent my translation into Russian to Haypo :)



If you care about i18n, go grab the sources from SVN and translate this great plug-in. There are just 13 messages.

Photofonts

Yesterday I read about photofonts in a russian typography community at LiveJournal.

Even if you don't read in Russian, have a look at examples that are provided there.

At the moment photofonts are supported only in several applications, but this might change, because the idea was "floating in the air" and is likely to be widely adopted soon.

Inventors are a russian firm Fontlab Ltd. that is known for its great proprietary typographic tools, oriented towards western users.

Homepage

Open specification of photofonts

KTU's gig in Moscow

This is most likely the best "King Crimson family" gig this year.

KTU adequates to Kluster + TU, where Kluster is Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen - two crazy finns, crazy in a really beautiful way, and TU is, of course, Pat Mastelotto and Trey Gunn.

It turned out that most people who came didn't really know what kind of music Kluster plays, so it was a kind of surprise that most of attention was drawn by Kimmo, whose excellent perfomance just couldn't leave anyone emotionless.



Samuli and Trey were not really that interesting as shooting targets :) And Pat was superb :)



If you care listening to a studio record of KTU, you can buy their "8 armed monkey" album.

Winter...

Winter has come early this year



It's really great to live just 5 minutes away from a huge park :)

So far...

It looks like I will finally pay for hosting and finish my website. I'm just really tired by having snapshots here, there and everywhere. They should be in one place really, and Jakub's Original looks like a perfect tool for a web gallery.



So far, CREATE is moving forward. There is still no common decision on name of root directory, however.

To my excitement, after setting up SpamBlacklist extension on mediawiki we have much less issues with spammers.

Several interesting software project are about to release new code: Inkscape 0.43, Audacity 1.2.4 and 1.3.0, Hugin 0.5, Grisbi 0.5.8. And all of them except Inkscape require updated translation into Russian :)

Besides, Bulia claims to have ~120 Kbyte of diffs of new code in his local Inkscape development tree, which means that I should once again forget about using stable version of this awesome application ;)

Ubuntu

Unfortunately there are places where Ubuntu is way too old.

LittleCMS - 1.13 instead of 1.14
GIMP-Print 4.2.7 instead of Gutenprint 5.0
linuxwacom - 0.6.4 instead of 0.7.0
Freetype - 2.1.7 instead of 2.1.9!!!

Scribus complains about possible errors when compiling with this old release of Freetype.

Even openclipart is 0.13 only.

I was under impression that Ubuntu is the best place for artists, because Andy Fitzsimon and others are there. It turns out, it's not really the best place.

Also, I'm still fighting setting up my Graphire3/USB in GIMP. It does see all three devices (cursor, stylus and eraser), but I cannot make it remember what tools each one should use. In an ideal case I just should take wacom stylus and choose an instrument with it and GIMP will apply appropriate settings and remember them. But all changes with stylus are applied only to Core Pointer device.

If I use Carol's devicerc, GIMP turns these three devices off automatically.

I might be doing something wrong, because under Windows wacom works like a charm.

Tea House

It's been more than three years since I first came to a classical chinese tea house.
Lots of things happened since then, still I feeel like home every time I'm there.



(the photo is clickable)

Interesting is that in China people don't drink tea that way any more. What moscow tea house holders do is what only monks in chinese temples keep doing.