If you want a shiny barely-customizable straitjacket as a desktop environment, go buy a Mac. Please stop wrecking Ubuntu.

Case in point – what’s down at the bottom of the OpenMedia.ca site? “Hosted by Koumbit”. Awesome.

(and on a closely-related note to the OpenMedia link: on May 2nd, my fellow Canucks, remember your ABCs when you head to the polls…)

Link to YouTube link, for after Planet Ubuntu gets done killing the video embed. Seriously, go watch this, it’s only two minutes long. Two minutes of awesome.

So, let us now praise excellent little apps. There’s a Unix/Linux tradition of apps that do one job, and do it well, and that has continued into the desktop/GUI era.

I’ll start with PDF-Shuffler. All it does is merge & break apart PDFs, but it does it very intuitively, with a UI consisting of four buttons and a main screen. You can even drag’n'drop between two different PDF-Shuffler windows.

I use PDF-Shuffler regularly as an adjunct to Inkscape, which can produce PDF very easily but has (so far) no mechanism for multi-page documents (this is an SVG-spec issue, not just an Inkscape issue). PDF-Shuffler makes blending a group of single-page PDFs from Inkscape into one document for publishing painless and brainless.

A recent project involved a mostly-text six page PDF created in OpenOffice and four graphic-heavy single page PDFs from Inkscape. Rather than chance OOo’s SVG import, or hack about with Scribus (a very powerful app, but not one I use enough to be fluent with), PDF-Shuffler allowed me to merge Inkscape’s high quality PDFs with the OOo text PDF.

I can’t promise this will become an entirely regular feature, but I want to do a bit more blogging on the smaller, more elegant, often forgotten apps and features available in Ubuntu. If nothing else, it’s a change from complaining!

I love visiting the folks, I’m actually glad it’s snowing so we can hopefully get a good cross-country ski in tomorrow, but getting back to a proper, fully-functional computer will be kind of nice!

There’s another, closely related gap in the CC schemes that I’ve just run into: there’s no way to specify “this product may itself be used in commercial products, but may not be sold by itself”.

The use case I have is a PDF package of gradient backdrops for photography which I’ve created; it’s a basic PDF of Inkscape-created coloured backdrops, mostly aimed at photography of wargaming miniatures. I’d be happy to have these used by a wargaming company for webstore/catalog pictures (or by anyone else, of course), but I don’t want the PDF (or printed backdrops from it) sold on it’s own… and there’s no way to make that distinction clear with existing CC Licences.

Anyone else got any other interesting licencing edge cases they’ve run into, or suggestions for cases like this?

Also available on PDF, if you wish to print it for reading by the fire with care. (UPDATED 5th December 2012; I rearranged part of the website a while back and forgot to fix this link. Sorry. It works now!)

CC-BY License, although it doesn’t currently say so on the page. Done in Inkscape, naturally.

Happy Mid-Winter Holidays, everyone, however you celebrate them.

Sickness. “… I’m going to live to experience more of it thanks to people who refused to gracefully accept the ineffability of reality.”

“The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” — John Gilmore

“How many of you have broken no laws this month?” — John Gilmore

“So when they continued asking him, he lifted up himself, and said unto them, He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her.” — John 8:7, King James Bible