Skip to main content

KDE 3.4.1

Nasturtium flower striped with sunlight

Well, no, that’s not really a KDE screenshot but the colours were bright and striking so I thought I’d post it anyway.

KDE 3.4 is no palace revolution (so far; waiting to see what happens with 3.4.2 when – in theory – some of the Safari code-bomb gets integrated) but everything about it seems to be faster and prettier than 3.3. And everything speaks. That might be more major if you have trouble seeing.

For an example of a minor but significant improvement, one of Konqueror’s help menu entries is “Introduction” which gives you four pages graded in complexity from “click here and see what happens” to “here in mindblowing detail are the specifications that I hew to”. It’s not the be-all and end-all of intro screens, but it’s visually pleasant and a potentially useful icebreaker for new users.

The Cooker update also brought me a newer GIMP, which seems to have preview panes pretty much everywhere by now, along with some new filters scattered through the menus and an intriguing packaged named “swfdec-gimp”, which loads a frame from a Flash animation at the resolution of your choice.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

new life for an old (FTX) PSU, improved life for one human

the LEDs on this 5m strip happen to emit light centred on a red that does unexpectedly helpful things to (and surprisingly deeply within) a human routinely exposed to it. it has been soldered to a Molex connector, plugged into a TFX power supply from a (retired: the MoBo is cactus) Small Form Factor PC, the assorted PSU connectors (and loose end from the strip) have been taped over. the LED strip cost $10.24 including postage, the rest cost $0, the PSU is running at 12½% of capacity, consumes less power than a laptop plug-pack despite running a fan. trial runs begin today.
Post a Comment
Read more

every-application-is-part-of-a-toolkit at work

I have a LibreOffice Impress slideshow that I wish to turn into a narrated video. 1. export the slideshow as PNG images (if that is partially broken — as at now — at higher resolutions, Export Directly as PDF then use ‘pdftoppm’ (from the poppler-utils package) to do the same). 2. write a small C program (63 lines including comments) to display those images one at a time, writing a config file entry for Imagination (default transition: ‘cross fade’) based on when the image-viewer application (‘display,’ from the GraphicsMagick suite) is closed on each one; run that, read each image aloud, then close each image in turn. 3. run ‘Imagination’ over the config file to produce a silent MP4 video with the correct timings. 4. run ‘Audacity’ to record speech while using ‘SMPlayer’ to display the silent video, then export that recording as a WAV file. 4a. optionally, use ‘TiMIDIty’ to convert a non-copyright-encumbered MIDI tune to WAV, then import that and blend it with the speech (as a quiet b...
1 comment
Read more

boundaries

pushing the actual boundaries of the physical (not extremes, the boundaries themselves) can often remove barriers not otherwise perceived. one can then often resolve an issue itself, rather than merely stonewalling at the physical consequences of the issue.
Post a Comment
Read more