
This beautiful coin won a Dutch contest to design a 5 euro commemorative coin. The winning designer, Stani Michiels, (actually, it’s more the winning architect) has a nice detailed process story about the winning design. The stunning thing for me was that the entire process of designing the coin was all done with free software — Python, SPE editor, PIL, pyCairo, Gimp, Inkscape, Phatch — on an Asus Eee PC that ran Ubuntu.
Absolutely stunning work and a glowing tribute to the versatility, quality and cost of Linux in a ‘production’ environment. If only Linux and most other free software were easy enough for more people (like our parents) to access and use on their desktops, the world might be better, freer and less energy-hungry than it is now.
[Via Design Oberserver]
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- alternative, architecture, coin, computer, dutch, euro, free, linux, mint, python, unix
Teaching children to use Windows is like teaching them to smoke tobacco — in a world where only one company sells tobacco. Like any addictive drug, it inculcates a harmful dependency.
›› Richard Stallman rips into the One Laptop Per Child project
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If you are on a Mac, need a simple software to automate your backups and don’t have much money to spare, you definitely need to take a look at iBackup. Created by Martin Jahn, iBackup is a simple-to-use back up tool that allows for easy restoration as well. Not only does it back up your files, it can also save system preferences and settings from applications like iCal, iSync, Keychains, etc. Very highly recommended for those who need a simple backup tool that can automate backups with minimum fuss.
If you are using it in a commercial environment, you need to pay for it though. But that’s not really a lot to ask for, is it?
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Type this into the address bar of your freshly installed beta version of Google Chrome.
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‘Whoa’, but hey, it is beta software.
[Via atc]
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Like many nerds, I really cannot do without Quicksilver on my Macs. For those not familiar with Quicksilver, it is (at the very basic level) a keyboard application launcher (though it’s capable of many more things). There are a number of Quicksilver pretenders for the Windows and I have tried a number of them. My favourite, though, has always been Find and Run Robot. I have been using it for the last three years and it has never let me down — it is lightning fast, doesn’t slow your computer down and stays out of the way.
Having said that, Quicksilver is a very powerful application, and honestly, Find and Run Robot is not really at that level yet. But it works great as an application launcher and can only get better.
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