Life with GIMP 2.7

Trying to repair the ugly "Could not find compatible GRE between version 5.0 and 5.0." error after a Firefox 5 upgrade I did the mistake to run a full "yum update" which (so I deserve for having many repos enabled) brought me with GIMP 2.7.1, which I consciously downgraded from many months ago (2.7.2 is not available for F14). I have work to do: edit photos, not install/uninstall and downgrade apps again, so here are the first things I did trying to make GIMP 2.7 bearable:

• change the "Export..." from Ctrl+Shift+E to Ctrl+S: I edit JPEGs and want to save JPEGs, not create from scratch to need XCFs (2.7 allow you to "Save" only in XCF, everything else is supposed to be exported);
• changed the shortcut for "Fit Image to Window" from Ctrl+Shift+J back to Ctrl+Shift+E (as it used to be in 2.6): with image surgery you need to zoom a lot, and do that only one handed, the other hand holds the mouse;
• disabled the confirmatin for closing unsaved images, since it is triggered even when the image was saved as JPEG, my desired target - hope won't lose data due to it.

Now back to work, will try to use it as it for the rest of the day and see how I can adjust to the new brushed, which dynamically change size (very annoying when you need precise size for image surgery) and force you to play with the brush scale on a tiny slider.
Wish me luck and wait for some hot pics on my photography blog later today (hopefully, if GIMP cooperates).

Update: in the end I created a set of custom fuzzy round brushes at various sizes: 3, 5, 9, 15, 19, 25 and use those, the slider is not usable to adjust the size. Hmmm... the GIMP developers are going to great lengths to remove useful functionality left and right, like they are aiming for inclusion into GNOME... newsflash for them: ain't gonna happen, these GNOME is not aimed at such advanced users like those able to edit pictures.

Summer wallpapers

Since I am not currently member in any artwork/design team, but I sense some people are playing with wallpapers and some people may enjoy pretty pixels, I think I'll share a few wallpaper-sized images (and not having a group to submit them to, the blog is just good for that). Enjoy and feel free to use them.

note: wide-screen sized, freely licensed as in CC-BY-SA

Confusing websites or confused users?

There are a few people following me as a photographer on social networks, many of those people which I didn't meet yet in real life, some I will never meet. And from time to time I get question, like this one:

Person: Hi Nicu could you indicate a Photoshop free to download ?
Me: you can't get legally a free Photoshop download, it is a proprietary software developed by the Adobe corporation, which don't allow for free use. this is the reason I personally don't use Photoshop bit a Free alternative. GIMP, which can be downloaded at no cost from its makers website: http://gimp.org/
Me: oh, a better download link is probably http://www.gimp.org/windows/
Person: how i could donwload , this site its so crazy

I realized the main GIMP website may be a bit unfriendly for an end user, since the downloads page is all about installing on Linux from packages, this is why I returned with the Windows link, but how the user is unable to use that page, with a big Installer link, is beyond me, so I stayed silent, making such an user install and run GIMP would result for more annoyances for me in the long run.

However, I don't understand how the same people are able to find their way on scammers websites, which sell GIMP and other apps as their own, and download from such messes (this particular user didn't try a scam site, but I am sure would not have declared that "crazy").

YouTube and CC: a baby step in the right direction

I wanted this feature forever, since I started uploaded stuff on YouTube, the ability to license them under CreativeCommons terms and today it was at last added. Have I already relicnesed my videos? Not yet... why? for the same reason I call it a "baby step", only CC-BY can be used, CC-BY-SA is not available. Still, I have hope for it, looking at the comments on the announcement, most people ask for two things: mass re-license and CC-BY-SA, pretty much what I expect too before taking this step. I asked for the feature too, I invite my readers to do the same.

Elections

Almost unnoticed, the voting for the Board and FESCo started and I voted, but I am a bit of disappointed: very few Board candidates have public answers and no one shows enough balls, even the one who tried is very weak and ambiguous (so I didn't give him full endorsement). I ended giving the most candidates zero points (too bad I can't give negative points) and a few points to a couple.

Politics sucks.