Playing Cards

I made those playing cards decks some time ago motivated by the Bellot set from GNOME Games being licensed as LGPL, so not free enough for the Open Clip Art Library (where the requirement is for release as Public Domain).
There are four variants: ornamental, white, bordered" and simple. Feedback on my blog and OpenClipart.org mailing list indicated ornamental as the nicer one.
So I submited them right away in the Open Clip Art Library and after some months, encouraged by Alan submitted the ornamental variant to GNOME Games (they made 2.14).

Coming no present day and to the actual news, it seems those cards are making a way in KDE 4, with the white variant considered a favorite.

Nice to have my cards set in both GNOME and KDE :p

Cu o floare nu se face primavara

Calla Lilly

This is not about software or Open Source, if you are not interested in my ranting, please skip this post.

Not sure how, I got a couple of white Calla Lilly on my garden.

They bloomed for the first time in the middle June when it has hot, sunny and I was happy. The flowers withered after a few weeks of the torrid summer about at the same time with my good spirit.

After a couple of months they bloomed again. It was a bad time: I was depressed, whitout any drop of vital energy. They bloomed and withered without any consequence.

Now, in this dark, cold and rainy October, in an exercise of supreme futility another bud appeared. I highly doubt it will get to bloom, the leaves are in the process of becoming yellow and brown, air temperature approaches negative values in the morning.

Winter is coming, I wonder it will survive and live another year with this hostile climate.


Note: pictures taken back in June.

Raster to Vector conversion

So Rejon is trying to kick me out of my current apathy by making me write more on my blog... Well, it does not work but at least I hope this is an informative post.

We, at the Open Clip Art Library, received a donation from worldlabel.com, it consist of a number of clipart images, unfortunately in raster (JPEG) format.

The policy of our library is to accept only images in vector format (preferably SVG), so we have to do some conversion. At first, Gerald came with the idea to manually trace the images, basically redrawing them and maybe use the opportunity to improve them. I was supporting more an automatic trace, as a chance to get beginners involved.

At this point Ryan came with a nice tutorial about converting from raster to vector using both Inkscape and The Gimp. I think the process can be greatly simplified by using only Inkscape and select the right parameters for trace, so I did my own simplified tutorial.

Shortly: for new people wanting to contribute to Open Clip Art Library, we have a very simple task: raster images wanting to be converted to vector, and two nice tutorials describing the process.

Note: for people in the Fedora Art project, this is the ccHost in use, which I think would be useful for us.