learning stuff

This has been tutorial day for me.

VnTutor has a page of GIMP video tutorials. Many of them are simple, or maybe it's just tasks I'm used to doing and forgot how I ever learned. There's a page of tutorials on the GIMP page, albeit not with videos (the merit of video or static pages is left as a debate for the voices in the reader's head). I almost dread clicking through to read the rest of an article about the GIMP though, because inevitably, someone whines about the fact that the interface doesn't look like photoshop, or OS X, or Vista, or the dashboard of their VW. Personally, I like that. I wish software could have more variation in the GUI department. I keep trying to find a way to use Poser or Blender more, just because they have interfaces that depart from the bland uniformity (or uniform blandness).

While I'm on that subject, I have to wonder why we have title bars on windows. There are buttons for minimize, maximize, and close, then another button on the other corner with a drop-down menu to minimize, maximize, close, restore, move, or size. Then there's the icons on the toolbar, with all those same options. So don't bother trying to point out that GIMP has three windows with duplicated menus. This interface is already in dire need of an enema.

Back to the aforementioned learning, I saw an article in the RSS feeds with a tutorial on bittorrent. Mostly I skim such things, because there's more articles than time to read them, but I noticed a link in there to Demonoid. A colleague asked me to go there a while ago and download some files. If you aren't a member of their site, you get limited to how many torrents you can download from them. My friend wanted a total of 21 torrents, and if all of us in the department coordinated our efforts, we could get them in just 3 days. Then we forgot all about it an hour later due to unseasonably warm temperatures. After seeing the article, I went to see if I could even reach demonoid from here, and lo and behold, registrations were open. So I signed up. In case you don't have such luck right away, you can search The Pirate Bay, ISO Hunt, Mini-nova, Nova Torrents, Torrent Spy, or btjunkie. Also worth looking into is this tutorial for speeding up your downloads.

And lastly, Make your Own Notebooks. I use a different method for slapping together my own, but that's based on readily-available supplies. I've seen a lot of sites with similar ideas, and the methodologies don't vary much.

See? You can learn something on the web, even things that aren't related to porn.