You know that obsession I’ve got with awesome stuff and the compulsion to share it? Well, it seems to have taken hold this morning. There are two things in the RSS feed today that simply must be shared. For these, everything – looming deadlines, familiar responsibilities, and miscellaneous addictions – can wait. The first item is a link to LibreGraphics magazine. The second is a call for proposals from a conference of the same...

Next Monday, I’m going to be giving a talk entitled “Writing and Publishing With Open Source Tools” at Camp KDE, the annual KDE conference for North America. For those interested in attending, the talk happens at 12:15 pm at the Hotel Kabuki, in San Francisco. I’m really excited about the talk and I think it’s going to be excellent. (I know, having high expectations for your own performance is the route to obscurity,...

Today was the 25th anniversary of the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Considering that it is a major anniversary of a catastrophic event, I’ve been somewhat surprised at the response. Or, I guess I should clarify, the lack of one. A quick search on Google News shows that it is being covered, but the world seems far more focused on the happenings in Egypt and the upcoming launch of Verizon’s iPhone. While the norm for most sites was...

Over the past week, I’ve been helping a non-profit put together a yearly thank-you calendar.  I’ve been using Scribus, and so far, it’s been going very smoothly. Scribus includes a nifty “Calendar Wizard” that lets you generate date grids for any month or year.  But though the Calendar Wizard works well, I found that it didn’t support all of the features that I would like.  Therefore, I spent a little bit of time and put...

Note: Still working on the book. Hope to be done soon.  More information will be posted when I actually finish. To the many kind people who have asked, I am still alive. Yes, I am still working on the book.  Large projects have minds of their own, and I am having a very hard time convincing this one that she should be “finished.” Every time I think I’m nearing the gate, I discover something else that needs to be done.  Writing...