Discontinued and other stuff

Hello everyone,

I see this blog of mine has started to pick up quite some slack, especially on the Inkscape tutorial for The Perfect Triangle and banshee.is_audio_player. I am all ecstatic about that, however I am going to have to say that this blog has been discontinued for quite some time.

I’ve moved on to other things in my life, like writing in my native tongue — Macedonian, I very rarely post things in English because I think the English-speaking world doesn’t have to change as much as the Macedonian-speaking one.

I won’t be deleting this blog, for the sake of the people who want to learn a trick or two in Inkscape and maybe are interested in the contents which I have written about. But, I won’t be posting any more, or at least that much.

When I do post, it will most likely be something minor and quite rare (maybe once a few months, hence I don’t really have that much time), or on my Tumblelog (might not be in English) and my Twitter. They are the most up to date websites of my own.

I’m currently working on some projects, like this webapp for telling you very simply how the weather is in Macedonia or parts of Macedonia. I’m also beginnig to become much more active at the school which is giving me quite a headache in organizing free time. Actually, I don’t really have that much free time… nonetheless,

That’s it. Thanks for reading this and read ‘ya later, I guess…

I’m Branding — Renewed

The Avatar I created for myself, about a month ago, has been generating a lot of popularity.

That’s why I chose to republish it under a Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license.

Here it is:

 
50×50 px

Please, don’t use it as your own avatar.

Sincerely,
Stojance Dimitrovski

The Photo. On BoingBoing

A couple days ago (maybe there’s a week or so) I created this Photo for a really cool story called Scroogled, about Google turning bad from Cory Doctorow. I liked the story so much I created a poster for it.

Today, 11 October I saw the same picture up on BoingBoing.net (one of the most read blogs in the world)! I couldn’t believe my eyes! Approx. 1.7 Million people are looking at my photo! Cool!

Thank you Cory for posting my picture! I love Creative Commons!

Make Banshee Recognize Your Mass Storage Device As A DAP

I have this cool phone, music phone, from Nokia. It goes by the name N91. It’s a great phone. 4 gigs of Memory, on a HDD, and arround 5 MB internal phone memory (even though the HDD isn’t detachable ). Every time that I want to add new music to it I have to do it manually. Connect the phone to the computer, use Nautilus to transfer songs, if they are Ogg manually convert them to MP3 and so on…

As Banshee is the player I use, which has great DAP support, I wanted it to see my phone as a DAP (well it should, it’s a music phone). There were two ways:

1. Teach HAL (Hardware Abstraction Layer) that the phone is a DAP; very hard — humans are smarter: so is Banshee
2. Create a .is_audio_player file inside the root directory of the Mass Storage Device — my phone.

Then you need to add a few lines into the file:

audio_folders=My Music/
folder_depth=2
output_formats=audio/mpeg,audio/mp3,audio/x-aac

Now you can start Banshee and sync up the phone. Great!

P.S. This works with the newest Rhythmbox too!

I.Listen.Tofu

Tofu is the name of my newest project! It’s a super-duper voice recording application, based on GStreamer, written in Python and the GUI, which still hasn’t been written, in GTK. It’s supposed to represent Voice Candy for Gnome, but we’ll see how much of that will be done.

You can think of Tofu as Cheese for your Voice! 

Much of the codebase, for recording and playing has been written. I just need to upload it to Google Code. Speaking of code, the code isn’t really clean right now. It’s been two days since I started writing! I try to use as much as I can from the Python writing convention, thus having unclean code!

What’s up with the name!?

Well I’ve been thinking a lot and Tofu seemed the best. I wanted to call it Gofu, but that sucks. I even thought of calling it Schwa (as the wovel), but it’s just too weird a name of. … what a sentence …

And basically it truly represents Cheese for your Voice.

No Good Kids

Are there such things like “no good kids”? Many people would say “NO” because many of them know that kids are as good as everyone, they have their qualities which should be respected no matter their color, religion, faith, geographical position and many other similar things. Me, as an adolescent, and trust me a recent kid must say that I was greatly insulted by a web site today. Why? Read on…

As I woke up at 8 am today, booted my Fedora 7 on the laptop, checked my mail, and went over to reader.google.com. Over there were waiting 100+ unread feeds. So I started reading, and somewhere on the 20th feed I read a sentence that I wish would have never been written.

The Guys over at CrunchGear have called kids “no good”! I wouldn’t quote the actual sentence here, due to copyright problems that may occur.

What’s the good in calling your future no good? Is it Okay if you were poor like those children in Africa, and be called no good because you are living in Africa and have no money to buy a real computer, or don’t have nice clothing, or that you believe in Who-Knows-What!? No! Kids should never be called “no good” because they are the future, and if they aren’t good god knows who will be!

You can find this very disturbing text ($100 Laptop, Only $400) on CrunchGear, the sentence that I’m refering to is the second sentence. The article was written by Ilya Kochanov.

Please, don’t call kids “no good” — they certainly are better than you are!

Some Things…

Oh… It has been a while since my last post. Mainly because of my extreme business with school and other responsibilites. But, see how good of a person I am, I found time to post just for You!

Things that happened:

• Started school, first year in RJK High
• Studied
• Made new friends
• Spent SFD 2007 really great!
• Got a new 100GB internet connection, for a good price, FINALLY!
• Bought myself a Wireless Router, yippee

Idea:

I somehow got an idea that my favorite Music Player, Banshee, should support Videos.

Is This Really Happening?

Why do I always need to change feed readers, and distros? Yesterday I installed Fedora, and since that time I hate Ubuntu so much!

Now I’m starting to hate Google Reader. Newshutch seems very much more intuitive and beautiful, whilst Google Reader has the grossest interface I’ve ever seen. Is this because of features, or just the beauty or usefulness? Yes, of course I’ll miss Google Reader’s shared option, which is really cool, but I’ll be voting for the same feature to come over at Newshutch.

Newshutch really is the Feed Reader that doesn’t suck! It has the best interface ever seen, and I kinda think it’s more useful than Google Reader. Ok, on to reading my newest feeds!

Eat Cheese In A Photo Booth

Have you ever tried eating Cheese inside a Photo Booth? I sure haven’t, but a guy named Daniel has and he’s so good at it!

Remember the guy Daniel I mentioned in the sentence before this one. Well he’s one truly amazing guy! Writing an application named Cheese is a very hard job, but he’s making it easy, very easy indeed!

If I could give him the Nobel prize for the application he has written, be sure I’ll!

Cheese is the coolest application ever known to man, it can take your picture from a web cam and turn it into something marvelous, into a super duper photo that you can share with your friends and family! It even can shoot a video!!! Basically this application, Cheese, speaks GTK, uses GStreamer for viewing and I don’t know if it listens GStreamer too. Here are some quick photos I took with it, too bad I couldn’t use my built-in webcam to do it, rather I had to borrow a USB web cam from my sister.

Say ‘Cheese’ Everyone!

 

 

 

More on my Flickr photos page.

I’m Branding

Nifty title, huh? Yeah, that’s me!

I started to brand myself, making me more unique in the online world. What does branding exactly means? Well, putting your unique stamp all over the online world, a way to be easily recognizable by anyone who encounters you online, umm… your online self. Ring a Bell?

Well today I just had one of my own crazy drawing excursions, and finally an avatar is here! It starts to appear almost everywhere I exist online: Mugshot, Deviantart, Last.fm WordPress, yatta, yatta, yatta… (Don’t you think “drn, drn jarinja” is better )

But there is one little problem. As much as I enjoy publishing things under a Creative CommonsNo! I will not publish my avatar under a Creative Commons license. Why? Well that’s me? I’m not under a Creative Commons license, am I? No, I’m not! And that is the reason for which I don’t release my avatar under a Creative Commons license! license, a brick struck me today. When the choice was made that the drawing I drew will become my own brand/avatar online, I started wondering whether it is a good idea to publish it under Creative Commons. I made the decision almost immediately!

This image is Copyright © Stojan Dimitrovski, 2007

Now if I find someone using it as their own, without my permission, you’ll be hearing from my lawyer and this is not a joke! I’m dead serious. A lawsuit will shortly follow, and the DMCA will be notified by the time you can say ‘DMCA’! And believe me, if needed I’ll take this up to a supreme-er court, even. So watch out for what you are doing!!! I’m dead serious about this, very serious indeed!