Some stylish button/banner in Gimp (with video)

In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to make a button or a banner if you want like this one, on the bottom of the article you can watch my video which I recorded, I belive it can help you to understand some steps. So here is the final result of this tutorial:



1) First open up Gimp and make a new image (300x100px is just fine). Select an area for the button (try to invoke the selection tool by pushing R button on your keyboard).



2) Now go to Select / Rounded rectangle
Radius 20%
Concave unchecked



3) Make a new layer called 'Content'. Click on the Bucket fill tool in Gimp menu (or just Shift+B) and fill the area with white.
Notice: pushing "d" button will set the colors to the default = black & white and "x" button will switch them.

4) Make a new layer called 'Border' and grow the selection (Select / Grow (1px)). Fill the layer with black and move it down (under layer Content). You should get something like this:



5) Select the text tool (T) and type some text with a color you want (the text layer should be on the top), I used 'Sans Bold' font:
Notice, move the text by using the move tool (M).



6) Right click on the text layer and select 'Alpha to selection', than grow this by 1px, make another layer and fill it with black. Call this layer 'Text border' and move it under the text in the layer dialog box.



7) Now select the layer called 'Border' and apply the drop shadow effect (Filters / Light and Shadow / Drop Shadow)
X: 0
Y: 0
Blur radius: 8
Apply this effect also on the layer called 'Text Border'.


8) Right click on the layer called 'Content' and click 'Alpha to selection'. We are going to fill this layer with some gradient (L). I used these colors: e1e1e1 and 939393. Now make the gradient from the top to the bottom of the image. Notice: maybe holding Ctrl button will help you.


9) Now again, right click on the layer 'Content' and select 'Alpha to selection. Now select the 'Rectangle select tool' (R). Hold Ctrl button, which will subtract the current selection, and select about a half of the button.


10) Create a new layer called 'Lighting' and fill it with white. Set the layer opacity to about 25% or so. This layer must be on the top of the layer dialog box.


Now the button is completed but you can add a mirror reflex by following these steps:

11) Merge all the layers down (right click on the layer / merge down), so you get only one layer probably called 'Background'.

12) Select the banner/button with the 'Rectangle select tool' (R).



13) Now copy this selection (Ctrl+C) and paste it on a new layer ('Background #1' is just fine). Now go to Layer / Transform / Flip vertically and move the layer down by using the move tool (M) and arrows on your keyboard. It should look like this:



14) This is the final step. Make sure you are working on the layer called 'Background #1'. Select the gradient tool (L) and use these settings:



This should be your result:



By the way I also made a video which is not high quality but it could help you to understand some steps, enjoy !

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Recovering Ubuntu after installing Windows

I belive many people use the Dual boot solution, Windows and Linux on one machine. You are able to run your favourite programs on Windows and you can also test Linux and get to known with it. But there is a little problem with the installation. If you install Windows and after that Linux, Linux will make a GRUB which will appear on every time when you turn on your computer and ask if you want to run Linux or Windows. Otherwise if you install Linux and after that Windows, or just if you have Linux and Windows installed and you reinstall the Windows, the GRUB will disappear and you wont be anymore asked whether you want to run Windows or Linux, Windows will just start booting without any prompt.

Fortunately there is a way how to solve this. You just need to recover your GRUB and all you need to have is a live cd of some Linux so put it into yout CD tray and follow these steps.

1) Open terminal ( Applications / Accessories / Terminal )

2) Run grub as root with this command

sudo grub

3) Now type this

find /boot/grub/stage1

This should throw a line with a label of your harddisk and parition (e.g. (hd0,1))

4) Now type this

root (hd0,1)

Note: (hd0,1) should be the result returned by the previous command.

5) And this

setup (hd0)

Note: again, if your command in the 3rd step returned something else (like (hd1,2)) than type setup (hd1).

6) Now the terminal should type something like 'succeeded and Done' so exit the grub config

quit

and restart your computer. The GRUB should now appear. :p

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3D realistic looking rubik's cube in Gimp (with video)

Today I'm going to show you how to make a 3-dimensional pretty good looking rubik's cube. The steps should be easy to understand. I've also made a little video which is situated right on the bottom of the article so you can watch it.

1) Open Gimp with a new image 300x300px (white background is ok).
2) Fill the background with a checkboard pattern (Filters / Render / Pattern / Checkboard). Size 100px.
You should get something like this:



3) Now we will make a grid. Go to Filters / Edge-Detect / Edge
Algorithm: Sobel
Amount: 2
Smear



4) Invert the colors (Colors / Invert)

5) Now we have a black grid on a white background and we want to make a border around the image.
Go to Image / Canvas size. (304x304px)

6) Select the Move tool (M on keyboard) and center the image. If you are able to handle this step with a mouse than ok, but I used arrows on my keyboard, twice right and twice down.

7) Now create a new layer. Select Bucket fill tool (Shift+B), Select all image (Ctrl+A) and fill the image with black. Than move this new black layer down and deselect all (Ctrl+Shift+A). You should get this result:



8) Now fill the image with some random colors, i used these (green [307617], blue [173d76], red [ff0000], white [ffffff], yellow [aecb0e]). After that, merge the layer down so you get only one layer.



9) Now we are going to make a cube. (Filters / Map / Map object) Use following values, but feel free to change it :p

Options/Map to: Box
Options/Transparent background checked
Options/Enable antialiasing (default)
Light/Lightsource type: Point light
Orientation/Position (default)
Orientation/Rotation
X: 30,0
Y: 45,0
Z: 0,0

10) Voila, the cube is done, but you can continue with 3 more steps to make it better :p.

11) Go to a dialog with layers, right-click on the layer you have there (there should be only one now) and click Alhpa to selection. Than go Select, Grow (1px). Create a new layer, fill it black and move it down. Deselect all (Ctrl+Shift+A).



12) Go to Filters / Light and Shadow / Drop Shadow. (0, 0, 8, black, opacity 80)

13) Add a new layer and move it on the bottom. Create some gradient, something like this, which is the final result:



I noticed that it's a little illogical, because I have two same colors (e.g. this green-green-red) on the same piece. This situation could never happen on the real rubik's cube. Maybe someone will find the solution than let me know in comments.

And here is the video, sorry for the quality but it's pretty good on my pc, this server uses an enormous compression.

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Delete unnecessary with Gimp

In this tutorial, I want to show you how to delete unnscessary from your holiday photo. First, open up Gimp, I used this image and I want to delete those people :p



1) Now focus on the right bottom of the image and start with the man in a yellow swimsuit. Select Clone tool in Gimp menu or by pushing C button on your keyboard.

2) Now you need to select a place on your photo from where you want to copy. Hold Ctrl and click somewhere on the picture (somewhere on a sand I suppose). Now you can just delete him.



Note: If your picture is in high resolution, you should scale the brush even if you are using the largest (19px).

3) Actually you can also select a piece of your image and use it as a pattern.

4) This method is quite simple but very useful, here is my result:

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The Lilac Chaser

The Lilac Chaser (also known Pac-Man :p), invented by Jeremy Hinton, is another optical illusion. Quite old, but still pretty nice. Just focus on the cross in the middle.

On the beginning you will see 11 pink (lilac) points on a gray background. There is also a gap which moves every tenth of a second (0.1s) in the clockwise direction.

After a while, the gap will take the green color. This is due to an interesting effect in which the colors of the lilac points are inverted in the optical illusion to a green color. See the image below, that green is right opposite to pink. If the points were black, one would see white where the gaps were.



And in the end, while still focusing on the cross, the points will disapper and you will see just the grey background.
An interactive version of the illusion may be found here: http://www.michaelbach.de/ot/col_lilacChaser/index.html. This version allows viewers to adjust the color, saturation, and timing of the disks.

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One year older

I got my b-day today, which means that I was born 17 years ago. Actually it's about 204 months ago, which is about 6120 days ago and that's about 146880 hours ago and that's about 8812800 minutes ago which is in fact 528768000 seconds ago.

Cya next year :p

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The same color illusion

This is a very nice optical illusion, also known as 'Adelson's checker shadow illusion' (Edward H. Adelson was a professor of Vision Science at MIT). It's a 3-dimensional situation. The chessboard has two colors: white and black. But there is also a green cylinder which drops shadow and makes two other colors: shadowed white and shadowed black. Now, would you belive that the color of a square labeled with letter A (black) is the same color as the color of a square labeled with letter B (shadowed white)?

I really disbellieved so I opened up my graphic editor (yes, it's Gimp) and checked this once again with the color picker tool. And here is the result, really unbelievable for me:

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Nokia N810 Internet Tablet

Nokia N810 isn't a hot news, actually the official release news comes from October 17, 2007 so it's about a year old but I think this machine is still very useable and maybe better than whatever else. N810 is not a phone, which is quite odd, because Nokia usually produces cellphones. But it's not a reason to cry, let's check this list of features and specifications:

Display: High-resolution 4.13” WVGA display (800 x 480 pixels) with up to 65,000 colors, which is not too much (but still sufficient) because PC (and iPhone) has 16M colors
Memory: DDR RAM 128MB
Storage: 2GB internal memory, support for compatible mini/microSD memory cards
Other characteristics:

• Smooth slide with integrated QWERTY keyboard
• Built-in GPS receiver
• High quality stereo speakers and sensitive microphone
• High-resolution widescreen display
• Integrated desk stand
• Integrated VGA web camera (640x480)
  
• HW key to lock touch screen and keys
• Ambient light sensor
• Price $320 these days on e-bay
  

The system Maemo Internet Tablet OS 2008 is based on Linux (actually on Debian) but it's possible to compile your own system (http://geekpenguin.blogspot.com/2008/01/n810-with-full-desktop-lovely.html). Web browser MicroB is modified Mozilla with full support for javascript, AJAX and Macromedia Flash, which means you can browse videos on Youtube, check your email via Gmail, use Google maps or Facebook. In-built media player for viewing and listening to downloaded, transfered or streamed media content has a support for these video formats: 3GP, AVI, WMV, MP4, H263, H.264, MPEG-1, MPEG-4, RV (RealVideo) and these audio formats: MP3, WMA, AAC, AMR, AWB, M4A, MP2, RA (RealAudio), WAV. All in all you can listen and watch whatever you want.

I don't have much experience with GPS, but I belive it can really make your life easier. There is a free version of WayFinder in the fresh installed N810 which contains almost all populated part of the world. Moreover WayFinder is able to navigate after buying the license.

Well, N810 isn't a computer and it's not a PDA, the label 'Internet Tablet' suits pretty well. I have to recommend this machine to everyone, who is looking for a pocket PC these days.

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Use Gimp, it's free !

It's absolutely free to download and use Gimp (abbreviated GNU Image Manipulation Program), moreover it's open source and it's avalible for Linux, Mac OS and also Windows. I agree that its't not as good as Adobe Photoshop is, but remember it's free and be sure Gimp is doing its best to be a good graphic editor.

There is also a good documentation on the Gimp official website. It's written in several languages (including czech :p) and for those who prefer tutorials is there a turorial page (in english).

Here i a list of some other tutorial pages for Gimp:
http://www.gimp-tutorials.com/
http://gimp-tutorials.net/
http://www.pixel2life.com/tutorials/gimp/

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Get acces to your files in Linux from Windows

This article is especially for people who use dualboot Windows+Linux. By default you can't read files situated in the Linux ext3 partition from Windows. Maybe you solved it by restarting Windows and booting Linux but you don't have to do it anymore. Fortunately there is a way how to get into your Linux partition. All you need to do is to download and install this utility http://www.fs-driver.org/download.html. As you can see, it's for Windows newer than Windows NT 4.0 including Windows XP and Windows Vista. Than follow the instructions or these screenshots.

Hope this was helpful for you.

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Easy Jailbreak your iPhone/iPod Touch

This is a manual how to jailbreak any iphone or ipod touch with software 1.1.4 or older. The new, unjailbroken, blocked iPod is a really fantastic and useful thing. Listen music and watch movies anywhere and browse the internet with WiFi. But it's still a little constrictive. You can't install any more applications like games (and there are lots of games avalible though), mail client, im messenger and so on. The first jailbreak took me about half a day but don't be stunned, than I fortunately found a program called ZiPhone and now it takes about 2 minutes.

Disclaimer: This method works for many people using iPod/iPhone but you can still get some error message or whatever. The easiest way how to solve it is to enter the error message into Google or into Youtube (this helped me once :p). Than be sure that you made a backup of your files and especially remember, that hacking iPhone/iPod is at your own risk.

Now, first thing to do is to download ZiPhone. Use this link:
http://download.ziphone.org/
http://ziphone.org/
Run ZiPhone, which should look like this screenshot:


For iphone users, click 'Do it all' and it will jailbreak and unblock your iphone (i guess this option will allow you to run any SIM in your iphone than, but I didn't tried because I'm ipod user :p) ipod users click just on jailbreak.

Now let the ZiPhone work a while but it shouldn't take more than 4 minutes. Than iPod restarts and there should appear 2 new icons on your display. The 'Z' is just a link to Zibri's blog where you can read more details about ZiPhone. And Installer is a simple application allowing you to install new apps :p.

I hope this was helpful for you. Enjoy and stay tunned :)

Post Scriptum: Once I got this problem, iPod stucked in the middle of jailbreaking and it threw this error: 'BSD root: md0, major 2, minor 0' watch this video on youtube, it should help you.

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I was looking for PDA

Several months ago, I was thinking about some PDA to buy. It's a very useful thing allowing you to organize your time with calendar, listen to mp3s, watch movies, browse internet, play games and so on. I was speculating about HTC Kaiser. It's a little box with loads of functions inside. It runs on Windows Mobile, which is good, because there are tons of programs for this system on the Internet. Kaiser's got a separated full qwerty keyboard so there is no software keyboard which would make your screen size smaller. The screen resolution is 320x240 which is not a cinema canvas but it's workable. Moreover Kaiser has a GPS module so can be used as a navigation on your trip. On the other hand, Kaiser is quite expensive and when I had it in my hands, in the shop, it got stucked and the processor wasn't as fast as I expected..
This is a photo of HTC Kaiser:



But than, while googling for another PDA, I found iPod Touch, which looked really amazing to me. The screen resolution of Touch is 480x320, which is twice larger than Kaiser's and the cost is twice smaller. When I saw the parameters, I couldn't belive. Actually, it's iPhone without the phone :p. Touch's got WiFi so you can browse Internet, mail, watch videos on Youtube and lots more. Moreover Touch has an accelerometer, which detects when you rotate it from portrait to landscape, then automatically changes the contents of the display, so you immediately see the entire width of a web page, your music in Cover Flow, or a photo in its proper aspect ratio.

Accelerometer in iPod Touch:

It's so sensitive that some games are based on it and you just control them by tilting.

Wathing videos on the 3.5inch display isn't really bad. You just need to convert the video movies into the right resolution and it must be mpeg. I use MediaCoder Iphone edition and it works pretty fine.

So in the end, I choosed Touch. Actually I ordered it the same day when i saw it :p. I was just afraid because lots of people say on the internet that it's just a movie&mp3 player and a web browser, nothing else, because the system is blocked for installing other apps. And it's true. And when i first tried to jailbreak Touch, it took me about a day. But after a little googling I found program which unblocked and jailbroke and made all the stuff in 10 minutes and it was immediately ready to use.

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Google Analytics

Today I set up Google Analytics (abbreviated GA) for this, ok, let's call it "blog". It's a very good monitoring system which allows you loads of things.

The registration was very easy, all you need to have is an email account on Google. Than you sign in here http://www.google.com/analytics/ and you follow the instructions. GA will make a javascript code which you copy on your site and it's done. GA now starts collecting the first information about your site, it tooks about a day or so. Than you can sign in and see practically everything about your visitors. Their web browser, system, resolution, what had they typed into search engine before they found you or where are they from. And at least number of visits a day.

So hope to see you there often and feel free to comment :p

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Odamex in Linux Xubuntu

It's a few days back I installed Odamex on my Linux Xubuntu. Odamex is a doom port like Zdaemon, Zdoom, Prboom etc. Actually it's based on Zdoom. As you maybe know, legendary doom2.exe doesn't work in Windows 2000+ including Windows XP of course. And that's the reason why came Odamex. It's trying to emulate old doom2.exe, the ages when we played this game on our very old machines with low resolution.
Well, the instalation was pretty easy. I used this command which i pasted to console and it started installing.

sudo apt-get install gcc g++ subversion libsdl1.2debian libsdl1.2-dev libsdl-mixer1.2 libsdl-mixer1.2-dev wx-common libwxgtk2.8-dev libwxgtk2.8-0 && cd ~ && svn co http://odamex.net/svn/root/trunk odamex && cd odamex && sudo make install

This command can be used only on debian based linux distributions for those who wanna use it. So now i got Odamex and I can play whenever I want from Linux. Unfortunately, Odamex is now at version 0.4.1 and still has a lot of bugs because it's still a "baby". The time of development is just far shorter than ZDaemon's for example. One problem I've noticed on the beginning is that sound doesn't work. My friends told me that Odamex works fine for them (they usually use Ubuntu) so I have to wait till Oda Team fix it.

Here is a screenshot, pretty good hm? :p

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Playing demos in Zdaemon

This is a thing I've been a long time thinking about. If I want to see a demo I usually have to download that demo than go to Zlauncher, local, play demo, than find the demo in tons of other demos, than select the pwads and than Zdaemon throws an error that I've set it wrong..

Now I found a way how to make this more comfortable. I thought that the command to play demo from the console (well, it's more a linux term, let's call it command line) is "zdaemon -playdemo something.zdo" but this didn't work so I opened up Firefox with google and found out in the Zdaemon officialy documantation that this command should be "zdaemon -netplay something.zdo".

So now we got the command and all we need to do is to make a .bat file (works it win xp too) and write into "zdaemon -netplay demo_you_want_to_run.zdo" (without the quotes). Than we run this file, e.g. netplay.bat and this will set the demo settings correctly and run it directly in Zdaemon. One-click.

Well, you won't probably do this because it's a lot of typing and it doesn't save your time. Neither will I :), but this is not still end of the article. I'm now working on pages for the Czech CTF Championship and there will be loads of demos to download. So I'm going to write a PHP script which will make the bat file instead of you and you will be able than to download the demo together with this file and run the demo easily one-click.

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Hello world

Hello world :)
I just test this system because it seems

• nice
• smart

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