Inkscape workshop

Yesterday was a full day for me, with the type of work I hate the most: on field, setting surveillance cameras, DVR-s, proprietary drivers, badly designed proprietary software, Windows laptops and such so didn't have the time to enjoy April Fools nor to go emo-style about my friends letting me alone in the cold with DFD.

But there was a positive part of the day, in the evening I had planned an Inkscape workshop with Ceata, to which I barely managed to arrive after the field task, so it was not completely wasted.

One of our friends who is a fire fighter by day and Linux user by night needed to learn how to make some signs and symbols for his day job, asked my for advice and tips so I proposed the workshop. We gathered 5 people with 3 laptops, no mice and one tablet (when I realised I forgot the USB mouse at home, I took with me the tabled which is gathering dust at the office). Lesson learned: no matter how good are you with the trackpad, when doing graphics you need a mouse.

We had the time for two signs, "no smoke" and "electricity hazard", as we had to go into many basic things, like drawing a circle or a star, using Ctrl key to preserve aspect ratio, changing colors and so on. My signs came like this (for source, open the URL and change the extension to .svg):

We also recorded on video as much as we could (the battery in my camera lasted for about 1 hour and 20 minutes) from which I made available a 5 minutes long segment to probe the interest (not sure is worth the effort for the full 1.7GB raw footage - editing and transcoding may take at least half a day and hosting + uploading would be tricky).