Well, I was busy with work lately, and now I’m living at a house with two other housemates. Apart from that, nothing much really. Or is it?

Hmm, I might want to consider putting very little activity over here though, and concentrate on my artistry skills… on the phone since it was what made me buy i in the first place. I can’t have enough time on the laptop, heh. Good thing the Chinese New Year is going to give me a good breather… For only two days, though. But still nice nevertheless.

Honoo out.

So hey. I’m typing this via the WordPress client as I speak.

Last Thursday I decided to go and get this phone of my dreams: the Nokia N900.

You read it right. It’s not an iPhone, it’s not an Android. Not a Samsung, not an HTC either. Oh well. Screw the fads.

To put it simply, this N900 is not what I’d call “just a phone.” It’s like taking my laptop, paint it black, strip the heavy things and add phone functions into it, and lastly scale it down to my palm’s size.

That’s what I like about it.

Or, more like, it was thanks to the possibility of making the N900 the mini equivalent of what you’d call a PC installed with a Wacom Cintix tablet thanks to its resistive touchscreen. Though I have been too busy to even doodle…

I can practically handle this like I would with my laptop. Only on a smaller scale… With maximum portability and battery life.

Oh yeah baby.

Me out, approaching a train station as I type. Pics, screenshots later I hope.

Welcome to MyPaint

Man, how long has it been since I actually wrote a blog post? And one like this, a review of all things?

As some of you who know me might have known, I am currently running Ubuntu 11.04 “Natty Narwhal” on my laptop.

While on Ubuntu when I just upgraded to 10.04 LTS, as an owner of a drawing tablet – I realize I’m unable to use my favorite drawing tools like what I had in Windows, namely Photoshop and SAI, especially the latter – natively in a Linux distribution. The switch to Ubuntu (although I did not remove Windows, just… it seems I have been forgetting to log in to Windows – intentionally) makes the switch feel a bit hard especially when I’m missing the Stabilizer feature of SAI, however I do realize I can’t be too dependent on that and it’d be best if I try to explore alternatives, as GIMP (even with the GIMP for Painters patch installed) and Inkscape does not prove to be the most favorable.

However, a simple search

apt-cache search wacom

returned me with a rather eye-catching result: one of them reads

mypaint - Paint program to be used with Wacom tablets

And so I proceeded to install it with apt-get install. Gentlemen, I introduce you, MyPaint. Which, as of current, is now at version 0.9.1.

MyPaint's interface

The interface of MyPaint is simple, and is easily distinguishable. MyPaint’s tagline is “to let you focus on the drawing without getting too bothered by the UI.” The GIMP 2.6-ish arrangement of windows seems a bit unsettling, but it provides a set of simple shortcuts which you can get accustomed to quickly (and might get you doing it in other painting programs you might have, so says someone here). Up there in my screenshot features the main canvas window, the brushes, palette, and the layers, which is enough for me on standard terms. You can hide all of the floating tools so that you can have a full view of the canvas and reveal them later when you need them or just reveal the one you need and hide it again.

With a measly installation size of around 1.6MB (for me, I don’t know how it varies between users) and for you Windows users, at MyPaint’s download page there’s a link that leads you to an 8MB installer, this painting program packs quite one hell of a punch; I think to dub it as one of the most powerful tablet-friendly, free and open-source painting programs around wouldn’t be too much of a praise. Also, thanks to its unlimited canvas feature, you can pretty much pretend you have one hell of a large tablet and draw your artwork while zoomed out at maximum and keep drawing as far as your hardware takes you. You read that right, it is possible to draw something large enough not even your hardware can take it (but please don’t if you value your time doing your work) – I accidentally drew up to 20,000 pixels wide; 20 times larger than my actual screen resolution (whoops!) and since I already got so many colors in, it became very taxing for my i7 equipped with 4GB of RAM laptop (laugh).

Also, MyPaint uses a file format unique to its own – actually, it’s being developed as an open standard for other applications, as of current one of the applications I knew of that utilizes it is Krita – which I gave up upon for some weird reason (It fails to start, or looks like its attempting to but is gradually eating RAM and CPU time but did not manage to launch), and I got to say it is very light, which will mean less space used for archiving your artworks.

MyPaint sports a plethora of brushes you can choose to use or test around width if you need to choose one that suits your style, and I have to say “lots” would be an understatement – because most of the time I probably use almost less than a dozen brushes (excluding the erasers), or maybe a bit more than that but to be honest, until today there are more than two dozens of MyPaint’s brushes that I never touched. Yet.

Brushes in MyPaint

One of the appeals of MyPaint is its portability between various platforms such as Windows, Linux and Mac OS X – and with the added benefit of Nokia’s Maemo which runs on the Nokia N900 being based off Debian, there are now MyPaint packages available for it. Here’s a video demonstrating its use in Nokia N900, courtesy of Luovatone:

Cons

Of course, as well as benefits, there are disadvantages of using MyPaint as well – to start, if you need to work on a document which has a restriction on size, it can get pretty tricky and messy when MyPaint comes into the fray – MyPaint does not come with a size limit, so you will have to set the document size limit in another application such as GIMP. More added benefit if you have the OpenRaster file save/load plugin for GIMP (which is installed by default in GIMP 2.7 but strangely it doesn’t work with me, a bug perhaps?), but even with that… after you’re done with MyPaint, MyPaint has the tendency to add unwanted pixels into your artwork as it sees fit, and you might have to resize your artwork again in GIMP back to the size you want it in.

I believe I set the page to be A4-sized and yet when I save it in MyPaint...

Also since MyPaint is almost totally dedicated to be a program to draw and paint pictures in, you lack the usual tools you would most be comfortable of in GIMP or Photoshop, which leaves very little room for adjustments/corrections – such as the rectangle selection tool. But right now there is a discussion on making selection tools implemented from the wiki, although with the way I already got myself accustomed in having MyPaint included in my to-do lists of drawing, I think it’ll be fine for me to not include that (actually, I’d rather be presented with an option to disable it from my plain sight, heh).

Conclusion

To put it simply, MyPaint is the most powerful painting programs I’ve used… ever. GIMP? Not liking its integration of tablets much. Inkscape? I think I work faster and more accurately with the mouse. Krita? Somehow failed for me as of current, and something just doesn’t feel good when I used it for the first time. Well, in the first place the reason for me writing this up is to give it some credit I think I should be saying as thanks to the developers.

If you’re an owner of a drawing tablet and are considering using a Linux distribution on your workstation, this might well be your drawing software of choice.

And as a final verdict, I’ll list down some dumbed-down impressions I have of it, on a scale of 1-5.

Features: 5/5, as a software that is dedicated to letting you do what you love the most with your tablet – drawing, it pretty much does it best in letting you do the drawing, stays out of the way and keeps you focused.

Usefulness: 4.5/5, excellent usefulness it just screams that you must use it with your hands moving on its own. (Pardon me on that last part, it was a joke). Although some work might be in order to make it less painful to work with documents that have size limits.

Stability: 5/5. If there’s something that can make MyPaint fail to do its job, it’ll be your computer crashing on its own and not by Mypaint’s fault, or you drew things too large it takes too much time for MyPaint to re-render it/save it into a PNG file if you did(whoa), but it pretty much does that with maximum stability – provided you don’t burn your processor in the process, heh.

User Interface (UI): 4/5. While its window layout seems a bit GIMP 2.6-ish, it does not distract you by having too much tools packed in a single window – as every window lists specific needs you have in your artwork. One for layers, one for brushes, another for editing brush parameters (not shown in the default layout – the screenshot I have), and another for colors. What more can you expect?

Also, to be reminded – Mypaint is on constant development, one of the ways you can help is by testing – refer here for details.

And as a closing, I’ll post here an artwork I have done using MyPaint – and edited using GIMP. I think its one of my best efforts with MyPaint so far, and also the latest.

Sample. Sorry, I only made a Japanese version of this. Text inserted using Inkscape.

Honoo out.

Apparently still one of my worst weakness to date. Pic related. Also, picture above is just as a decoration. Nice pic anyway though.

No, to be exact, I rarely draw these kinds of characters because in the first place I don’t really like such archetypes.

In fact, I do have something against them, and I’m not the kind to back down and let out an exasperated sigh whenever they get on their "tsun."

Still, I do believe getting used to designing these kinds of characters will help me learn a lot and add into my repertoire of character archetypes I can draw.

… Probably, up to date, Misaka Mikoto might be the most familiar tsundere I’ve ever drawn. But then again her physical features don’t fit what I’m trying to draw now, though.

That kind of twintailed, blond hair tsundere. Is something I’m thinking of right now. So far the most helpful reference has been Dream C Club’s Mian. (Yeah. I’m a boobs guy after all. ALL HAIL OPPAI!)

I’m thinking of creating one who has a lot of tsun on people around her but is full on dere on her love interest (something I only had in mind, never drew him yet I guess), and feels bad whenever she hits him out of embarassment. Too tired of the usual scream of "BAKA"/whatever before I see the MC being sent flying (I’m looking at YOU, NARU.).

… I guess I’ll need to do trial-and-error as usual.

There are times I refuse to admit that I don’t know something, and will take some time before I admit it just in case I can counter that state of "unknowingness" myself.

But then again there are times where what I want to do something yet I don’t know what to do about it, and that’s frustrating. I guess one of the culprits is not having something I really like to have enough motivation to draw it.

Weirdly, motivations came up at the most wrong times yet when I grab my pen it all disappears fantastically like air, and in an instant I’m back to zero, not knowing what I actually want to do.

Or maybe I’m missing something that I want to be here when I draw, but meh I don’t know. Just be here as a motivating factor.

Or maybe it is what I want has something that I can’t just draw anywhere (well, you know… erm… stuff. Don’t ask). But then again it’s not the case here, because right now I’m devoid of anything I feel like drawing.

… Urgh, maybe I need to go around and get my brain working towards something that’ll make my creative juices flow again after quite some time.

… By the way, this is my first time testing Blogilo (a blogging app) for this post. If I manage a proper post with this, maybe I’ll use this rather than opening up the browser. Loading WordPress via the browser is so much pain when I’m in the campus’s slow network connections.

... Honestly, I have no idea what kind of "intelligent caption" I want to put here LOL.

Goodbye, my old machine… and why hello there Portable Mk II, now you’re commissioned, hoping to have a good time in service with you alongside me.

So my… uh, 2-year old “beloved” (as if I really did love it that much) Acer Aspire 4520 succumbed to overheating, and so I had to make a transition to my other siblings’ laptops – which to be frank, were as old as mine. Did a transfer of the HDD and RAM (how could I not enjoy the benefit of more RAM!?) to both of them… and both of them broke down with the same problem, although the latter two were caused by a failing onboards GPU (GG NVIDIA GeForce 7000M. Not only you were bad for the simplest of games, but you also broke down on me that way. I MAD).

I can pretty much say the week (or two, I can’t really remember) following it was a “dry spell” for me, what with the retreat to my comfortable little home somewhere down south (I tell you, it’s not far from the capital but hey the railway station there makes a great scenery comparable to that certain “oh-my-lord-of-weeaboo-ness” country, too bad I don’t have a camera around me).

Well, it was just a matter of time before my grandmother decided to help me out on this (arigatou gozaimashita baa-chan! This grandson of yours, forget it he will never!) but yeah I guess I really have fallen much that I can’t imagine a life without a decent portable box to do everything. A certain someone suggested that I get a goddamn desktop instead, but nay I guess I already have enough desktops at home (yeah, that another thing that counts as an ‘unusable scrap metal’ counts, because I haven’t been able to upgrade it due to having no money to do it, I guess I’ll just make a total overhaul of it to a humble spec when I can get my hands on  some bucks for it).

And so with the great news coming abuzz, I started to decide on what would I dub the “Portable Dude Mk. II”. Browsing in Lowyat for just a day or two doesn’t really help much on making the final decision, but it pretty much helped me to get a gist on what’s nice. Well… my indecisiveness lasted me till the D-Day (day of purchase), and little did I think the greatest impact to my decision would come from my ‘saavy-to-the-most-minimum-extent’ father.

At first I was attracted to a certain Asus machine which offers an Intel Core i5 which offers a decent NVIDIA GT310M graphics (the rest of the specs is pretty much standard-issued, no questions on RAM because I will almost always choose to upgrade before making the final payment there), then suddenly… considering the budget I received was enough for another one beside it (an Asus as well) which sports a larger 15″++ screen and a separate number keypad (which saves one the task of having to use the “Fn” key present in most budget laptops today to emulate that).

But then again my dad didn’t like the color… it’s a total shiny black laptop (most of you in my place would argue that that’s the best thing ever) and suggested another one with a smaller screen (just the same size as the smaller Core i5 laptop I mentioned just now) and with a . I was a bit skeptical at first until I took a look at its specs.

Intel Core i7 740QM @ 1.73GHz with TurboBoost, graphics ATI Radeon 5470 1GB

myface.jpg

Well, I wasn’t particularly keen at first due to the ATI graphics thanks to my familiarity with NVIDIA, but knowing myself on how I can’t give up the temptation of owning a goddamn i7 laptop (in case if anyone is asking, it’s a 4-core, yeah I know there are 2-core i7s but nope, this is not one of them), I decided to get this instead. So all in total including upgrades cost me a nice MYR2,900. How nice is that? Well, before this I helped my sister choose a laptop, and she picked an i5-powered Acer Timeline X with the same ATI GPU albeit at a lower video memory (half than this one), the merits being excelling at battery life (hers can live up to 8~9 hours on use compared to the one I bought)… albeit at the same price of the one I bought.

And so off to home I went, spending the following weekend getting my favorite stuffs from my old HDD back to here – on Ubuntu of course. Well, I spent a lot of time trying to do a migration install but failed, so what I did was do a listing of whatever I’ve installed from the old hard disk, and installed them on the new machine (which took me quite some time… 2GBs over a 2Mbps connection is like… heh heh).

Long story short, I got things working the way I wanted them to (with some exceptions) again. Oh well, I guess I wrote too much tl;dr on this already, so I guess I better stop now; and post something else later.

... Don't mind my crude, ugly use of the notify-send utility.

I use IRC quite frequently, and having the IRC now playing announcer script in XChat is what I can’t miss out on using. However, when circumstances disallow me from using an IRC client and I had to settle for a web-based IRC client instead… well, I don’t quite like it when I can’t get the announcer into good use.

But! I’m running on a Linux distribution (in my case, Ubuntu 10.04 “Lucid Lynx”), Audacious has a controller utility to do stuff on it via the terminal (audtool/audtool2), and since my XChat script for it is based on controlling that utility from within XChat…

… so I created a shell script to make me still be able to announce, except that I had to paste the output manually into the web-based IRC client I am using. But since in the script I made that the outputs be copied into the system clipboard – which enables you to paste it anywhere using the middle mouse button –  it’s just a single click before I pressed enter.

You can try out the script here (copy it to your favorite text editor and save it as *.sh) and modify as you wish. Note that this script requires the utilities xclip and notify-send for it to work out for you.

Uh, I thought I'd try it out... so yeah.

And so I thought I’d ditch Rhythmbox and go for Amarok instead…

Before this, I was using Audacious as my main player. Frankly, it was great, but it’s not until the software itself begins producing some hiccups at random, and by “hiccups” I mean software hanging. At some certain points of playback it somehow hangs for no reason, and running it in the console does not give any warning/error messages about it whatsoever. It just hangs like that, forcing me to terminate it using the system monitor. Even so, it’s still my primary player, with Rhythmbox (now replaced with Amarok) as my second.

It was until I read some info about it that I decided to try it for a change instead of the usual Rhythmbox software usually prebundled with most Ubuntu distros, however it lacks one of the most basic things I usually look for in a music player: an equalizer. Library management was at it utmost ease though, so that’s probably a redeeming point for Rhythmbox. However, it’s not until I hear certain praise of Amarok I decided to reinstall it after dumping it in favor of the preinstalled Rhythmbox.

Getting used to it was pretty tricky though, as some functions I expected it to do were suddenly gone, thankfully it’s somehow restored on a system restart. Don’t know why it took a system restart to correct things! But so far it’s pretty fine though, if not for the interface which looks a bit cluttered to me (which added the difficulty of getting used to it).

And since I mentioned the lack of an equalizer in Rhythmbox, I was pretty pleased – to top it off it even came with built-in presets, which means I don’t have to mess around with it like how I did with Audacious. So I set up my media library and simply dumped everything into the playlist – and I’m done.

One thing though is that I don’t know how to customize the OSD. I don’t want to be using KNotify for it, so I guess I’ll have to look up ways on how to customize it for now.

… I think I’m starting to forget Audacious was my main player already… Heh heh.

Hello, my new CPU idle temperature! Uh, no, oh noes. Crap.

… I really should’ve picked up a crap PC just to trash upon it some testings instead of my precious working laptop.

So I decided to play around with the “thermal paste” theory – by using the cheapest solution gained from the nice concept of “improvisation” – using toothpaste. Not that it’s a first hearing of the usage of toothpaste as a substitute, but I really should’ve known better. I wasted a lot of system restarts that my current existing Windows Vista installation became corrupt and non-bootable.

Way to go, me. Way to ruin your main working OS with stuff done for kicks… This will so need a recovery CD to fix up stuff.

My foolishness aside, I finally managed to restore the laptop to its working condition, but for now I only can start Ubuntu. Urk…

… And I just found a reason to go angry over my laptop’s manufacturer, or to be exact any manufacturer that doesn’t let users control the CPU fan manually. That, is the cause of angst for me ever since I got this laptop – which was two years ago  - losing out to my younger sister’s laptop, as her laptop manages temperatures much more effectively.

Maybe in the future I should just invest on second-hand junk in order to waste experiments on, but as how I am now I have no budget to waste, gotta be thrifty to every single little cent I have. Maybe that’ll change when I get a decent job in the future – I wish.

Uh, I only added the "with-gimp-for-painters-patch" part there.

Which will lead us from an almost full HDD space from compiling source codes to that nice little package up there.

This entry itself isn’t meant to be long anyway… Okay I’ll get down straight to the point.

1. You need to install GIMP from source for this to work, so uninstall any previous installation of GIMP that you have.

2. Follow instructions from here. This is where most of the hardwork comes before the easy parts. (TIP: You can use GIMP versions greater than what was stated there to do this)

3. Instead of using “sudo make install” (without the quotation marks, of course), key in “sudo apt-get install checkinstall”. This will get you the necessary packages needed to use “sudo checkinstall”.

4. Follow the instructions provided by checkinstall.

5. After its finished, checkinstall will create a .deb output inside the source folder enabling you to use it for future installations. Copy it to anywhere you wish to store it into as a backup, and you’re done. GIMP is now installed and you can safely delete the source folder you installed GIMP using checkinstall from, provided you already saved its .deb output somewhere else. This helps you recover HDD space you lost during the compilation process of GIMP. Enjoy.

6. If you can’t start GIMP either by typing in the terminal or running it from your software lists (this is what checkinstall helps you to do), try doing this:  “sudo /sbin/ldconfig” (again without the quotation marks) in the terminal. This should solve the problem.

I read that you might need some build dependencies to run the package on another computer, but to me it isn’t really that hard to do so. Cheers.

WARNING: Do NOT install the gimp-data package along with the GIMP you installed this way. You will lose the patching you have done prior to compiling.

UPDATE: If you recently just installed Ubuntu on another computer and would like to use the saved package, do not forget to install GIMP’s build dependencies. This can be done by typing

sudo apt-get build-dep gimp

into the terminal. This can be done even after you installed the package.